Cornpar~tive
Politics Twenty-fifth Edition
EDITOR Christian S/iJe California State University. Long Beach
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Cornpar~tive
Politics Twenty-fifth Edition
EDITOR Christian S/iJe California State University. Long Beach
Christian S"e was born in Denmark. studied at the University of British Columbia and the University of Michigan, and received his doctoral degree in political science at the Free University in Berlin. He is professor in political science at California State University in Long Beach, where he teaches coUrses in comparative pOlitics. His research deals primarily with political developments in contemporary Germany. He visits that country annually to conduct research on parties and elections, as part of an effort to follow continuities and shifts in its politics. His publications include a book be co-edited with Mary N. Hampton, Between Bonn and Berlin: German Politics Adrift? that examines the last years of Helmut Kohl's center-right government and its replacement by a center-left coalition headed by Gerhard SchrOder and Joschka Fischer. The milestone election of 1998 is the subject of another 'bOOK that he coedited with David Conradt and Gerald R. Kleinfeld, Power Shift in Germany. The same team co-edited a recent volume on the 2002 German Bundestag election and its aftermath, Precarious Wctory. Three other publications include a biographical essay on Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Germany's foreign minister from 1974 to 1992, in Political Leaders o!Contempomry Western Europe, a chapter on the Free Democratic Party in Germany's New Politics, and another chapter on the Danish-Gennan relationship in The Germans and Their Neighbors. Dr. SIJ;' is also co-editor of the latter two books.", He has been editor of Annual Editions: Compamtive Politics since the beginning of ,this series in 1983.
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Europe In Transition: West, Center, and East
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Copyright Cataloging in Publication Data Main"entry under title: Annual Editions: Comparative Politics. 2007/2008, 1. Comparative Politics-Periodicals. I. 809, Christian, comp.lI. Title: Comparative Politics. ISBN-13: 97!Hl-Q7-351628-8 MHID-10: 0-07-351628-7 658'.05 ISSN 0741-7233
© 2008 by McGraw~HiU Contemporary Learning Series, Dubuque, IA 52001, A Division of The McGraw-Hili Companies. Copyright law prohibits the reproduction, storage, or transmission in any form by any means of any portion of this publication without the express. written permission of McGraw~HIII Contemporary Learning Series, and of the copyright holder (If different) of the part of the publication to be reproduced. The Guidelines for Classroom Copying endorsed by Congress explicitly state that unauthorized copying may not be used to create, to replace, or to substitute for anthologies, compilations, or collective works. Inquiries concerning publishing rights to the articles herein can be directed to the Permission Department at Contemporary Learning Series. 800.243.6532 Annual Editions® is a Registered Trademark of McGraw-Hili ContemporalY Learning Series, A Division of The McGraw-Hili Companies. Twenty-Fifth Edition Cover image Stockbyte/Punchstock Images and Lawrence Lawry/Getty Images Compositor: Laserwords Private Limited Printed in the United States of America
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Editors!Advisory Board Members of the Advisory Board are instrumental in the final selection of articles for each edition of ANNUAL EDITIONS. Their review of articles for content, level, currentness, and appropriateness provides critical direction to the editor and staff. We think that you will find their careful consideration well reflected in this volume.
EDITOR Christian S0e California State University, Long Beach
ADVISORY BOARD Louis J. Cantori University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Jane Curry Palmer Santa Clara University
E. Gene Frankland Ball State University
Ronald Inglehart University of Michigan
Anthony M. Messina University of Notre Dame
Timothy J. White
Helen E. Purkitt U.S. Naval Academy
Mark E. Rush
Xavier University
Joel D. Wolfe
Washington and Lee University
Michael J. Sodaro George Washington University
JUdithe A. Thompson University of Rio Grande
University of Cincinnati
Eleanor E. Zeft Drake University
Charles E. Ziegler University of Louisville
Primo Vannicelli University of Massachusetts, Boston
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Preface In publishing ANNUAL EDITIONS we recognize the enormous role played by the magazines, newspapers, and journals of the public press in providing current, first-rate educational information in a broad spectrum of interest areas. Many of these articles are appropriate for students, researchers, and professionals seeking accurate, current material to help bridge the gap between principles and theories and the real world. These articles, however, become more useful for study when those of lasting value are carefully collected, organized, indexed, and reproduced in a low-cost format, which provides easy and permanent access when the material is needed. That is the role played by ANNUAL EDITIONS.
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his collection of articles, culled from many sources, has the aim of promoting a comparative perspective on politics. It pays special attention to the varied patterns of democratic politics in today's world, but it also reports on major alternative forms of governance, ranging from what amounts to contemporary oligarchy or autocracy to modern party dictatorship. Together the readings will provide a better understanding of the conditions that encourage or inhibit the emergence, survival and enhancement of the democratic expression in politics. They leave us with no reason to assume that representative democracy can be installed at will, whenever and wherever we choose. Like no other form of government, democracy requires an active and informed citizenry. There is reason to be concerned over the withdrawal of people from politics in a number of established democracies. Unit 1 begins with an inventory of the main forms of rule in today's world. About one-half of humanity now lives under rulers who can be elected and removed by use of the ballot. Yet many of the democracies are flawed, often beginning with the electoral process on which they rest. The other articles in this unit examine politics in some prominent contemporary representative democraciesBritain, France, Germany and Japan. In terms of gross domestic product (GOP), these countries constitute, along with the United States, the top five market economies in the world. If China were included, it would presumably occupy the third rank, between Japan and Germany, in view of the sheer volume and value of output in that populous country. Each of our four advanced industrial societies has its own tradition of politics and governance within a particular institutional framework that has been historically developed. Nevertheless, as the readings of Unit 2 show, there are comparable patterns of political challenge and response in their politics and those of many other representative democracies. The issue of women's advancement toward a greater share of the top elective and appointive jobs lends itself very well to a comparative study-cross-nationally and/or historically. Unit 3 deals with the impact of two major forces of change that continue to have an impact on the political scene of Europe. One of them is the irregular, sometimes halting, but nevertheless impressive growth of the European Union (EU). It began with six member states
in 1957, grew incrementally to fifteen, and then in 2004 added ten new countries. With the addition of Bulgaria and Romania at the beginning of 2007, the total membership has now reached 27 countries, with a population of about 480 million. A second and closely related major change involves the political and economic reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia, after the collapse of the Communist regimes in that region between 1989 and 1991. Here the marked turn toward authoritarian pOlitics in Russia could have important consequences. Unit 4 adds a discussion of the impact of globalization along with articles on pOlitics in the developing countries and regions. Here there will probably be no surprises in the list of countries covered. It includes Mexico and Latin America as a whole, Nigeria, India, China, and the Muslim world with special attention to Iran. South Africa has been covered in the past and will probably return in a future edition. The articles will give the careful reader a better understanding of the diversity of social and political conditions in these countries. Unit 5 considers three major trends in contemporary politics from a comparative perspective. First, the past twenty-five years have seen a remarkable spread of democratic forms of government in the world. This recent "wave of democratization;' sometimes described as the 'third" of its kind in modern history, seems likely to have a lasting effect on the political process in some countries that previously knew only authoritarian governments. Yet some recent reversals remind us that there is no simple or guaranteed way to construct a stable democracy anywhere-least of all in countries that are marked by deep ethnic, economic, religious and other divisions. Second, beginning in the early 1980s or sometimes even earlier, a major shift took place in economic policy toward greater reliance on private enterprise and markets. There was a corresponding reduction in state ownership and regulation in much of the world, including Communistruled China. Here too there have been later reactions against the inequalities, dislocations, and uncertainties associated with the unfettered market economy. There not been a return to the status quo ante, however, and it would probably be a mistake to enlist in such a lost cause. Third, many parts of the world h,ave seen a surge of what has been called "identity politics:' This trend has brought group identities more strongly into play when
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differences are being defined, played out, and resolved in the political arena. Amy Chua and Benjamin Barber warn in different ways about the potential costs of such a politics. This is an important time to study comparative politics. The past few years have seen a major restructuring of politics in many countries along with generational shifts in leadership. Even in a time of political transformation, however, there will usually be significant patterns of continuity as well. This is the twenty-fifth edition of Annual Editions: Comparative Politics. It has been a busy and crowded quarter of a century in politics, but I believe the series has managed to identify major developments fairly early and has at the same time avoided getting lost in some dead end streets. Here is a special word of thanks to my many students at California State University, Long Beach. They are wonderfully inquisitive and help keep me posted on matters that this anthology must address. Several of my past students have helped me gather materials for this edition. As always, I am particularly grateful to Susan B. Mason, who received her master's degree in political science from this university some fifteen years ago. She has continued since then, from a distance of some three thousand miles, to volunteer her services as a superb research assistant. Once again, I also wish to thank other former or recent students at California State University, Long Beach. It is impossible to name them all, but the following have been particularly helpful: Linda Wohlman, Erika Reinhardt, Erik Ibsen, Jon Nakagawa, Mike Petri, and Ali Taghavi. Like
so many others, these individuals first encountered the anthology in comparative politics courses. It is a great joy to have worked with them, for they have shown an enthusiasm for the project that remains contagious. To meet the annual deadlines, I have been able to rely on the quick and ready assistance of my two sons, Nils and Erik. Louise Soe has academic obligations of her own, but she always finds time to enjoy with me the world we share beyond the paper jungle. Thanks also to Rowena Moore and Margaret Dennis for their assistance in critical moments. And as always, I am indebted to my colleagues and to Nancy St. Martin and Amelia Marquez for having made the work day at Cal State Long Beach so pleasant. I am very grateful also to members of the advisory board and McGraw-Hili/Contemporary Learning Series as well as to the many readers who have made useful comments on past selections and suggested new ones. I ask you all to help improve future editions by keeping me informed of your reactions and suggestions for change. Please complete and return the article rating form in the back of the book.
Christian S0e Editor
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Contents iv xiv xviii
Preface Topic Guide Internet References
UNIT 1 Pluralist Democracies: Country Studies Unit Overview
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Part A. The United Kingdom
1. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy, Laza Kekic, The Economist, 2007 In a new "index of democracy," the world's 167 countries (excluding its micro· states) are scored across five broad categories: electoral process, functioning of government, political participation and political culture. Countries are split into four regime types determined by their democratic credentials: 28 "full" democracies, 54 "flawed" democracies, 30 "hybrid" regimes, and 55 "authoritarian" regimes. The top ranks go to Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries as well as the Netherlands. North Korea is ranked last.
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2. A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy?, Donley T. Studlar, McGraw-HilVContemporary Leaming Series, 2007 Tony Blair's "New" Labour came to power In 1997 promising to modernize British government. The subsequent institutional reforms can be seen as Tony Blair's lasting legacy. Here an American political scientist examines Mr. Blair's record until the end of 2006. He covers such topics as the reform of the House of Lords, the regional and local devolution of power, the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights Into British law, a relatively timid British Freedom of Information Act, and electoral reforms.
26
3. Who Killed the British Prime Minister? The Economist, September 14, 2006 This article reviews Tony Blair's record as party reformer and government modernizer. It pOints to Iraq as an obvious reason for his massive loss of public trust, but finds a deeper explanation in Blair's governing style-his enthusiastic ~'oversell" of his political initiatives, his tendency to micro~manage and his perceived inclination toward expediency.
33
4. Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom, Donley T. Studlar, McGraw-Hili/Contemporary Learning Series, 2007 The author singles out and explains some important aspects of Britain's electoral politics. He discusses the sharp drop in voter turnout in the two most recent general elections as well as the considerable distortions in the present system that give considerable advantages to Labour and enormous disadvantages to the "third" party of Liberal Democrats. It is clear that the rules of the game are anything but neutral in their political impact. All of this takes place without partisan design, such as the strategy of gerrymandering.
The concepts in bold italics are developed in the article. For further expansion, please refer to the Topic Guide and the Index.
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Part B.
France
5. The End of French Europe?, Steven Philip Kramer, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006 The author connects the French vote against the European constitution in 2005 to two factors-a general crisis in French society and the flaws in the French conception of Europe. The postwar French model (political, economic and social) no longer functions well. There is a pervasive mood of decline in France and a widespread public distrust of the political class. Economic growth is low, the social welfare model is under siege, and the system of ethnic integration has been challenged in the recent riots. Meanwhile France has come to use Its leading role In the EU In an Increasingly self-serving and defensive manner.
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6. France's Murky Mix of School and Scandal, Katrin Bennhold, The Nation, May 15, 2006 France has a smaller and more exclusive elite than is found In other democracies. It is concentrated in PariS, where Its training grounds are the grandes ecoles, above all the Ecole Natlonale d'Admlnistration (ENA) and the Polytechnique ( or "X"). The graduates form closed networks that close off outsiders and blur the lines between the business sector and the public arena. In a country where the state has a big presence in the economy, these exclusive networks result in a lack of transparency and result in preferential treatment. Part C.
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Germany
7. Angela Merkel's Not-So-Grand Coalition, The Economist, October 6, 2006 The "grand" coalition of Germany's two major parties-the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats-Is not as popular as It was at the outset. It turns out, as many had predicted, that the left-right differences in such a coalition generate tensions, that interest groups block some reforrns, and that the two governing parties become worried as they lose supporters. There is no easy alternative in sight.
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8. Waiting for a Wunder, Ludwig Siegele, The Economist, February 11, 2006 Far from being '1he sick man of Europe:' Germany Is in better shape than some of its larger neighbors. Yet the fabled "German model" has lost much of its attraction during the last two decades. This article looks at how Germany's institutions have become increasingly paralyzed and provides an explanation that resembles those heard in Britain before Margaret Thatcher's radical reforms.
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Part D.
Japan
9. Japanese Spirit, Western Things, The Economist, July 10, 2003 150 years after Commodore Perry's order to open the country to trade, Japan lays claim to be one of the world's great economic success stories. This survey examines the origins of that success and emphasizes that Japan has shown that modernization does not require a wholesale embrace of Western culture.
The concepts in bold italics are developed in the article. For further expansion, please refer to the Topic Guide and the Index.
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10. Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual, Norimitsu Onishi, The New York Times, September 19, 2006 After more than five years in office, prime. minister Koizumi stepped down at the end of September 2006. He enjoyed a high popularity rating until the end, although his reforms were often controversial. He took a leading role in reducing the central government and Its bureaucracy, devolving more authority to the local officials. His pro·market policies of deregulation and privatization stimulated the dormant economy.
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UNIT 2 Pluralist Democracies: Factors in the Political Process 64
Unit Overview
Part A.
Patterns of Democratic Change. Some Comparative Perspectives
11. Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis?, The Economist, July 17, 1999 Advanced democracies differ considerably from each other, but In recent years they have shared a common pattern of public disillusionment with Institutions and politicians. The first in a series of three briefs dealing with this development examines the general decline in public trust and voter turnout in well-established democracies.
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12. Political Parties: Empty Vessels?, The Economist, July 24 1999 This brief from The Economist series examines the partial weakening of political parties in modern democracies.
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13. Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures, The Economist, August 21, 1999 This brief reports on the growth of special-interest lobbying in modern democracies.
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Part B.
Women in Politics
14. Women in National Parliaments, Inter·Parliamentary Union, November 30, 2006 This table has been compiled by the Inter·Parliamentary Union on the basis of information regularly provided by national parliaments. It classifies 181 countries in descending order by the percentage of women elected to the lower or single legislative chamber. The most striking change in recent years has been the move by Rwanda to the top of the list. This is a the result of elections held in 2003, in the aftermath of the genocide that often left women-now nearly two-thirds of the popUlation-to take charge of rebuilding the country. Otherwise the "usual suspects" among the older and smaller democracies occupy the high end of the list-the five Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands as well as Costa Rica. Germany keeps placing well, and a growing number of other countries have attained what is sometimes called the "critical mass" of 30 percent. After the 2004 elections, the United States continues to lag behind.
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15. The True Clash of Civilizations, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Foreign Policy, MarchIApril 2003 There is a cultural divide between the West and the Muslim world, but it derives from a fundamental difference about gender equality and not, as Samuel Huntington would have it, over the value of democracy.
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The concepts in bold italics are developed in the arUcte. For further expansion, please refer to the Topic Guide and the Index.
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Part C.
The Institutional Framework
16. What Political Institutions Does Large-Scale Democracy Require?, Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy, As seen in Political Science Quarterly, vol. 120, no. 2, 2005 Here Robert Dahl summarizes some of his most important findings about the core institutions of a representative democracy.
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17. What Democracy Is ... and Is Not, Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, Journal of Democracy, Summer 1991 The two authors of this important article point out that modern representative democracies vary in their institutions, practices, and values, depending on their socioeconomic, historical and cultural settings. The carefully developed argument includes two concluding sections headed, "How Democracies Differ" and "What Democracy Is Not."
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18. Judicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe, The Economist, August 7, 1999 Democracies have handed increasing amounts of power to unelected judges. This article examines the growth and many different forms of judicial review.
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19. Referendums: The People's Voice, The Economist, August 14, 1999 Direct democracy takes many forms. This article examines the different kinds of referenda, looks at the experience so far, and reviews the arguments about letting voters decide policy questions directly.
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Part D.
American Politics in Comparative Perspective
20. The Great Divide, Timothy Garton Ash, Prospect, March 2003 Influenced by their own weakness and the trauma of contemporary wars, Europeans have come to pursue International peace, negotiation, and cooperation at almost any price, whereas Americans have retained a greater willingness to use force. Kagan sums up the contrast in a memorable overstatement, "On major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." Ash explains why he finds Kagan's analysis to be only half right.
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21. Living With a Superpower, The Economist, January 2, 2003 A study in world values by Ronald Inglehart and associates shows a fairly persistent pattern of basic similarities and differences within countries. On an axis that plots "quality of life," Americans and West Europeans show high commitments to "self~expression" values. They differ on "secular~ rational" and nonreligious values. Here Europeans (except the Irish) turn out to be markedly more secular-rational and less patriotic and religious than Americans.
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22. The Case for a Multi-Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective, Christopher S. Allen, Original Work, 2006 The author supports the inclusion of American political institutions in the study of comparative pOlitics. He presents a brief on behalf of a multi-party parliamentary system for the United States. As he points out, it can be read as a mental experiment In institutional transplantation. It underscores the basic insight that institutions are not neutral but have consequences for the political process itself.
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The concepts In bold italics are developed in the articlEi. For further expansion, please refer to the Topic Guide and the Index.
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UNIT 3 Europe in Transition: West, Center, and East 124
Unit Overview Part A.
The European Union
23. A Too Perfect Union? Why Europe Said "No", Andrew Moravcsik, Current History, November 2005 The defeat of the EU Constitution in French and Dutch referendums had little to do with the substance of the document and does not mean that the European Union is now in decline or disarray, according to this American observer. The EU continues to be a successful multilevel system of governance, but it should not aspire to imitate or replace the nation states with their symbolic and democratic legitimacy.
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24. Bored by 'Results', Europe Regains Its Taste for Grand Plans, George Parker, Financial Times, October 27, 2006 Europe is having a breather after the traumas of 2005, when the EU's consti-
tutional draft was rejected in French and Dutch referendums and a major EU budget revision failed to be enacted. As the fiftieth anniversary of the EU's founding in the Treaty of Rome approaches, however, this observer finds signs that the EU is gearing to lurch forward on several major issues.
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25. A Venture at a Standstill, The Economist, May 27, 2006 The British weekly sees no emerging consensus among EU members on how to proceed. This article differentiates between the "Institutionalists," who
favor a new framework, and the "incrementalists," who prefer an organic development of what has already become a variegated organization. It concludes that some institutional adjustments are needed and possible while a grand makeover, as sought by the draft EU constitution, is neither necessary nor likely.
Part B.
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Central and Eastern Europe
26. Shadows at Europe's Heart, The Economist, October 12, 2006 This article looks at the former Communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. While their economies have flourished, there is great risk of political failure in these newcomers to the EU, with populist politicians taking advantage of the rampant discontents.
Part C.
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Russia
27. Russia's Ersatz Democracy, Lilia Shevtsova, CUrrent History, October 2006 The author of this unusual interpretation of Russian politics sees the country's governing elite as experimenting with a political model that attempts to bring together "conflicting elements" like autocracy and democracy, market freedom and state controls of the economy, partnership with the West and a rejection of Western values. It is leading to a dead end, she concludes, and there is a crisis looming ahead.
The concepts in bold italics are developed in the article, For further expansion, please refer to the Topic Guide and the Index.
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28. What Does Putin Want?, Peter Lavelle, Current History, October 2004 The author believes that Vladimir Putin follows a long-term reform agenda that includes authoritarian forms of "managed democracy" and "managed capitalism." Despite its remarkable economic recovery, fueled by high prices for oil exports, Russia faces some serious structural problems. In his efforts
to increase the Russian state's ability to govern effectively, Putin is seeking to break the power and drain the wealth of the super rich "oligarchs."
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29. The New American Cold War, Stephen F. Cohen, The Nation, July 10, 2006 The author has long been a critic of the U.S. failure to curb what he sees as its "triumphalism" at the time of the Soviet Union's breakup. He emphasizes that there is a continuing lack of understanding by leaders of both major parties in Washington of Russia's distinct traditions and interests.
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UNIT 4 Political Diversity in the Developing World Unit Overview
Part A.
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Latin America
30. Mexico's Disputed Election, Luis Rubio and Jeffrey Davidow, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006 Mexico's presidential election in 2006 was the first after the defeat of the longruling PRI six years earlier. The two top candidates represented different directions for the country-whether to continue on the road to political and economic liberalization or return to the state-driven development model of the 1970s and earlier. The article discusses the importance of the election for Mexico's future.
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31. Latin America's Left Turn, Jorge G. Casteneda, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006 The left has returned to Latin American politics, but it comes in two different strands-the traditional left with its origins in Marxism and leftist populism. The traditional left has undergone significant change and is now in power in Chile. Uruguay, and Brazil, while left-wing populism has an important presence in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina. The author argues that the traditional left is a more moderate and preferable option.
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Part B.
Africa
32. Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State, Ike Okonta, Current History, May 2005 Nigeria is the most populous and most diverse country in Africa. It is potentially also one of the richest. But Nigeria is also a prime example of a failed state, rife with corruption, and based on a violent and predatory relationship of rulers to the population that goes back to colonial times. A "reform team" will contest the elections scheduled for 2007.
The concepts in bold italics are developed in the article. For further expansion, please refer to the Topic Guide and the Index.
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Part C.
China
33. China: The Quiet Revolution, Doug Guthrie, Harvard International Review, Summer 2003 The reformers who led China toward a market economy avoided "shock therapy." Instead, they moved gradually in implementing changes that in the end turned out to be a major institutional transformation. This article explores their strategy and the reasons for the success of their "quiet revolution."
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34. Where's Mao? Chinese Revise History Books, Joseph Kahn, The New York Times, September 1, 2006 Beginning in the fall of 2006, high school students in China will have new textbooks in history that emphasize stability, trade and technology rather than revolution and class struggle.
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Part D.
India
35. India's Path to Greatness, Martin Walker, Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2006 Despite its numerous problems, India is a model for political survival as a multlethnic democracy. Its political institutions provide safety valves for expressing grievances and finding decentralized responses. The paradox is that India's enormous diversity and its cumbersome political system have enabled unity and democracy to combine. There are indications that a moderate prosperity may follow, as India continues the incremental deregulation of its economy, begun in 1991.
Part E.
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The Muslim World
36. Bin Laden, the Arab "Street," and the Middle East's Democracy Deficit, Dale F. Eickelman, Current History, January 2002 Osama bin Laden speaks in the vivid language of popular Islamic preachers, and he builds on a deep and broad resentment against the West. He benefits from the lack of democratic outlets in much of the Middle East that leaves no established platforms to express opinions on matters of public concern.
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UNITS Comparative Politics: Some Major Trends, Issues, and Prospects Unit Overview Part A.
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The Democratic Trend: How Strong, Thorough, and Lasting?
37. Democracy's Sobering State, Thomas Carothers, Current History, December 2004 The "third wave" of democratization, first identified and labeled by Samuel Huntington, has come to a standstill. It referred to the numerous democratic openings that began in southern Europe in the mid-1970s and then spread to much of the rest of the world. This article examines the cluster of factors that are blunting the further advance and consolidation of democratic government. Individually and together, they present a major challenge that cannot be removed by empty rhetoric.
The concepts in bold italics are developed in the article. For further expansion, please refer to the Topic Guide and the Index.
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Part B.
The Ambivalence about Markets: What Role for the State?
38. Capitalism and Democracy, Gabriel A. Almond, PS: Political Science and Politics, September 1991 Towards the end of the Gorbachev era, Gabriel Almond presented a Moscow audience with some key ideas about the ambiguous relationship between capitalism and democracy. Drawing in part on the work of other theorists, this leading political scientist explored ways in which capitalism both supports and subverts democracy as well as ways in which democracy may both subvert and foster capitalism.
Part C.
205
The Politics of Group Identity: How Much Does It Matter?
39. Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe, The Economist, November 9, 1996 This essay critically reviews recent scholarly attempts to explain economics
and politics In terms of cultural differences.
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40. Globalization Is About Blending, Not Homogenizing, Joseph S. Nye Jr., Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 20, 2002 The author emphasizes that globalization does not necessarily mean homogenization or Americanization. He uses examples from Japan to Canada to illustrate his argument.
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41. An Explosive Combination, Amy Chua, Orlando Sentinel, September 21, 2003 Free-market economics and overnight democracy can become a volatile mixture when members of a market-dominant ethnic minority become seen as outside exploiters. Amy Chua explains and illustrates how this combination has fueled ethnic conflict in some developing countries and could recur in postwar Iraq.
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42. Jihad vs. McWorld, Benjamin R. Barber, The Atlantic Monthly, March 1992 Benjamin Barber examines two major tendencies that are shaping much of the political world today. One is a form of tribalism, which pits cultural, ethnic, religious, and national groups against each other. It clashes with a tendency toward globalism, brought about by modern technology, communications, and commerce. Both tendencies can threaten democracy.
Index Test Your Knowledge Form Article Rating Form
The concepts in bold italics are developed in the article. For further expansion, please refer to the Topic Guide and the Index.
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228 232 233
Topic Guide This topic guide suggests how the selections in this book relate to the subjects covered in your course. You may want to use the topics listed on these pages to search the Web more easily. On the following pages a number of Web sites have been gathered specifically for this book. They are arranged to reflect the units of this Annual Edition. You can link to these sites by going to the student online support site at http://www.mhcls.comJonlineJ.
ALL THE ARTICLES THAT RELATE TO EACH TOPIC ARE LISTED BELOW THE BOLD-FACED TERM.
African politics 14. 15. 21. 32. 37. 41. 42.
8. Waiting for a Wunder 9. 10. 12. 25. 30.
Women in National Parliaments The True Clash of Civilizations living With a Superpower Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State Democracy's Sobering State An Explosive Combination Jihad vs. McWorld
31. Latin America's Left Turn
Democratic politics
British politics
2. A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy? 3. 4. 5. 7.
2. A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy? 3. Who Killed the British Prime Minister? 4. Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom
11, Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis? 12. Political Parties: Empty Vessels?
8. Waiting for a Wunder
14. Women in National Parliaments
12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
18. Judicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe
19. Referendums: The People's Voice 20. The Great Divide
21. Living With a Superpower 22. The Case for a Multi~Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective 23. A Too Perfect Union? Why Europe Said "No" 24. Bored by 'Results', Europe Regains Its Taste for Grand Plans
17. 18. 19.
22.
Central and Eastern Europe
23.
14. Women in National Parliaments The Great Divide Living With a Superpower A Too Perfect Union? Why Europe Said "No" Bored by 'Results', Europe Regains Its Taste for Grand
25. 26. 28. 29.
A Venture at a Standstill Shadows at Europe's Heart What Does Putin Want? The New American Cold War
27. 28. 30. 31. 32. 35. 36.
Plans
37. 38. 39. 41. 42.
37. Democracy's Sobering State
Chinese politics 14. 21. 33. 34. 37. 38. 39. 41.
Women in National Parliaments Living With a Superpower China: The Quiet Revolution Where's Mao? Chinese Revise History Books Democracy's Sobering State Capitalism and Democracy Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe An Explosive Combination
Political Parties: Empty Vessels? Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures Women in National Parliaments The True Clash of Civilizations What Political Institutions Does Large~Scale Democracy Require? What Democracy Is ... and Is Not Judicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe Referendums: The People's Voice The Case for a Multi~Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective A Too Periect Union? Why Europe Said "No" Russia's Ersatz Democracy What Does Putin Want? Mexico's Disputed Election Latin America's Left Turn Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State India's Path to Greatness Bin Laden, the Arab "Street," and the Middle East's Democracy Deficit Democracy's Sobering State Capitalism and Democracy Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cate An Explosive Combination Jihad vs. McWorld
Developing world 14. Women in National Parliaments 15. The True Clash of Civilizations 30. Mexico's Disputed Election
31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.
Latin America's Left Turn Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State China: The Quiet Revolution
Where's Mao? Chinese Revise History Books India's Path to Greatness Bin Laden, the Arab "Street," and the Middle East's Democracy Deficit 37. Democracy's Sobering State 38. Capitalism and Democracy 39. Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cate
Conservative parties 2. 3. 4. 5. 7.
Who Killed the British Prime Minister? Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom The End of French Europe? Angela Merkel's Not·So-Grand Coalition
10. Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual 11. Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis?
13. Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures
20. 21. 23. 24.
Japanese Spirit, Western Things Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual Political Parties: Empty Vessels? A Venture at a Standstill Mexico's Disputed Election
A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy? Who Killed the British Prime Minister? Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom The End of French Europe? Angela Merkel's Not-So-Grand Coalition
xiv
41. An Explosive Combination
41, An Explosive Combination
42. Jihad vs. McWorld
42. Jihad vs. McWorld
Economics and politics
Ethnicity and politics
3. Who Killed the British Prime Minister? The Strange Death ofTony Blair 5. The End of French Europe? 7. Angela Merkel's Not-So-Grand Coalition
4. 5. 15. 23. 26. 28.
8. Waiting for a Wunder Japanese Spirit, Western Things
9. 10. 13. 23. 24.
Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures A Too Perfect Union? Why Europe Said "No" Bored by 'Results', Europe Regains Its Taste for Grand
30. Mexico's Disputed Election 31. Latin America's Left Turn 32. Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State 35. India's Path to Greatness 36. Bin Laden, the Arab "Street;' and the Middle East's
Plans 25. A Venture at a Standstill 26. Shadows at Europe's Heart
Democracy Deficit 37. Democracy's Sobering State 39. Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe
27. Russia's Ersatz Democracy
41. An Explosive Combination
28. What Does Putin Want? 29. The New American Cold War
42. Jihad vs. McWorld
30. Mexico's Disputed Election 31. Latin America's Left Turn
European Union
32. Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State 33. China: The Quiet Revolution
2. A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy? 5. The End of French Europe? 7. Angela Merkel's Not-So-Grand Coalition
34. Where's Mao? Chinese Revise History Books 35. India's Path to Greatness 36. Bin Laden, the Arab "Street;' and the Middle East's
8. Waiting for a Wunder 23. A Too Periect Union? Why Europe Said "No" 24. Bored by 'Results', Europe Regains Its Taste for Grand
Democracy Deficit 37. Democracy's Sobering State
Plans
38. Capitalism and Democracy
25. A Venture at a Standstill
39. Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe 40. Globalization Is About Blending, Not Homogenizing
26. Shadows at Europe's Heart
41. An Explosive Combination
French politics
42. Jihad vs. McWorld
5. The End of French Europe? 6. France's Murky Mix of School and Scandal
Elections
11. Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis?
2. A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy?
12. Political Parties: Empty Vessels? 13. Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures
3. Who Killed the British Prime Minister? 4. 5. 7. 8.
Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom The End of French Europe? The True Clash of Civilizations A Too Perfect Union? Why Europe Said "No" Shadows at Europe's Heart What Does Putin Want?
Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom The End of French Europe? Angela Merkel's Not-So-Grand Coalition Waiting for a Wunder
14. Women in National Parliaments 18. Judicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe
19. Referendums: The People's Voice 20. 21. 23. 24.
10. Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual 11. Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis? 12. Political Parties: Empty Vessels?
13. 14. 15. 16,
Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures Women in National Parliaments The True Clash of Civilizations What Political Institutions Does Large-Scale Democracy Require? 17. What Democracy Is . , . and Is Not
The Great Divide Living With a Superpower A Too Periect Union? Why Europe Said "No" Bored by 'Results', Europe Regains Its Taste for Grand
Plans 25. A Venture at a Standstill
German politics 5. The End of French Europe?
18. Judicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe 19. Referendums: The People's Voice
7, Angela Merkel's Not-SowGrand Coalition 8. Waiting for a Wunder 11. Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis?
22. The Case for a Multi-Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective
12. Political Parties: Empty Vessels? 13. Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures
23. A Too Periect Union? Why Europe Said "No"
27. Russia's Ersatz Democracy
14. Women in National Parliaments
28. What Does Putin Want?
18. 19. 20. 21.
30. Mexico's Disputed Election 31. Latin America's Left Turn 32. Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State
35. India's Path to Greatness
Judicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe Referendums: The People's Voice The Great Divide Living With a Superpower
22. The Case for a Multi-Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective
36. Bin Laden, the Arab "Street;' and the Middle East's
Democracy Deficit 37. Democracy's Sobering State
23. A Too Periect Union? Why Europe Said "No"
24. Bored by 'Results', Europe Regains Its Taste for Grand Plans
38. Capitalism and Democracy 39. Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe
25. A Venture at a Standstill
xv
Italian politics 11. 12. 13. 14. 18. 19.
Political parties
Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis? Political Parties: Empty Vessels? Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures Women in National Parliaments Judicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe Referendums: The People's Voice
2. 3. 4. 5. 7. 8. 10. 11. 12. 13.
.Japanese politics 9. Japanese Spirit, Western Things 10. Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual
16.
11. Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis? 12. Political Parties: Empty Vessels? 13. Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures
14. 21. 39. 40.
17. 19. 22.
Women in National Parliaments Living With a Superpower Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe Globalization Is About Blending, Not Homogenizing
27. 28. 30.
Latin America, Mexico 14. 15. 17. 21. 30. 31. 37. 39.
31. 32.
Women in National Parliaments The True Clash of Civilizations What Democracy Is ... and Is Not Living With a Superpower Mexico's Disputed Election Latin America's Left Turn Democracy's Sobering State Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cate
35. 36. 37.
38. 39.
41. 42.
Parliamentary systems
A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy? Who Killed the British Prime Minister? Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom The End of French Europe? Angela Merkel's Not-So-Grand Coalition Waiting for a Wunder Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis? Political Parties: Empty Vessels? Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures What Political Institutions Does Large·Scale Democracy Require? What Democracy Is ... and Is Not Referendums: The People's Voice The Case tor a Multi-Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective Russia's Ersatz Democracy What Does Putin Want? Mexico's Disputed Election Latin America's Left Turn Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State India's Path to Greatness Bin Laden, the Arab "Street:' and the Middle East's Democracy Deficit Democracy's Sobering State Capitalism and Democracy Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cate An Explosive Combination Jihad vs. McWorld
Religion and politics
2. A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy? 3. Who Killed the British Prime Minister? 4. Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom 5. The End of French Europe? 7. Angela Merkel's Not-Sa-Grand Coalition 8. Waiting for a Wunder 10. Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual 11. Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis? 12. Political Parties: Empty Vessels? 13. Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures 14. Women in National Parliaments 16. What PoUticallnstitutions Does Large-Scale Democracy Require? 17. What Democracy Is ... and Is Not 18. Judicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe 19. Referendums: The People's Voice 22. The Case for a Multi-Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective 23. A Too Perlect Union? Why Europe Said "No" 26. Shadows at Europe's Heart 27. Russia's Ersatz Democracy 28. What Does Putin Want? 30. Mexico's Disputed Election 31. Latin America's Left Turn 32. Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State 35. India's Path to Greatness 36. Bin Laden, the Arab "Street:' and the Middle East's Democracy Deficit 37. Democracy's Sobering State 38. Capitalism and Democracy 39. Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe 41. An Explosive Combination 42. Jihad vs. McWorld
5. 9. 15. 17. 19. 21. 32. 35. 36. 37. 39. 41. 42.
The End of French Europe? Japanese Spirit, Western Things
The True Clash of Civilizations What Democracy Is ... and Is Not Referendums: The People's Voice Living With a Superpower Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State India's Path to Greatness Bin Laden, the Arab "Street:' and the Middle East's Democracy Deficit Democracy's Sobering State Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe An Explosive Combination Jihad vs. McWorld
Russia 14. Women in National Parliaments 21. Living With a Superpower 26. Shadows at Europe's Heart
27. 28. 29. 37. 38. 39.
Russia's Ersatz Democracy What Does Putin Want? The New American Cold War Democracy's Sobering State
Capitalism and Democracy Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cate
Social Democrats 2. A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy? 3. Who Killed the British Prime Minister? 4. Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom 5. The End of French Europe?
xvi
7. 8. 10. 11.
Angela Merkel's Not~So~Grand Coalition Waiting for a Wunder Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis?
32. Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State 36. Bin Laden, the Arab "Street;' and the Middle East's
Democracy Deficit 37. Democracy's Sobering State
12. Political Parties: Empty Vessels? 13. Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures
16. What Political Institutions Does Require?
Large~Scale
39. Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe
41. An Explosive Combination Democracy
42. Jihad vs. McWorld
U.S. comparisons
17. What Democracy Is ... and Is Not
19. Referendums: The People's Voice 22. The Case for a Multi~Party U,S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective 27. Russia's Ersatz Democracy
11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis? Political Parties: Empty Vessels? Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures Women in National Parliaments The True Clash of Civilizations What Political Institutions Does Large~Scale Democracy Require? 17. What Democracy Is .. . and Is Not
28. What Does Putin Want?
30. Mexico's Disputed Election 31. Latin America's Left Turn 32. Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State
35. India's Path to Greatness
18. Judicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe
36. Bin Laden, the Arab "Street;' and the Middle East's
19. Referendums: The People's Voice
Democracy Deficit 37. Democracy's Sobering State 38. Capitalism and Democracy
20. The Great Divide
21. Living With a Superpower 22. The Case for a Multi~Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective 38. Capitalism and Democracy
39. Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe
41. An Explosive Combination 42. Jihad vs. McWorld
39. Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe
40. Globalization Is About Blending, Not Homogenizing
The Muslim World
Women in politics
5. The End of French Europe?
14. Women in National Parllaments 15. The True Clash of Civilizations
7. Angela Merkel's Not-So-Grand Coalition
14. Women in National Parliaments 15. The True Clash of Civilizations
21. Living With a Superpower
xvii
Internet References The following Internet sites have been carefully researched and selected to support the articles found in this reader. The easiest way to access these selected sites Is to go to our student online support site at http://www.mhc/s.comionlineJ.
AE: Comparative Politics 01 /08 The following sites were available at the time of publication. Visit our Web site-we update our student online support site regularly to reflect any changes.
UNIT 2: Pluralist Democracies: Factors in the Political Process Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
General Sources
http.'/Iwww.ceip,org
This organization'S goal is to stimulate discussion and learning among both experts and the public at large on a wide range of international issues. The site provides links to the weU·respected journal Foreign Policy, to the Moscow Center, to descriptions of various programs, and much more.
Central Intelligence Agency http://www,odci.gov Use this official home page to get connections to The CIA Factbook, which provides extensive statistical and political information about every country in the world.
National Geographic Society
Inter-American Dialogue (lAD) http.'//www.iadtalog.org
This is the Web site for lAD, a premier U.S. center for policy analysis, communication, and exchange in Western Hemisphere affairs, The 1OO~member organization has helped to shape the agenda of issues and choices in hemispheric relations.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com This site provides links to Nationa! Geographic's archive of maps,
articles, and documents. There is a great deal of material related to political cultures around the world.
U.S. Information Agency
The North American Institute (NAMI) http://www.northamericaninstitute,org
http://usinto.state.gov/ This USIA page provides definitions, related documentation, and discussion of topics on global issues. Many Web links are
NAMI, a trinational public·affairs organization concerned with the emerging "regional space" of Canada, the United States, and Mexico, provides links for study of trade, the environment, and institutional developments,
provided. World Bank hffp:llwww.worJdbank.org News (press releases, summaries of new projects, speeches) and coverage of numerous topics regarding development, countries, and regions are provided at this site.
World Wide Web Virtual Library: International Affairs Resources
UNIT 3: Europe in Transition: West, Center, and East Europa: European Union http://europa.eu.int
This server site of the European Union will lead you to the history of the EU; descriptions of EU policies, institutions, and goals; discussion of monetary union; and documentation of treaties and other materials.
http://www.etown.edulvll Surf this site and its extensive links to learn about specific countries and regions, to research international organizations, and to study such vital topics as international law, development, the international economy, and human rights.
NATO Integrated Data Service (NIDS) http../Iwww.nato.intlstructurlnidslnids.htm NIOS was created to bring information on security-related matters to the widest possible audience, Check out this Web site to review North Atlantic Treaty Organization documentation of all kinds, to read NATO Review, and to explore key issues in the field of European security.
UNIT 1: Pluralist Democracies: Country Studies France.com
Research and Reference (Library of Congress)
http://www.trance.com
http://lcweb.loc.govlrrl
The links at this site will lead to extensive information about the French government, politics, history, and culture.
This massive research and reference site of the Library of Congress will lead you to invaluable information on the former Soviet Union and other countries attempting the transition to democracy, It provides links to numerous publications, bibliographies, and guides in area studies.
GermNews http://www.germnew5.de/dn/aboutl Search this site for German political and economic news covering the years 1995 to the present.
Russian and East European Network Information Center, University of Texas at Austin
Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs
http://reenic,utexas,edu
http://www.mofa.go.jp Visit this official site for Japanese foreign policy statements and discussions of regional and global relations.
This is the Web site for information on Russia and the former Soviet Union,
xviii
www.. mhcls .. com/online/ UNIT 4: Political Diversity in the Developing World
UNIT 5: Comparative Politics: Some Major Trends, Issues, and Prospects
Africa News Online
Commission on Global Governance
http://a/lafrica.coml
http://www.sovereignty.netlplgovlgganalysis.htm
Open this site for extensive, up-toMdate information on all of Africa, with reports from Africa's leading newspapers, magazines, and news agencies. Coverage is country-by-country and regional. Background documents and Internet links are among the resource pages.
This site provides access to The Report of the Commission on Global Governance, produced by an international group of leaders who want to find ways in which the global community can better manage its affairs.
IISDnet
ArabNet http://www.arab.net This home page of ArabNet, the online resource for the Arab world in the Middle East and North Africa, presents links to 22 Arab countries. Each country Web page classifies information using a standardized system of categories.
http://www.iisd.org/default.asp
Inside China Today
ISN International Relations and Security Network
http://www.einnews.comlchinai
http://www.isn.et~z.ch
This site of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian organization, presents information through links on business and sustainable development, developing ideas, and Hot Topics. Linkages is its multimedia resource for environment and development pollcy makers.
Part of the European Internet Network, this site leads to information on China, including recent news, government, and related sites pertaining to mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.
This site, maintained by the Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research, is a clearinghouse for extensive information on international relations and security policy, Topics are listed by category (Traditional Dimensions of Security, New Dimensions of Security) and by major world regions.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
United Nations Environment Program
http://www.oecd.orglhomel
http://www.unep.chl
Explore development, governance, and world trade and investment issues on this OECD site. It provides links to many related topics and addresses global economic issues on a country-by~country basis.
Consult this home page of UNEP for links to critical topics about global issues, including decertification and the impact of trade on the environment. The site leads to useful databases and global resource information.
Sun SITE Singapore
We highly recommend that you review our Web site for expanded information and our other product lines. We are continually updating and adding links to our Web site In order to offer you the most usable and useful information that will support and expand the value of your Annual Editions. You can reach us at: http://www.mhcls.comlannuaieditions/.
http://sunsite.nus.edu.sglnoframe.html
These South East Asia Information pages provide information and point to other online resources about the region's 10 countries, including Vietnam, Indonesia, and Brunei.
,,
xix
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xxi
UNIT 1
Pluralist Democracies: Country Studies Unit Selections 1.
2. 3. 4. 6. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
The Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy, Laza Kekic A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy?, DonleyT. Studlar Who Killed the British Prime Minister? The Strange Death of Tony Blair, The Economist Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom, Donley T. Studlar The End of French Europe?, Steven Philip Kramer France's Murky Mix of School and Scandal, Katrin Bennhold Angela Merkel's Not-So-Grand Coalition, The Economist Waiting for a Wunder, Ludwig Siegele Japanese Spirit, Western Things, The Economist Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual, Norimitsu Onishi
Key Points to Consider • What is the "index of democracy," and how would you explain its fairly low ranking of the UK? • What were the main items on Tony Blair's constitutional reform agenda, and how have they been implemented? Have they invigorated civic participation in the UK? • How did Tony Blair manage to hold on to power for so long? • Discuss the repeated political discontinuities and ruptures that mark French development and relate it to the phenomenon of Bonapartism. • Explain the periodic French resort to cohabitation. • What are some signs that French politics have become more centrist or middle-of-the-road for the main political parties? • How did the formula, "first vote with the heart, then vote with the head;' boomerang for the Left in the presidential elections of 2002? • What is the contradiction between promise and practice in the French policy of assimilation? • Discuss the preconditions for the collapse of Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe. • How did Angela Merkel benefit from feminist reforms in Germany? Explain the difference between a "grand coalition" and a "small coalition"-and give examples of both. • Explain why Japan's LOP (Liberal Democratic Party) is jokingly said to be "neither liberal, nor democratic, nora party." • What has been the role of this party in postwar Japanese politics? • How did Prime Minister Koizumi speak the language of neoliberal economic reform in Japan, and what kind of resistance did he encounter?
Student Web Site
www.mhcls.com/online
Internet References
Further information regarding these Web sites may be found in this book's preface or online. France.com http://www.franc8.com
GermNews http://www.germnews.deldnJabouti
Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs hffp:!!www.mofa.go.jp
xxii
a social or economic component in its definition of political democracy. In a summary of its findings, the index states that a little more than one-half of the world's population lives in "a democracy of some sort"-usually a very imperfect one. It may soon be a little less than one-half, given the present trends. Humanity's other half lives in decidedly non-democratic conditions. Using four regime types, the index concludes that: o
fewer than one person in seven (13 percent) lives in one of the 28 countries that it classifies as "full democracies:'
• almost three times as many people (38.3 percent) live in one of the 54 "flawed democracies:' • approximately one person in ten (10.5 percent) is found in one of the 30 "hybrid regimes." • almost four in ten (38.5 percent) live in one of the 55 "authoritarian regimes:"
The primary aim of this collection of articles is to promote a comparative understanding of contemporary politics. It pays special attention to the major varieties of representative democracy and includes reports on alternative nondemocratic forms of governance. Together, the readings will increase familiarity with the varied patterns of politics found in today's world, again with a special attention to the varieties of the democratic experience. They also discuss such related 'matters as the conditions that appear to favor or impede democracy's emergence, survival, and enhancement. The challenges are many, and they are by no means only external in origin. They include the widely discussed phenomenon of civic disengagement in advanced and relatively affluent societies. It turns out that the withdrawal from politics is not exclusive to Americans. That should be of concern, for democracy eventually becomes meaningless and will atrophy without an active demos. Democracy won can become democracy lost. It is useful to begin with a general inventory of the alternative forms of rule found in the world's 165 independent states and two territories (not including its 25 micro-states). The recently developed "index of democracy" is a useful source of comparative information on the state of governance in the world today.' Using 60 indicators across five broad categories, the index evaluates each of the 167 countries and then ranks them in terms of their overall score. Some of the rankings may come as a surprise, including the placement of the United States in rank 17, but they are supported by a wellconsidered methodology and empirical data. The categories are based on a "thick" or non-minimalist definition of political democracy that includes more than free elections and a basic guarantee of political freedoms and civil liberties. The index also gauges how well a government functions in implementing its decisions, how vigorously the citizenry takes advantage of the opportunities to participate in public life, and how supportive the pOlitical culture is of such democratic political participation. In conformity with the dominant liberal democratic tradition, it does not include
No Global Sweep of Democracy. There is no reason to assume that democratic rule will soon become global or that we can successfully build democracy when and where we choose. After a quarter of a century that recorded a widespread and unexpected advance of democratization, that trend appears to have come to a standstill in the late 1990s. There are signs that a weaker counter-trend of retreat from democracy may have set in-a topiC taken up by Thomas Carothers in unit five. Cultural and Socio-Economic Context. The democracy theme helps explain some of the topical and institutional emphasis of this collection. Is there a cultural-regional dimension embedded in the data? Even a cursory look at the index would find it hard to ignore a striking regional concentration of regime types. • The Middle East and Africa have the highest incidence of authoritarian government and the lowest occurrence of democracy. The single case of ''full democracy" among the 64 regimes in these two regions is the tiny island nation of Mauritius. There are 7 "flawed democracies" in sub~Saharan Africa, but only 2 in the Middle East and northern Africa. o
Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Australasia score high in the "flawed democracy" category, which is found in 43 of its 80 countries. In addition, these regions have 14 cases of "hybrid regimes" and 16 "authoritarian regimes; including that of China. There are only seven ''full democracies" here-including only a single case in Asia (Japan).
• By contrast, 18 of Western Europe's 21 countries are ranked as "full democracies." Even more striking is the fact that of the world's 28 full democracies, all but two (Mauritius and Japan) lie either in Western Europe (18), in Central Europe (2), or in "overseas" countries that politically were dominated by settlers from Europe and their descendants (6).
1
Culture and region matter, but they are by no means the whole story. There are also countries within Europe or primarily settled from there, which have not participated fully in the democratic experience. And it is sobering to remember that the most virulent attacks on democracy in the twentieth century came from European fascists who claimed to represent the political wave of the future. Another look at the country listings suggests the possibility that the socio-economic dimension sometimes rivals the cultural-regional one in attempts to explain the very uneven distribution of both democracy and income in the world of today. Britain, France, Germany, and Japan have been selected as case studies of pluralist democracy for a number of reasons. After the United States, they are the most populous and economically powerful of the 28 "full democracies." In addition, they are probably somewhat more familiar to most readers than the other countries in the category-and it makes some sense to begin with the more familiar and proceed to less familiar territory later. Finally, they offer sufficient similarities, differences, and contrasts to serve our comparative endeavor. Our four countries are best approached as real world examples of democracy-"warts and all." It is striking that they all developed from some form of oligarchic rule into pluralist democracies with representative forms of government and rule of law. None of them is an ideal type or model. Each one of them has democratic shortcomings. Indeed, they all rank relatively low among the full democracies. Each has its own peculiarities that invite individual narrative and single case focus. There is a lot to be said for country specialization, but the decisive step into comparative studies is taken when cross-national comparisons are added. Looking more closely at the political landscape in our four pluralist democracies is a useful way to become more familiar with different forms of democratic expression. The difference between a presidential-congressional system and a parliamentary form of rule is a basic institutional theme that is explored by Christopher Allen's article in Unit Two. There will be ample opportunity to make other comparisons with the United States before the collection moves to a series of non-Western case studies in Units Three and Four. They contain no surprises. The countries or regions chosen are: Russia, China, India, the Middle East, Iran, Latin America in general, and Mexico specifically. Even our small sample prompts reflections on the fragility of democracy. Of our four case studies of pluralist democracy, the UK was the only one that did not turn away from its democratic heritage at some point during the twentieth century. Italy, Japan, and Germany were the most prominent among several countries that abandoned the democratic road in the period between the two world wars. France followed suit after its defeat and partial military occupation by Germany in 1940. After World War II, these countries started out with new democratic constitutions. Representative governments were quickly restored in a number of other European countries where it had collapsed as a result of Nazi invasion and occupation. Only the UK continued to function-as it had for centuries-within an evolving framework of basic laws, rules, and conventions that are often referred to as its "unwritten" or "uncodified" constitution.
It is historically ironic that contemporary Britain ranks only in place 23 on the democracy index, quite far behind today's Germany (13). It also trails Japan (20). Britain's relatively low position on the list can be partly explained by its unusual concentration of power in the political executive, for the index of democracy assumes that a predominance of the legislature is more likely to encourage overall democracy. But the most detrimental impact comes from Britain's very low score on political participation-voter turnout, level of party membership, and willingness to engage in politics. In this category, Britain shares the lowest rating among all the full democracies with Mauritius and Uruguay. What, then, is a Democracy? The concept is contested, and it makes sense to follow Laza Kekicin's advice to avoid an either-or proposition (as in "a country is either democratic or it is not")' It is useful to remember that although Alexis de Tocqueville regarded the United States as a democracy in the 1830s, by today's stricter standards there was probably no country (with the exception of New Zealand) that would qualify as a democracy as late as 1900. By using a continuum, it becomes possible to differentiate between varying aspects and degrees of democracy. Moreover, it can be shown where a country has become more-or less-democratic over time. Robert Dahl's contribution in unit two provides considerable illumination because he skillfully brings historical, institutional, and theoretical considerations to bear on our understanding of democracy. He names six '~undamental" institutions that can be seen as essential for reaching a minimum level of modern representative democracy or what he has long called "polyarchy." Dahl adds a set of further going democratic criteria that the established democracies generally fall short of meeting. He ends with a call for raising the level of representative democracy. In their article, also found in unit two, Terry Lynn Karl and Phillippe Schmitter provide another valuable discussion of democratic governance. They emphasize that democracies differ considerably in their institutional infrastructure even as they meet some generic criteria that make democracy a unique political system. Their discussion ranges over procedures and principles that make democracy possible, and they add a valuable reminder of "what a democracy is not:' For example, a democracy does not provide a guarantee of higher economic growth, greater administrative efficiency, or ultimate political harmony among many other desirable achievements. All good things do not necessarily come together. In an intellectual tour de force, found in unit five, Gabriel Almond addresses a major topic that Robert Dahl has also addressed-the complex and ambiguous relationship between capitalism and democracy. Almond argues that capitalism "supports democracy" but also "subverts democracy;' even as democracy "subverts capitalism" but also "fosters capitalism:' His own preference appears to be what below is presented as "the great compromise:' In any case, he has directed attention to what may be the greatest political handicap of capitalism. It may well be more efficient and productive than other economic arrangements, but it has failed to provide a morally and intellectually persuasive theory of distributive justice rooted in the market. In a joint position paper
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released in the late 1990s, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroder used this deficiency as the reason for their support of an interventionist state. The government leaders of the UK and Germany at the time explained that while they were in favor of a productive "market economy:' they were opposed to a "market society." In other words, they did not want markets to determine major societal priorities. This appears to be a commonly shared position taken by a number of social reformers today. The Modern Nation State. The three West European countries in our sample show the impact of some major developments that are changing the political, social, and economic map of their continent. Europe was the birthplace of the modern nation state, and it is now the location where that basic political construct is undergoing a partial and ambiguous transformation. In prinCiple and practice, all of the member nations of the European Union (EU) have agreed to an unprecedented dilution of their tradition of national sovereignty. As a result, some familiar aspects of their political identity, like national borders or distinctive national currenCies, have been reduced in importance or entirely replaced. None of this Signals the end of the modern nation state or its imminent displacement by a United States of Europe. But no student of comparative politics will want to ignore the EU as a novel political formation. It is examined in unit three, along with its constitutional and democratic "deficit:' The Great Economic Compromise. Each of these countries has arrived at some "mixed" form of market capitalism, but the manner and degree of state intervention in the economy show considerable variations. Since the ''Thatcher Revolution" of the 1980s, Britain has moved closer to the relatively open market conditions of the United States, while France and Germany have followed a more organized and regulated form of capitalism. The highly protected and corporatist Japanese economy is less competitive and sometimes described as neo-mercantilist. Economic Rankings. When compared in economic strength, the four countries have relatively high and fairly similar ran kings. They are all members of the Group of Seven (G 7), where they rank behind the United States among the world's biggest market economies. If China's economy were included, that huge and rapidly developing country would probably take third place in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). On the other hand, if national economies were compared in terms of their GDP per capita, China would fall far behind. By this measure, our four countries would themselves slip somewhat in ranking, as they were passed and separated from each other by a few smaller, high-performing
problem were merely a cyclical one, It would lend itself more easily to solutions within the existing policy framework. But structural components seem to require a thorough revamping or "reinvention" of the welfare state. Almost everywhere in Europe, this popular social contract has been based on a "pay-as-you-go" formula that in practice involves an intergenerational transfer of wealth. There is much room for creative politics here. Quality of Life. Each of the four countries records a high performance when it comes to a standard measure of the quality of life. The Human Development Index (HDI) places Japan slightly ahead of equidistant Britain and France, closely followed by Germany. Once again, the aggregate figures are strikingly similar. Income Disparities. The four countries show some notable differences when compared for disparity in income, as measured by the GINI index. Yet none of them records as big a gap between the highest 10 percent and the lowest 10 percent of the household incomes as the one found in the United States. The income gap is still lowest in Japan and highest-and thus closest to the U.S. situation-in Britain since the "Thatcher Revolution:' France used to have an unusually big gap between its highest and lowest income earners, but the GINI index shows a marked reduction of the gap during the past quarter of a century. It seems plausible to link a good part of this development to the delayed political breakthrough by the Left, followed by its dominance in French politics from 1981 to 1986, from 1988 to 1993, and again from 1997 to 2002. Finally, the Scandinavian countries have very low disparities in income, even as they continue to score high on overall GDP per capita, the quality of life index, the perceptions of low corruptibility, the index of democracy, and the advancement of women to high appOinted or elected political office. One reasonable conclusion would appear to be that it is not incompatible for a country to maintain the conditions for a vigorous economy even as it also pursues the goal of reducing income disparities-and those additional policy goals that seek to enhance life chances can be added to the public agenda as well. Ethnic and Cultural Diversity. There are some additional European developments of importance for comparative political studies. For example, much of the continent has experienced difficulties in coping with the growing ethnic and cultural diversity brought about by the arrival of many economic and political immigrants during and after the cold war. Japan remains far more homogeneous, but even this island nation has experienced some ethnic diversification and could one day conceivably conclude that it needs an active immigration policy to offset the aging of the Japanese population. In Western Europe it is widely understood that the influx of newcomers has had stimulating economic and cultural consequences, but it has inevitably brought issues of multicultural co-existence and tolerance back onto the political agenda in a new form. Politics of Xenophobia. It is remarkable that there appears to be a similar level of potential support for xenophobic populist politics in much of Western Europe. It hovers around 15 percent of the popUlation, sometimes even more,
economies. Saving the Welfare State. Europeans have begun to examine carefully another of their major contributions to contemporary politics, the modern welfare state. In practically every country there are attempts to define a new balance between economic efficiency and social justice, as governments and publics are confronted with the increasing costs of a popular and relatively generous system of welfare and service entitlements. Longer life expectancies and lower birth rates contribute to the funding problem. If the funding
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but it has not been mobilized to the same degree in all the countries. Germany is one of the countries where such farright politics have been largely kept at bay, at least in federal politics. Politics of the Environment and Globalization. Even as West Europeans seek to come to terms with the challenge of greater diversity, their politics has also been affected by a growing awareness of global interdependence. Environmentalists are active in the Green parties. But the other and usually older parties have taken up the ecological theme as well. It is reflected in their widespread support for national and international initiatives to protect the environment, such as the Kyoto Treaty. They are also trying to adjust to the new information technologies and the many challenges of the global market with its opportunities for expansion and its widely perceived threat to job security and economic stability. Political Terrorism and Civil Liberties. The events of September 11, 2001 and the aftermath have sharply increased the role of organized violence and unpredictability in our political world. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon were directed at the United States, but the clandestine networks of supporters and sympathizers apparently reach deep into the immigrant communities of several European countries, including the ones we have singled out for special discussion here. Similar strikes have already affected European democracies: the train-bombings in Madrid in the spring of 2004 and in London in the summer of 2005 are the best known examples. There is no transAtlantic consensus on the most effective strategy for dealing with the new terrorism. One crucial assumption of the traditional policy of containment seems not to apply to this kind of activity, namely that the deSire for self-preservation will restrain potential opponents by making them reluctant to risk severe retaliation. The search for an appropriate and effective response will preoccupy our politics for a long time to come. The Transatlantic Gap. It is hardly surprising that the transatlantic debate over terrorism has revived the timehonored practice of engaging in public reflections on more fundamental cultural and political differences between continental Europe and the United States, One of the most widely discussed contributions has come from the American political writer, Robert Kagan. He argues that Europe and America are not just separated on the important issue of Iraq. In a widely quoted phrase, Kagan sums up his perception of the difference: "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus:' He points out that Europeans are more likely than Americans to favor multilateral approaches and to prefer a resort to "soft" rather than "hard" power in international relations. Kagan's thesis has touched off a lively debate, much of it critical. In his spirited response, found in unit two, Timothy Garton Ash critically discusses "The Great Divide" from a British perspective and explains why he finds Kagan to be only "half right." Traditional Values and Secular-Rational Modernity. The transatlantic values gap is illuminated by the world values survey, an ambitious project led by Ronald Inglehart at the University of Michigan. It studies cross-cu~ural similarities and differences in 81 societies' around the world-including the
ones discussed in this book. One of its major findings is that while contemporary Americans and West Europeans share some basic values of "self-expression" that are closely associated with political and economic freedoms, Americans tend to be far more traditional, religious, and patriotic in their values than their more "secular-rational" West European contemporaries. The resulting "values gap" between the United States and Western Europe is evident on the cultural map that accompanies the article, "Living with a Superpower:' in unit two. Continuity and Change. This is the point at which to embark on a serial discussion of politics in the four countries that make up our sample. But two suggestions of caution may be in order. First, in our concern to include the most recent changes and newest challenges, we must not lose sight of some equally important if less dramatic elements of continuity or even inertia in political life. In the stable democracies of Western Europe and Japan, the political process is usually defined by a relatively mild blend of change and continuity. Here political agendas are normally modified rather than discarded entirely, and shifts in the balance of power do rarely take the form of revolutionary displacements of a ruling group. Instead, there are occasional changes of government as a result of coalition disagreements or routine elections. Second, this capacity to adjust and adapt is important but may not always suffice. Dramatic disruptions of established political systems do sometimes occur, even in "our time" and in democratic contexts. In France, there have been periodic outbreaks of urban and suburban upheavals and riots, massive demonstrations, and politically motivated industrial strikes. In retrospect, it may be possible to reconstruct how the tipping point was reached that led to an unexpected upheaval, but that does not make such upheavals predictable. In the countries we now turn toward, the unexpected major turns in political development have included the following: The Thatcher Revolution, "New" Labour, and Blair's support for President Bush's Policy on Iran, President Mitterrand's social and economic reforms, the recurrent periods of cohabitation, the new French party system, the defeat of the EU Constitution, the collapse of the Communist bloc in Europe, Germany and the German unification, and the new German party system after the 1950s and now. Great Britain has long been regarded as the "mother" of the parliamentary system of government. In contrast to a presidential system, where the chief executive and legislatures are separately elected by the voters for fixed terms of office, a parliamentary government is often described as based on the "fusion" of the executive and legislative powers. Its most distinctive trait is that the prime minister, as head of government, is in some way Hchosen" or
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form of majoritarian politics in which the main opposition party of "outs" plays the adversary role of an institutionalized critic anct.rival of the party of "ins:' The Party System. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of the party system in shaping the British political process. Without strong parties and party discipline, the parliamentary system would be chaotic. The requirement that a governing group receives a steady flow of majority support (or, at least, toleration) would be difficult to meet, and governments would be weak and unstable. France and Italy have both experienced the problems associated with a multiplicity of weak parties. As in the United States, there was an early development of legislative caucus parties in Britain. When the suffrage gradually became democratized and the number of potential voters increased sharply, well-developed party organizations became a practical way to reach the many voters. The two major political parties that existed until the 1920s were the Conservatives (Tories) and the Liberals. The lalter were largely replaced by the new party of Labour in the 1920s. In the 1960s, the Liberals had a limited revival. They made an electoral alliance with the new party of Social Democrats in the early 1980s, and eventually the two merged. The electoral system (first-past-the-post in single-member districts) is largely responsible for the "two party system" that dominates the House of Commons, even though between 18 and 25 percent of the electorate has supported the candidates of a "third" party in recent years, now called the Liberal Democrats. This "third" party understandably supports electoral reform, namely a form of proportional representation (PR).lts argument emphasizes the "fairness" of outcome that had already attracted John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century. A century later, another liberal philosopher, Karl Popper, countered with a defense of the FPTP system that stressed that its "winner-take-all" provisions were more likely to lead to single-party majorities that could be governed effectively and be effectively held to account by the opposition. Popper clearly thought that coalition governments were less effective decision-makers and harder to call to account by the electorate. Three Major Reform Governments. Since 1945 Britain can be said to have had three reform governments that greatly altered some key features of British society and politics. Each of them also demonstrated the considerable capacity for decisive governance that remains a crucial feature of the Westminster model.
than the Tories). What some had seen as a quiet revolution came to an end, but the six years had changed the UK for ever. There was no major roll back of the reforms, except for some key nationalizations. During the next quarter of a century, the British governmental process seemed to be captured in the phrase "muddling through:' While the British tradition of adversary rhetoric continued to flourish, the differences between the two major political parties seemed often to have been reduced to relatively minor matters, except for some foreign and defense policy disputes. Labour's return to power between 1964 and 1970 and again from 1974 to 1979 failed to revive the country's sluggish economy or set a new direction. The Sick Man of Europe? By the mid-1970s, Britain had become obsessed with its governing problems-and this at a time when the ruling Social Democrats in West Germany confidently touted their own Modell Deutschland, the German societal model. British debate seemed dominated by a general malaise and a widely shared sense of deterioration. Even serinus observers spoke of Britain as "the sick man of Europe:' Journalists referred regularly to "the English disease" or "Englanditis"-a condition that showed up in the coincidence of inflation, economic stagnation, and unemployment along with widespread social squalor and the apparent incapacity of the public authorities to deal effectively with such problems. Academics seriously asked whether the UK suffered from a "governability crisis" possibly linked to "government overload" or "overstretch." It was ironic that this discussion took place less than two decades after an acute American political scientist, Harry Eckstein, had concluded that compared to its major neighbors in Europe, the British form of government showed an unusual structural capacity for effective and responsible action. The political parties took part in the national debate. In their search for answers, they tended to revisit ideological roots that had been glossed over during what became known as the consenSUS years. While some Labor intellectuals rediscovered the ideas of a stronger state socialism, there was a revival of market thinking among some Conservatives. Such ideas become important when they influence political elites. Margaret Thatcher became a firm supporter of deregulation, privatization and other central aspects of market economics before she successfully challenged Edward Heath to become Conservative party leader in 1975. She confidently led her party out of the opposition into government in the election of 1979. The hardships of the chaotic "winter of discontents" probably played a bigger role in the defeat of Labour than her economic ideas, but the two were not unconnected. In any case, her neoliberal ideas influenced some important policy shifts during the 1980s. Once in office, the Conservatives were the political beneficiaries of the continuing divisions among their opponents. Labour's disarray and the rise of a militant left-wing that sought to pull the party away from its centrist course did not sit well with its moderates. Some of the best known members decided to leave the Labour Party and set up a reformoriented party of their own. Led by the "Gang of Four"-Roy Jenkins, David Owens, William Rodgers, and Shirley Williams-the defectors were encouraged by popular support
The first major series of reforms were produced by Clement At/ee's Labour Government (1945-51). It came to power immediately after World War II, replacing the wartime coalition government led by Winston Churchill. During its first five years in office, Labour established a comprehensive welfare state in Britain, nationalized some key parts of the economy, and took the first major steps to dismantle the large overseas empire by releasing the huge Indian subcontinent. Toward the end of its time in office, Labour had spent much of its energies and the country had lost some of its appetite for the vision of a "New Jerusalem" that originally had energized the reformers. The party narrowly lost its parliamentary majority in 1951 (where it won more votes but fewer seats
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for the idea of a non-socialist alternative to Thatcherism. Calling themselves Social Democrats, the dissidents believed that a loose alliance between the "loony" Left and the "hard" left were taking over the Labour Party. They cooperated with the other '1hird" party of Liberals and eventually merged with them as Liberal Democrats. Their combined share of the vote reached about 25 percent in the 19aos and remained unusually high, at close to 20 percent in the 1990s. They won a much smaller number of parliamentary seats under the British electoral system. The second major reform government In the UK (1979 to 1990) since World War II was headed by Margaret Thatcher. She saw the new government as an overdue corrective to "consensus politics" pursued by both the major parties since Atlee's earlier reform government. Thatcher prided herself on being a "conviction politician" and was determined to replace what she saw as a sluggish socialist torpor with a dynamic entrepreneurial spirit. Her poliCies were designed to stimulate the private sector, weaken the obstructing trade unions, increase the power of the national government over local authorities, and generally reduce the interventionist role of government. She stood for an assertive British role in Europe, where she resisted the drive toward monetary and greater political union. She practiced a close cooperation with the United States under the leadership of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Thatcher's economic strategy received failing grades from most professional economists, but she could eventually point with pride to some animating effects. Yet even some of those who were impressed by a British economic revival in the mid-1980s became disturbed by what they regarded as very high social and political trade-offs. The local authorities were reduced in authority, and the "poll tax" was partly designed to guarantee that. The income gap between rich and poor in Britain, as measured by the GINI index, grew precipitously even as neighboring France was moving in the other direction. In foreign affairs, Thatcher gained respect among many voters for her resolute military response in 1982 to the occupation of the Falkland Islands by the junta that ruled Argentina. In 1990, Thatcher increasingly came to be regarded as a political liability by her own party. In November 1990, she was challenged as party leader and reSigned before she could be defeated in a crucial party vote. Her successor, John Major, continued to support many of her business-friendly reforms and basically consolidated her economic reforms. Some were surprised that the Conservative majority held through the 1992 general election. Tony Blair and New Labour. Already since the electoral defeat of 1983, the Labour party under Neil Kinnock's leadership had begun to move away from the far left-wing positions announced in its election manifesto of that yearwidely lampooned as '1he longest suicide note in political history:' After taking over the leadership in 1994, Tony Blair succeeded in carrying through a major symbolic reform that removed the famous Clause Four with its demand for socialization from the party's program. Labour became "New Labour:' and its hard Left remnants were marginalized. In the public opinion polls, Labour took a commanding lead over
the Conservatives. John Major had good reason to delay the next election as long as pOSSible, until May 1997. The Third Reform Government: Blair's New Labour in Power. Labour's landslide victory in 1997 brought the UK its third reform government since World War II. Unlike Prime Ministers Atlee or Thatcher, however, Tony Blair did not focus primarily on major social and economic policy changes. Since the mid-1990s, the British economy had once again revived well ahead of those on the mainland in Western Europe. A growing number of observers-including Tony Blair and in all probability the Chancellor of the Exchequer and heir apparent as Labour leader-Gordon Brown-willingly conceded that Thatcher's "neo-liberal" policies had played a role in stimulating the U.K. economy. It had become more flexible and dynamic, leading to higher growth rates and lower unemployment. But there were serious tradeoffs that Blair's government could have been expected to give more remedial attention-above all Britain's growing income disparities and the neglected and dilapidated infrastructure of the public service sector, where greater investments were badly needed for maintenance and renewal. Blair's reform agenda gave prominence to constitutional change, an area to which the Liberals have generally paid more attention. In his important article on this topic, Donley Studlar examines each of the institutional reforms and reviews their impact until the end of the year 2006. Many of these reforms were implemented relatively quickly. The symbolic change, especially with regard to the House of Lords, has been very great. The political effects vary. Until now, at least, Blair's institutional "modernization" has not brought about a more robust democratic commitment in the country. Political partiCipation is very low. Labour's share of the vote in the 2005 general election was 35 percent-one of the smallest winning results in British history. In the two most recent general elections, 2001 and 2005, the British voter turnout has reached the lowest level since the early twentieth century. As we have seen, the country ranks relatively low in the index of democracy-it trails both Germany and Japan, and barely comes ahead of France. New Party Leader: Labour. After the election of 2005, each of the three national parties has come to face a leadership succession. Tony Blair has announced his intention to step down during the present parliamentary term. Conventional assumption is that he will retire by mid-2007. Some Labour dissidents have begun to give vent to their displeasure over his long tenure. It remains to be seen whether the patient candidate for the leadership, Gordon Brown, will face serious competition-and what the winner will inherit. Brown is intellectually formidable, but he will carry the burden of having supported an increasingly unpopular policy in Iraq. And he may appear dull and dour after 10 years of Tony Blair's lively performance. New Party Leader: The Conservatives. Britain's Conservatives are rarely sentimental about holding on to leaders who don't deliver. After a lost election, they normally sack the leader and look for a new one. In replacing the hapless Michael Howard after the 2005 election, they chose a younger and very different successor: David Cameron. He is often compared to Tony Blair as an unusually articulate
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and "telegenic" leader. Critics find him somewhat slick and complain that he has more style than substance. It is possible that they underestimate him. He wants to move the Conservatives back toward the center-right and overcome their dull and unattractive public image. His strategy appears to target Liberal Democratic voters. In his first year as leader, the Conservatives climbed to their highest ratings in 20 years. New Party Leader: The Liberal Democrats. Under the popular but somewhat chaotic Charles Kennedy, the small party reached its highest parliamentary strength, by winning 62 seats in the general election of 2005. Kennedy stepped down in early 2006 after a controversy connected with his well known personal struggle with alcoholism. The leadership contest was won by Sir Menzies Campbell, who has been the party's foreign policy spokesman. The third party has thrived when one or both of the major parties departed from centrist positions. It may soon face the danger of being squeezed between the Labour and Conservative parties as both seek to win more voters in the center. There are possible opportunities as well. With the rise in appeal of the Conservatives and the decline of Labour, the Lib Dems have again begun to speculate about the possibility of a "hung" parliament-where no single party has a majority. In such a situation, the "third" party could end up holding the balance of power. There could even be a chance to have the electoral law changed toward a more proportional representation. Even if that situation should not come about, the Lib Dems have learned a lot about conducting successful campaigns in the last couple of decades. The party does not always win as big a share of the vote as the Alliance could muster in 1983 and 1987. But it has learned to target vulnerable districts, so that it now wins about three times as many seats with a somewhat smaller share of the total national votes as the Alliance did in its best days. For example, in 2005 the Liberal Democrats won 22 percent of the vote and 62 seats, whereas in 1987 the Alliance had won 22.6 percent of the vote but only 22 seats. France has gone through a modern political development that has been far more discontinuous than its British counterpart, with numerous attempts at a fresh start since 1789. For example, historians count between 13 and 17 French constitutions in the first two centuries that followed. In the past, French political discourse often seemed to reflect the sharp ideological cleavages to which the Revolution had given birth. After the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, France built up the energies for intermittent new revolutionary spasms in 1830,1848, and 1870. After each of these upheavals, France seemed to settle back into a much less exciting political routine, in which the civil service basically administered the country, while governments usually had short life spans (an average of less than one year) with few accomplishments because of the stalling power of parliament. In the Third Republic (1870 to 1940) and Fourth Republic (1946 to 1958), France was notorious for its multiplicity of undisciplined parties and groupings. They provided a weak and unreliable support for prime ministers and their cabinets, resulting in political paralysis and instability of many shortlived governments. In the frequent absence of responsible
political direction and oversight, a well-trained civil service maintained administrative continuity but lacked authority as well as confidence when facing major political issues that required political answers. There developed a risky tradition, known in France as Bonapartism, of intermittently calling for strong political saviors who were to lead the country out of its recurrent crises. Ironically, it was such a Bonapartist leader who ended up delivering an institutional alternative to such a constitutionally questionable and politically dangerous reli-
ance on a "strong man." De Gaulle as Bonapartist. The change took place in 1958 when a political emergency caused by the colonial war in Algeria gave Charles de Gaulle the opportunity to become architect of a new and very different political system. He had already played a Bonapartist role in World War" when he acted as self-designated leader of the Free French and in defiance of the official government of France, headed by a rival Bonapartist leader, Marshal petain. After the liberation of France, de Gaulle became interim president before the adoption in 1946-against his strong warnings-of the constitution of the Fourth Republic. It set up a legislativeexecutive relationship that very much resembled the one that had plagued the Third Republic. Having long viewed the unruly French parties as beyond reform, de Gaulle became convinced that it was necessary to prune their power base in the legislature and greatly empower the political executive. He basically dropped out of French politiCS for about a decade, until he was asked to resolve the political crisis of 1958. The new constitution, which practically bears his spirit if not his name, embodies de Gaulle's desire to institutionalize a strong political executive and tame the parliamentary parties. The prime minister remains responsible to the National Assembly but enjoys far more prerogatives and is far less VUlnerable to legislative power plays than previously. Above all, de Gaulle strengthened the government by adding a politically powerful president rn what became known as a dual executive. The president is directly elected and has powers that include the appOintment and dismissal of the prime minister, the dissolution of the National Assembly, and the call for a national referendum on a particular issue rather than leaving a decision to the parliament. The result is often called a semi-presidential system in which the French president played the dominant role for the first quarter of a century. It has found some imitation in the post-Communist political systems set up in Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia. A Consolidation of the Party System. It is also an unforeseen consequence that the new political framework of the Fifth Republic has become the setting for a consolidation and moderation of the French party system. Almost all of the main parties were started or reconstituted in the first few years after de Gaulle left office in 1969. Change on the Left. The Communists (PCF) are the main exception. They were once the main party of the Left, receiving about 20 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections until the late 1970s. They were relatively late to join their colleagues elsewhere in Western Europe in the painful withdrawal from their common Leninist and Stalinist heritage. By now they are a marginal force, less than half their former
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run-off between Chirac and Le Pen, the incumbent president won an overwheiming victory by attracting moderate votes from both Right and Left. By now, the Fifth Republic has lasted longer than all other political arrangements in France since 1789, with the notable exception of the crisis-ridden Third Republic (1870-1940). By institutionalizing the strong executive, the Fifth Republic has eliminated any justification for the irregular resort to Bonapartism. The dual executive is clearly more than a custom-made hybrid designed for Charles de Gaulle. It has outlasted him and become a basic model for a number of post-Communist constitutions in Eastern and Central Europe, including Russia. In France, it has given at least the appearance of institutional stability and authority at the price of an enormous concentration of power in the executive. There is at least one important way in which the French electorate can politically reduce the dominant role of the President-by voting in such a way as to make "cohabitation" necessary. "Cohabitation" refers to a French version of divided government. It occurs when a situation arises where the National Assembly has a parliamentary majority of one political orientation (Left or Right) and the President has a different orientation (Left or Right). That did not come about during the first 23 years of the Fifth Republic, when the Right dominated and de Gaulle was followed in the presidency by the Gaullist conservative, Georges Pompidou, and the liberal Giscard d'Estaing. In 1981, Socialist Franqois Mitterrand defeated Giscard in the latter's bid for reelection. The new Left-wing president was faced by a Right of center majority in the National Assembly that had been elected for a five-year term in 1978. On Winning office in 1981, Mitterrand immediately called parliamentary elections two years early. His calculation that the majority that had just elected him president would carry over into the parliamentary election was vindicated, and Mitterrand was able to preside over the first Socialist government in the Fifth Republic. Had the parliament just been elected, Mitterrand would not have been able to call an election until the following year. The new government tackled a major agenda: shift that included traditionally socialist reforms, in some ways comparable in its scope to the reform agenda of Clement Atlee's Labour government in 1945. Mitterrand had postponed the problem of how to deal with a divided government, but it came back to haunt him in a more difficult form in 1986, when the five-year term of the National Assembly came to an end. The Socialist majority had lost public support with some of its economic policies and was voted out of office in the regular parliamentary elections. For the first time in its nearly three decades of existence, the Fifth Republic faced the possibility of divided and possibly grid locked government-the very problem the Fifth Republic had been designed to deal with effectively. The Socialist president was directly confronted with the question of whether to interpret the electoral defeat of his party as a vote of no confidence and resign early from the presidency. Alternatively, he could stay on and appoint a conservative prime minister who would have the support of the new parliamentary majority. Mitterrand chose the latter option and appointed the neoGaullist Jacques Chirac as prime minister. The resulting co-existence of Left and Right in the dual executive was something new in French politics-and
strength, but they have gained a chance to play a role in coalition pOlitics that was previously denied them. After 1981, and again between 1997 and 2002, they were a small partner in the coalition government dominated by the Socialists, who had overtaken them on the Left in 1978. The Extreme Right. Le Pen's National Front (FN) seemed to be weakened by internal splits and rivalries, before it surprised many by capturing 17 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election in 2002. The party continues to find right-wing populist support for its authoritarian and xenophobic rhetoric directed primarily against the country's many residents of Arab origin. In his article, Steven Philip Kramer does not mince words in describing this party as "fascist, racist, xenophobic, and often anti-Semitic, as well as staunchly anti-EU:' The Socialists (PS). Between these peripheral positions, we find the more centrist parties located. On the left of center we find the Socialists (PS), who were revived by Franqois Mitterrand in the early 1970s. It is a social reformist party, with a strong appeal to teachers and white collar workers. The revived Socialist Party is more responsible than any other party for France's welfare state development during the 14-year presidency of Mitterrand and the cohabiting 5-year government during President Chirac's first term. The Conservatives. On the center-right there is also one leading party that is conservative in a more traditional sense. It is the Rally for the Republic (RPR) that was organized as a neo-Gaullist party. Jacques Chirac played a major role in creating this party during the early 1970s, after de Gaulle's death. It is a neo-Gaullist party-that is, it can be counted on to support measures that will strengthen the armed forces, protect French industry and agriculture, and reinforce law and order. It has taken over some defectors from other parties, notably the UDF. Since the eleelions of 2002, the party has presented itself as the UMP (Union for a Popular Majority or, simply, the Union for a Majority). One major change is the decline of t~e previously sharp ideological struggle between the Left and the Right. This seems to have resulted in a sense of loss among some French intellectuals who prefer the political battle to have drama and implications. They apparently find it hard to accept that the grand struggle between Left and Right has been replaced by a more moderate and mundane party politics of competition among groups that tend to cluster fairly close to the center of the political spectrum. The French faced an electoral marathon in 2002, when there were two-stage elections for both the presidency and the National Assembly. It Was expected in advance that the focus of the relatively short presidential campaign would be on the two veteran warhorses, Chirac and Jospin. The big surprise was the elimination of Jospin in the first stage. He ran a close third behind Chirac, who came first, and the far right candidate, Le Pen, who came second. As in 1995, many people on the Left had apparently voted "with their hearts" in the first round. The result was that the Left vote was split among a multiplicity of candidates, none of whom had a chance of making it into the second round. This time, however, the result was the failure of the main candidate of the Left to make it into the second round, since socialist Jospin gathered slightly fewer votes than nationalist Le Pen. In the
8
promptly dubbed "cohabitation:' It only lasted two years, until the end of Mitterrand's seven-year presidential term, but during that time this form of power sharing had a remarkable effect on the balance of power and responsibility between president and prime minister. Mitterrand drew back from the active political role he had played during his first five years and let Prime Minister Chirac dominate the political stage. Chirac's government took advantage of the new relationship. During its two years in office, it in effect rolled back some of Mitterrand's social and economic reforms. The French have returned to this version of power-sharing in two more recent time periods-from 1993 to 1995 and again between 1997 and 2002. Each time, the same basic pattern could be observed: In domestic politics, the president becomes a less central and less act'lve political figure and the prime minister takes over the leadership in most public matters. One could also say that the system becomes decidedly more parliamentary (or more prime ministerial) and much less presidential in a period of cohabitation. In the second half of 2005, France was torn by a prolonged series of suburban riots in which young people of North African descent played a major role. Order was eventually restored, but the damage went far beyond the toll of human injuries or the torched cars and buildings. Major politicians seemed to be in a state of shock, and their responses came slowly and unci early. Sargozy stood apart by combining an early and unambiguous demand for law and order with sug. gestions for constructive public policy measures to give more reality to the French promise of integration. The dramatic events drew attention to flaws in the celebrated French policy of full assimilation of immigrants. In 2007, France plans to hold both presidential and parliamentary elections. There will presumably be many politicians eager to enter one or the other race. It will be interesting to see whether Left voters will remember the lesson from 2005, when in the two rounds of the presidential contest they planed to vote "first with the hearr' and then, in the second round, "with the head:' As a result, they spread their vote among several Left candidates who had no chance of winning. The result was that the chief Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, did not make it to the second round, where he would probably have made a good showing. Instead, the incumbent Jacques Chirac ran against right-wing candidate and founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and beat him soundly. At the beginning of 2007, the two most prominent candidates for the presidential race appeared to be the conservative, Nicolas Sargozy, and the socialist, Segolene Royal. There have been female candidates for the French presidency before, but with exotic party labels that doomed them to be "also rans:' This time, however, the Socialists have stirred up the French race with a woman candidate who seemed to be the only politician, male or female, capable of beating Sargozy. Would France follow Germany in electing a woman as its chief executive? Germany was united in 1990, when what had been the eastern German Democratic Republic joined the western Federal Republic of Germany. The event came as one of the big surprises in recent political history, and neither the Germans nor anyone else were ready forthe shift. There were
no carefully prepared "unification plans" waiting for implementation. Instead, quick judgment and improvisation became the order of the day. Considering such matters as the lack of preparation, the unreliability of the official East German statistics, and the ideological separation of the political elites in the two states, there was an enormous potential for chaos, conflict or corruption. It is difficult not to be impressed by the fairly low incidence of such problems. On the other hand, the unification has led to an east-west divide in German politiCS that has attracted the attention of comparativists. German unification was closely connected to the general weakening and eventual collapse of Communist control in that part of the world. There seem to have been two major preconditions for the rapid transition from authoritarian communism to representative democracy in all of these countries. First, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had abandoned the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine under which the Soviets claimed the right of military intervention on behalf of the communist regimes that had been set up in these countries after World War II. Their rulers were now basically left to fend for themselves. Second, when the test came, these same national leaders turned out to have lost their will to powerthat is, their determination (and ability) to assert themselves and hold on to power at any cost. Once that became plain, they had lost the game, for none of these regimes had a reservoir of popular legitimacy to back them up. A snowball-like effect set in, and within a year the people's democracies were no longer there. But four decades of communism had left an imprint that would not be removed so readily. The two German states had been established in 1949, four years after the total defeat of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in World War II. During the next 40 years, their rival elites subscribed to the conflicting ideologies and interests of East and West in the cold war. When the two German states began to prepare their separate fortieth anniversaries, the division had lost its provisional character-or so it seemed. National unification was just around the corner, but no leading politician was on record as having foreseen the imminent upheaval. A leading American dictionary published in 1988 reflected the conventional view that the division of Germany was by now a fact of political life. It simply defined Germany as "a former country in Central Europe:' East Germany comprised the territory of the former Soviet Zone of Occupation in postwar Germany. Here, the rulers established a Communist political system with an economy based on Soviet-style central planning. East Germany lagged far behind West Germany in its recovery from the ruinous war, but it gained a reputation for having built one of the most productive economies in the Soviet bloc. The Berlin Wall was erected in August of 1961 to end what for East Germany had become an economically ruinous flight of people to the West. As a result, its population stabilized at about 16 million by the late 1980s. West Germany comprised the regions that had been the American, British, and French zones of occupation. By the time of unification, it had become a prosperous society of about 62 million people-nearly four times as many as in East Germany. The new West German state had been carefully constructed as a representative democracy that reflected the Founders' determination to avoid the political disaster associated with
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the Weimar Republic. New constitutions often attempt to include remedies for the ills that beset a previous political system. That was very much the case with West Germany's constitution. Called the Basic Law, it was replete with institutional safeguards, including elaborate checks and balances. It set up a strong federal system, a very active system of judicial review, and gave special emphasis to the importance of a vigorous system of democratic parties. Perhaps the most unusual feature of the Basic Law was that it carried a notice of its own limited shelf life. It foresaw the day when Germans in a united and free country could work out a new constitution. That scenario was not to be. Germany has been united, but the Basic Law (much amended over the years) remains in effect. West Germany experienced an early, sustained, and impressive economic and political recovery from the postwar disorder. This development stood in sharp contrast to the problems that had beset the first German republic, prior to the Nazi rise to power. Basically, the Weimar Republic in its last years had become a deeply fragmented and politically radicalized society, whereas West Germany started out as a politically exhausted, post-revolutionary society in which individual energies were largely channeled toward the pursuit of economic self-betterment. The new state benefited from an unusually long economic boom that had been triggered by the currency reform of 1948. The second German republic passed the pragmatic test of performance ("does it work?"). By the 1970s, just before some structural problems began to darken the economic horizon, Germany's political class began to refer with new found self-confidence to Modell Deutschland, "the German model."
the Weimar population had been. Their votes were based on moderate or centrist preferences for parties that largely pursued moderate policies and made centrist appeals. The result was a simple and amazingly stable party system. During the 1950s, German politics largely concentrated around the two leading parties, the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU or, in Bavaria only, CSU) and the centerleft Social Democrats (SPD). Beginning in 1957, these two parties together received well over 80 percent of the vote-and occasionally topped 90 percent. As a result, West Germany ended up with a "two and one-half" or '~wo plus one" party system in thE! Bundestag between 1961 and 1983. The business-friendly and liberal Free Democrats (FOP) were the only small Bundestag party to survive the concentration of the party system. Despite their modest share of the vote (an average of 8 to 9 percent), they held the balance of power, and this gave them an opportunity to be kingmakers. In their heyday, the Free Democrats were one of the most successful small parties in Western Europe. In 1982, one of their last dramatic impacts on West German politics came about when they switched coalition partners in midterm. They left the SPD after 13 years of co-governing and joined a new governing coalition led by Helmut Kohl and the CDU/CSU. They immediately joined the COU/CSU, with whom they served for another 16 years, until 1998. By that time, the FOP had served in government for a total of 40 years. Their role as small coalition partner was at this point taken by the new party of Greens that had entered the Bundestag in the early 1980s. After that, West Germany had a "two plus two" party system that became a "two plus three" party system with the addition of the post-communist PDS in the year of German unification. Small or big, two or three party coalitions? In contrast to Britain's single-party tradition, West German governments were based on coalitions. These were led by one of the two major parties and included the small FOP as majority-making junior partner. The only interruption in this pattern of small coalitions was a three-year period in the late 1960s, when the two leading parties came together in a "grand coalition:' with the FOP relegated to the role of small opposition party. East Germany began to unravel in 1989. There were peaceful protest demonstrations in several cities and a dramatic westward flight of thousands of defiant citizens. In effect, these people were "voting with their feet"-and that turned out to be very effective. The confused East German rulers reacted with a mixture of conciliatory and repressive measures that only made the dissidents bolder. After sacking their long-time leader Erich Honecker in October 1989, the Communists elected a new party leadership and adopted a new party name. This Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) also adopted a new program that identified it as a democratic left-wing socialist party. It tried a form of power-sharing with noncommunist groups and agreed to hold a free East German parliamentary election in March 1.990. The March election in East Germany resulted in a new non-communist coalition government that favored a short, quick route to unification. It was to begin with an early monetary union in the summer and a political union by the fall
The West German "Two-plus-One Party System." A key role in the West German political success story before unification had been the development of the parties and their coalition politics. The Weimar party system had mirrored Weimar society and been highly fragmented and polarized, producing considerable instability. To avoid the splintering effect attributed to the Weimar system of pure proportional representation (PR), West Germany adopted a modified system of PR that was designed to keep very small parties from gaining seats in the Bundestag. It is a two-ballot system in which the second and most important ballot is cast for a party. The parties win a share of the total number of Bundestag seats that is approximately equal to its share of the second or party vote, but only parties that win 5 percent or more of the second votes are eligible to participate in this proportional distribution of Bundestag seats. The 5 percent clause will be set aside in the rare case of a small party that has managed to win at least three single-member districts on the first ballot. The 5 percent clause and three districts rule has kept very small parties out of the Bundestag since they were adopted in the 1950s. That includes several far right-wing parties that occasionally have managed to gain entry to one of the state parliaments. But the new West German party system could not have been engineered through electoral law alone. Instead, it reflects the electoral choices made by voters who were not nearly as deeply divided or ideologically driven as
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of 1990. That was indeed the route taken, in tandem with international negotiations that involved the former World War II allies, the United States, the UK, France and the Soviet Union, as well as East and West Germany. Basically East Germany entered into the existing Federal Republic with its institutional framework. Here some critics saw a missed opportunity to revamp or even "democratize" the Basic Law. Others pointed out that the Basic Law had stood the test of time, by already lasting about three times as long as the Weimar Republic. More technocratic reformers sometimes point out that this would have been an opportune moment to streamline the increasingly cumbersome federal system and consolidate some of the smaller states. The rush to unite Germany would probably have been slowed down by adding such items to the agenda. . Each of the former Communist-ruled countries made its own transition from one-party rule and central planning toward a pluralist democracy and a market economy. The path taken by the eastern part of Germany differed greatly from all the rest, because it alone involved a full merger with a successful (and much larger) non-Communist part of the same nation.' As a result, East Germany had the advantage-if advantage it was-of having a prosperous and accomplished West Germany as "sponsor" of its post-Communist reconstruction. It became the recipient of generous social programs and some heavy public investments in the infrastructure that were made possible by huge financial transfers from western Germany. It received as well a ready-made and time-tested constitutional, legal and organizational infrastructure as a result of the merger. At first glance. Germany's unification would appear to have been an unusually friendly and generous takeover. But the projection of West German institutions into East Germany did not transform the East into an easterly extension of the West. Eastern Germany came to depend on "the golden West" to supply public funds and fill vacant leadership positions that required modern business skills or simply to meet consumer demand with Western products. Some East Germans began to see themselves as partial losers in the unification process-most obviously former elite members who had lost privileged positions and social status, many professionals whose occupational competence did not readily fit into the new order, and the many who for the first time in their lives experienced unemployment. By the late 1990s the jobless approached 4 million in Germany, nearly 10 percent in the West and nearly twice that rate in the East. The parties that had come in from the West-the COU. SPO, FOP and Greens-often found it difficult to reach many of the voters with such biographies. The Communist rulers had made great efforts to promote Marxism-Leninism as the new socialist state's official ideology. They do not appear to have had much success in this endeavor, but the experience of life in the GOR nevertheless seems to have left a general ideological residue that still differentiates East from West in Germany more than a decade and a half after their unification. Basically, many easterners seem inclined to prefer a more egalitarian and risk-free order, along with a major role for the state in a kind
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of collective definition of social justice. By contrast, more westerners seem willing to accept as fair or just an outcome that primarily reflects unequal individual achievements and outcomes in a competitive market context. This resembles a key difference between a socialist and a capitalist orientation, although the difference in "real" life is less sharp-edged than suggested by the ideological contrast. Perhaps one should think in terms of different tendencies rather than dichotomous ("either-or') positions. The one home-grown political party was better positioned for focusing on the grievances of East Germans. It became essentially a regional protest party of socialist reformers. There was a high volatility in East German voting behavior, but the total share won by the POS in the East alone rose from 11.1 percent at the time of unification to hover around 20 percent until 2005, when it rose to 25.3 percent-exactly the same share as the COU in the East. In effect, the East Germans had created a "three party system" that operated alongside a "two plus two" party system in the West. For in the West, before the addition of the Left Party in 2005, the POS received only about 1 percent of the vote-even less than the FOP and the Greens received in the East. In an almost evenly balanced Bundestag, the POS-whether in parliament or not-drew enough votes to act as a spoiler, by either producing a stalemate or tip the election in favor of the Right. The election results from 1994, 2002, and 2005 would all have produced different winners without the POS. In 1998, the German voters finally drove Helmut Kohl's government from office. The next government was similarly based on a small coalition, but now the Greens had replaced the Liberals as majority makers. By deciding that it was time for a change, German voters produced a result that was similar to the turnabouts in Britain and France a year earlier. In Germany the change was also generational. The new government was composed of Germany's first post-war generation in power as well as it's first left of center governing coalition. The Bundestag election of 2002. This was the closest election in the history of the Federal Republic. Both SPO and COU/CSU won 38.5 percent of the vote, but a quirk in the two-vote electoral law gave the SPO three more seats than its major rival. At the start, the SPO had a poor stand in the polls. It could hardly claim to have delivered on the promise of an economic turnaround, yet it managed to catch up. The electoral recovery was in large part attributable to Chancellor Schroder's campaign, in particular (1) his more impressive performance in the televised debates with the conservative chancellor candidate, Edmund Stoiber, (2) his unusually sharp disavowal of President Bush's strategy toward Iraq, and (3) his well timed appearance as a decisive leader in dealing with the great floods that ravaged parts of eastern Germany in the month before the Bundestag election. Structural Reforms: Federalism and Agenda 2010. After the 2002 election, German politics turned more seriously toward the task of basic structural reform. The two main topics were the country's federal structure and its socioeconomic model. Federalism is a crucial element not only in the country's governance but also in its self-understanding,
as reflected in its official name, the Federal Republic of Germany. The founders of the West German state had regarded a strong federal arrangement as a key safeguard against a dangerous concentration and potential abuse of power in the central government. Today there are outspoken reformers who believe that the federal entanglements often impede effective governance in Germany. At the same time, there are powerful vested interests that wish to keep the present arrangements, perhaps with some modifications. There may be even broader agreement about the need for a basic socio-economic reform in Germany. Yet there is no consensus about the specific reform meaSUres themselves. The discussion resembles that carried on in several other advanced societies. It proceeds from the insight that Germany's generous social welfare model will be unsustainable in its present form over the long run. Germany faces not only the familiar demographic shifts of an ageing society and stiff economic competition from abroad. Its problems are compounded by the economic burden of post-communist reconstruction in eastern Germany. Germans have traditionally favored a socially more contained form of capitalism than the untrammeled market version that prevails in Britain or the United States. They are unlikely to accept the kind of massive deregulation that was introduced in the United States and Britain by conservative governments in the 1980s and largely accepted in both countries by their center-left successors in the following decade. Both the political culture and institutional framework of Germany (and much of mainland Europe) lean more toward corporatist and communitarian solutions than their British and American counterparts. At the beginning of 2004, Chancellor Schroder succeeded in mobilizing parliamentary support for a comprehensive structural reform package, Agenda 2010. It ran into protests as Germans began to anticipate the painful rollbacks they were facing. The SPD, as the leading government party, dropped sharply in the polls and experienced an unprecedented loss of voters and dues-paying members. There was an institutional power shift as well, when victories in several state elections gave the Christian Democrats enough votes in the federal upper chamber (Bundesrat) to have a blocking majority. After the defeat of the SPD-Ied coalition in the most populous state of North Rhine Westphalia for the first time in four decades, SchrOder announced his intention to hold the next Bundestag election a year early. He managed to obtain the necessary approval by the Federal President and the Constitutional Court. During a short campaign, in which SchrOder and the SPD pulled out all the stops, the CDU/CSU managed to lose a more than 10 percent lead and came out only one percentage point ahead of the SPD (35.2 to 34.2 percent). It was the first election since 1949 in which the two major parties had together received less than 70 percent of the vote. That has led to a discussion in Germany whether the near duopoly by the CDU/CSU and SPD is coming to an end and will be replaced by a more fragmented, pluralized party system. The relatively strong performance of the Left. PDS determined the outcome of the 2005 election. This alliance
brought together the eastern PDS and western socialist dissidents, who had reacted to SchrOder's "neoliberal" reforms by gathering behind the former SPD leader and one-time chancellor candidate, Oskar Lafontaine. Thus the political alliance overcame the weakness of the PDS, which can win between one-fifth and one-fourth of the vote in eastern Germany but not more than 1.2 percent in the West. The Left Party brought in almost four times as many votes in the West as the PDS had at best been able to win-4.4 percent. The Left would not have passed the 5 percent barrier by itself, but by adding the result in the eastern states (25.3 percent) the alliance won a combined total of 8.7 percent. The coalition possibilities were greatly restricted because of politics or arithmetic, quite often both. Germany has not tried minority government at the national level, and it rarely discusses it as a workable alternative to a governing majority coalition. As we have seen, the classical German "small coalition" was arithmetically impossible-whether "red-green:' "red-yellow:' "blaCk-yellow," or "blaCk-green:' PDS was also impossible for reasons of politics. The post-communists have entered into governing coalitions at the state level in former East Germany; they are still regarded as political anathema at the federal level. The SPD had special reasons for not getting cozy with the defectors who had joined the renegade, former SPD leader, Lafontaine. Majority coalitions based on three parties were arithmetically possible, but turned out to be politically impOSSible. In the end, the two big parties (CDU/CSU and SPD) decided to form a black-red "grand coalition;' headed by Angela Merkel. The challenges facing this coalition and its remarkable leader are discussed in the readings on German politics in unit one. Japan has long fascinated comparative social scientists as a country that modernized early, rapidly and thoroughly while maintaining its Japanese, non-Western identity. This topic is explored in the article "Japanese Spirit, Western Things." There seem to be few cultures that have shown a similar capacity to "assimilate" borrowings from abroad. Japan moved tentatively toward a semblance of the parliamentary form of government after World War I, but further steps were blocked by a militarist takeover in the early 1930s. After World War II, Japan came under military occupation but, unlike Germany, it was occupied by a single power only, the United States. A parliamentary form of representative democracy was installed in Japan under American superviSion. This new political system soon acquired indigenous Japanese characteristics that set it off from the other major democracies examined here. The adaptation of the representative institutions took place in the context of a prolonged economic boom, which had begun a little later but became in some ways even more impressive than that of West Germany after World War II. It helped the new system gain legitimacy by meeting the pragmatiC test (it "worked"). The party system shows some superficial resemblance to the many weak and internally divided parties of the Third and Fourth Republics. In Japan, however, there are informal but well established, alternative networks for contact and
12
communication between leading politicians and their counterparts as business leaders and top bureaucrats. Since its creation in 1955, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has played a leading role in Japanese party politics. Most of the time, the many opposition parties have been divided and they have provided little effective competition. Yet the LDP could be said to provide its own opposition. According to a standard political joke, the Japanese Liberal Democrats are neither Liberal nor democratic-and they do not really constitute a party either! There is some truth in this remark. The LDP has essentially performed like a conservative political machine that loosely unites and balances several rival factions, which in turn consists mostly of the personal followers of political bosses who stake out and pursue factional claims to benefits of office. In Japanese politics, the LDP performs an important coordinating role, and if it were not there, it might have to be invented in order for the parliamentary side of the Japanese system to work. Such a conclusion is supported by the political chaos that resulted during the one year when the LDP was absent from the government. That was in 1993, when the LDP temporarily lost its parliamentary majority. Thereupon seven different parties, spanning the spectrum from conservative to socialist, formed a fragile coalition government. It was incapable of defining or promoting a coherent policy program and stood helpless as the Japanese economy continued on its course of stagnation. The long postwar economic boom had petered out somewhat later for Japan than in Western Europe, but by the beginning of the 1990s the Japanese economy was on the decline. One year, two prime ministers and several cabinet reshuffles later, a revived LDP managed by the summer of 1994 to return to the cabinet in coalition with its former rivals, the Socialists. The peculiar alliance was possible because the Socialist leadership took a thoroughly pragmatic view of coalition politics-as did the LDP. By December 1995, the more experienced LDP had recaptured the prime ministership for itself. There followed a rapid succession of short-lived governments headed by LDP factional leaders. When the post once again became open in April 2001, there were a surprising number of willing candidates and an even more surprising victor. The unexpected new leader of the Liberal Democrats and new prime minister of Japan was Junichiro Koizumi. He had unequivocally identified himself as committed to a new course of thorough reform that would go beyond the economy into realms that hitherto had been deemed out of reach for politics. Once in office, Koizumi immediately took some symbolic steps to show that he meant business. His first cabinet included five women, including the controversial Makiko Tanaka who became head of the foreign ministry. Considered assertive, she quickly became a target for opponents of the new course. She was dismissed as foreign minister in January 2002, but immediately replaced by another prominentwoman.
Although he had learned the traditional ways of Japanese party politics before reaching the top, Koizumi soon became widely known for having adopted an unconventional approach. His leadership style brought him media attention and, at times, personal popularity as with no previous prime minister. But he was less successful in turning his popularity into political capital. He used every opportunity to call for economic reform, and he mastered the language of structural innovation. No previous Japanese prime minister had made such outspoken neoliberal demands for privatization and deregulation. But he worked within a context that was not conducive to reform. His proposals ran into tough resistance from conservative elements in the political class, including factional leaders of his own party and members of the high civil service. It is remarkable that Japan's prolonged economic stagnation, lasting from the early 1990s for well over a decadeand not yet completely over has not resulted in more political protests or electoral repercussions. A key question has been whether the fragmented parliamentary opposition would one day overcome its divisions and find a way to become a more coherent, alternative force. It is a vision that has brought The Economist to speculate about the possible emergence of a two-party system, with the newly emerging Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) as the clear alternative choice for mainstream voters. So far, this reading of Japanese party politiCS has failed to pan out. The immediate result of the 2003 parliamentary election was that Koizumi remained prime minister with his coalition intact. Japanese politiCS seemed to continue in its well-worn groove. Prime Minister Koizumi continued to run into opposition to his plans for economic liberalization, and much of the resistance came from members of his own party. When his plans to privatize the postal service were rejected by the upper house of parliament in 2005, Koizumi used the occasion to call for early elections. His move resembled the one taken about the same time by the German chancellor in reaction to a political stalemate. The immediate outcome was very different for, in contrast to Gerhard Schroder, Koizumi won a landslide victory. The Japanese prime minister had used the opportunity to purge his party of some rebels, and in the following parliamentary session the Liberal Democrats acted more as a team and mobilized support to have 82 of 91 proposed bills passed, including the one to privatize the postal services. The turnabout came in the fifth year of Koizumi's tenure as prime minister-far too late to give him an opportunity to pursue his new course to the end, if that had seriously been his intention. In 2006, following his party's rules on term limits, he stepped down. Unlike many of his predecessors, Koizumi did not try to pick his own successor. In September 2006, Shinzo Abe was elected to succeed Koizumi as leader of the Liberal Democrats and prime minister of Japan. Some observers called attention to what they regarded as the new leader's unrepentant attitude to his country's war crimes as likely to have major foreign repercussions. Others found it difficult to
13
2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. An early discussion of this potentially problematiC dependency on the West German sponsor is found in my essay: Christian S0e, "National Unification and Reconstruction in Germany: The Problem of Old and New Divisions:' in Gaines Post, ed., German Unification: Problems and Prospects (The Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, Monograph Series, Number Three: Claremont, 1992).
believe that Japan would put its hard-won, good relations with China, South Korea, and other neighbors at risk by indulging in a revival of nationalism.
Notes 1. Laza Kekic, The Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy, included in Comparative Politics 07108 as article one.
14
Article 1
The Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy LAZA KEKIC
Defining and Measuring Democracy
3. Regularly contested elections conducted on the basis of secret ballots, reasonable ballot security and the absence of massive voter fraud. 4. Significant public access of major political parties to the electorate through the media and through generally open campaigning.
There is no consensus on how to measure democracy, definitions of
democracy are contested and there is an ongoing lively debate on the subject. The issue is not only of academic interest. For example,
although democracy-promotion is high on the Jist of American foreign-
The Freedom House definition of political freedom is somewhat (though not much) more demanding than its criteria for electoral democracy-Le., it classifies more countries as electoral democracies than as "free" (some "partly free" countries are also categorised as electoral democracies). At the end of 2005, 122 states were classified as electoral democracies; of these, 89 states were classified as free. The Freedom House political-freedom measure covers the electoral process and political pluralism and, to a lesser extent, the functioning of government and a few aspects of participation. A key differenc.e in the various measures of democracy is between "thin" or minimalist ones and "thick" or wider concepts (Coppedge, 2005). The thin concepts correspond closely to an immensely influential academic definition of democracy, that of Robert Dahl's concept of polyarchy (Dahl, 1970). Polyarchy has eight components, or institutional requirements: almost all adult citizens have the right to vote; almost all adult citizens are eligible for public office; political leaders have the right to compete for votes; elections are free and fair; all citizens are free to form and join political parties and other organisations; all citizens are free to express themselves on all political issues; diverse sources of infonnation about politics exist and are protected by taw; and government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference. The Freedom House electoral democracy measure is a thin concept. Its measure of democracy based on political rights and civil liberties is thicker than the measure of electoral democracy. Other definitions of democracy have broadened to include aspects of society and political culture in democratic societies.
policy priorities, there is no consensus within the American govern-
ment on what constitutes a democracy. As one observer recently put it, "the world's only superpower is rhetorically and militarily promoting a political system that remains undefined-and it is staking its credibility and treasure on that pursuit" (Horowitz, 2006, p 114). Although the terms "freedom" and "democracy" are often used interchangeably, the two are not synonymous. Democracy can be seen as a set of practices and principles that institutionalise and thus ultimately protect freedom. Even if a consensus on precise definitions has proved elusive, most observers today would agree that, at a minimum, the fundamental features of a democracy include government based on majority rule and the consent of the governed, the existence of free and fair elections, the protection of minorities and respect for basic human rights. Democracy presupposes equality before the law, due process and political pluralism. Is reference to these basic features sufficient for a satisfactory concept of democracy? As discussed below, there is a question of how far the definition may need to be widened. Some insist that democracy is necessarily a dichotomous concepta state is either democratic or not. But most measures now appear to adhere to a continuous concept, with the possibility of varying degrees of democracy. At present, the best-known measure is produced by the US-based Freedom House organisation. The average of its indexes, on a 1 to 7 scale, of political freedom (based on 10 indicators) and of civil liberties (based on 15 indicators) is often taken to be a measure of democracy. The index is available for all countries, and stretches back to the early 1970s. It has been used heavily in empirical investigations of the relationship between democracy and various economic and social variables. The so-called Polity Project provides, for a smaller number of countries, measures of democracy and regime types, based on rather minimalist definitions, stretching back to the 19th century. Freedom House also measures a narrower concept, that of "electoral democracy". Democracies in this minimal sense share at least one common, essential characteristic. Positions of political 'power are fined through regular, free, and fair elections between competing parties, and it is possible for an incumbent government to be turned out of office through elections. Freedom House criteria for an electoral democracy include:
The Economist Intelligence Unit's Measure of Democracy The Economist Intelligence Unit's index is based on the view that mea~ sures of democracy that reflect the state of political freedoms and civil liberties are not thick enough. They do not encompass sufficiently or at all some features that detennine how substantive democracy is or its quality. Freedom is an essential component of democracy, but not sufficient. In existing measures, the elements of political participation and functioning of government are taken into account only in a marginal way. The Economist Intelligence Unit's democracy index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the
1. A competitive, multiparty political system. 2. Universal adult suffrage.
15
ANNUAL EDITIONS
Table 1
Economist
il'1olnl"'o
Unit
nOI'Ylr"~":"~\1
Index 2006
Category scores Rank
Overall I Electoral Process II Functioning III Political IV Political V Civil Score and Pluralism of Government Participation Culture Liberties
Full democracies Sweden Iceland Netherlands Norway Denmark Finland Luxembourg Australia Canada Switzerland Ireland New Zealand Germany
Austria Malta
Spain
US Czech Republic Portugal Belgium Japan Greece
UK France Mauritius Costa Rica Slovenia Uruguay
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11~ 11~
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20~ 20~
22 23 24 25~
25~ 27~ 27~
9.88 9.71 9.66 9.55 9.52 9.25 9.10 9.09 9.07 9.02 9.01 9.01 8.82 8.69 8.39 8.34 8.22 8.17 8.16 8.15 8.15 8.13 8.08 8.07 8.04 8.04 7.96 7.96
10.00 10.00 9.58 10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 9.17 9.58 9.58 10.00 9.58 9.58 9.17 9.58 8.75 9.58 9.58 9.58 9.17 9.58 9.58 9.58 9.17 9.58 9.58 10.00
10.00 9.64 9.29 9.64 9.64 10.00 9.29 8.93 9.64 9.29 8.93 8.57 8.57 8.21 8.21 7.86 7.86 6.79 8.21 8.21 7.86 7.50 8.57 7.50 8.21 8.21 7.86 8.21
10.00 8.89 9.44 10.00 8.89 7.78 7.78 7.78 7.78 7.78 7.78 8.33 7.78 7.78 6.11 6.11 7.22 7.22 6.11 6.67 5.56 6.67 5.00 6.67 5.00 6.11 6.67 5.00
9.38 10.00 10.00 8.13 9.38 8.75 8.75 8.75 8.75 8.75 8.75 8.13 8.75 8.75 8.75 8.75 8.75 8.13 7.50 6.88 8.75 7.50 8.13 7.50 8.13 6.88 6.88 6.88
7.91 7.89 7.88 7.82 7.74 7.73 7.68 7.60 7.60 7.53 7.43 7.43 7.40 7.38 7.37 7.35 7.34 7.30 7.28 7.18 7.10 7.06 7.04
8.75 9.58 9.58 9.58 9.58 9.17 9.58 9.17 9.17 9.58 9.17 9.58 9.58 9.58 9.58 9.58 9.17 9.58 9.17 9.17 9.58 9.58 9.17
7.86 8.93 7.14 7.50 7.50 6.43 8.21 7.86 6.79 6.79 7.86 6.43 7.50 7.86 6.43 7.14 7.14 6.07 6.64 6.79 5.71 6.07 6.07
7.22 5.00 7.22 6.67 5.00 6.11 5.56 5.00 6.67 5.00 5.00 6.67 6.11 4.44 6.11 5.56 5.00 6.11 7.78 6.11 6.67 6.11 6.11
6.88 6.25 7.50 5.63 7.50 8.13 5.63 8.88 6.25 6.88 6.88 5.63 5.00 5.63 5.63 5.63 6.25 5.63 7.50 5.63 5.00 5.00 5.63
10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 9.71 9.71 9.71 10.00 10.00 9.71 10.00 10.00 9.41 9.12 9.71 9.41 8.53 9.12 9.41 9.41 9.41 9.41 9.12 9.12 9.71 9.41 8.82 9.71
Flawed democracies South Africa Chile South Korea
Taiwan Estonia Italy
India Botswana Cyprus Hungary Cape Verde Uthuania Slovakia Brazil Latvia
Panama Jamaica Poland Israel Trinidad and Tobago Bulgaria Romania Croatia
29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36~
36~
38 39~
39~
41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
16
8.82 9.71 7.94 9.71 9.12 8.82 9.41 9.12 9.12 9.41 8.24 8.82 8.82 9.41 9.12 8.82 9.12 9.12 5.29 8.24 8.53 8.53 8.24 (continued)
Article 1. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy
Table 1
Unit
Economist
nAm(1,f'r<'f'\1
Index 2006
Category scores Rank Ukraine Mexico Argentina Serbia Mongolia Sri Lanka Montenegro Namibia Papua New Guinea Suriname Moldova Lesotho Philippines Indonesia Timor Leste Colombia Macedonia Honduras EI Salvador
Paraguay Benin Guyana Dam Rep Bangladesh
Peru Guatemala Hong Kong Palestine Mali Malaysia Bolivia
52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59~ 59~
61 62 63~
63= 65~ 65~
67 68 69 70 71= 71~
73 74 75~ 75~
77 78 79 80 81= 81 =
Overall i Electoral Process II Functioning III Political IV Political V Civil and Pluralism of Government Participation Score Culture Liberties 6.94 6.67 6.63 6.62 6.60 6.58 6.57 6.54 6.54 6.52 6.50 6.48 6.48 6.41 6.41 6.40 6.33 6.25 6.22 6.16 6.16 6.15 6.13 6.11 6.11 6.07 6.03 6.01 5.99 5.98 5.98
9.58 8.75 8.75 9.17 9.17 6.92 9.17 4.75 7.33 9.17 9.17 7.92 9.17 6.92 7.00 9.17 8.25 8.33 9.17 7.92 6.83 8.33 9.17 7.42 8.75 8.75 3.50 8.25 8.25 6.08 8.33
5.71 6.07 5.00 5.36 6.07 5.00 5.71 4.00 6.43 6.07 4.29 6.43 5.36 7.14 5.57 4.36 4.50 6.43 5.43 5.00 6.43 5.36 4.29 5.07 3.29 6.79 5.71 2.71 5.71 5.71 5.71
5.56 5.00 5.56 5.00 3.89 5.56 5.00 6.67 4.44 4.44 6.11 4.44 5.00 5.00 5.00 5.00 7.22 4.44 3.89 5.00 3.89 4.44 3.33 4.44 5.56 2.78 5.00 7.78 3.89 4.44 4.44
5.63 5.00 5.63 5.63 5.63 7.50 5.63 8.75 6.25 5.00 5.00 6.25 3.75 6.25 6.25 4.38 3.75 5.00 4.38 4.38 6.88 4.38 5.63 6.25 5.00 4.38 6.25 6.88 5.63 7.50 3.75
8.24 8.53 8.24 7.94 8.24 7.94 7.35 8.53 8.24 7.94 7.94 7.35 9.12 6.76 8.24 9.12 7.94 7.06 8.24 8.53 6.76 8.24 8.24 7.35 7.94 7.65 9.71 4.41 6.47 6.18 7.65
5.91 5.89 5.82 5.82 5.78 5.70 5.68 5.67 5.66 5.64 5.42 5.37 5.35 5.28 5.25 5.22 5.18 5.14 5.08 5.02 4.97 4.90
7.33 4.33 5.67 7.92 8.25 7.92 8.25 4.83 6.50 7.83 7.00 7.00 7.42 5.25 5.25 7.75 6.00 4.33 4.33 7.00 6.00 7.92
5.07 7.50 5.71 2.36 3.29 6.79 5.71 6.43 5.21 4.29 3.64 5.00 4.64 5.71 4.64 2.14 3.93 3.93 4.29 3.21 5.00 1.79
4.44 2.78 5.56 6.11 4.44 4.44 3.33 5.00 3.33 5.00 5.56 3.33 4.44 4.44 3.33 5.00 5.06 4.44 5.56 5.56 3.89 3.33
5.63 7.50 6.88 6.25 5.00 3.75 3.75 5.63 5.00 3.13 5.00 5.63 4.38 6.88 6.25 5.63 5.63 6.25 6.25 3.75 4.38 5.00
7.06 7.35 5.29 6.47 7.94 5.59 7.35 6.47 8.24 7.94 5.88 5.88 5.88 4.12 6.76 5.59 5.29 6.76 5.00 5.59 5.59 6.47
Hybrid regimes Albania Singapore Madagascar Lebanon Bosnia and Hercegovina Turkey Nicaragua Thailand Fiji Ecuador Venezuela Senegal Ghana Mozambique Zambia Liberia Tanzania Uganda Kenya RUssia Malawi Georgia
83 84 85~ 85~
87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104
(continued)
17
ANNUAL EDITIONS
Table 1
Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index 2006 (continued)
w;m;:if::\)iiI\it~k,{.\~t~IKi~~~~&~i~!Fl~~~f~Jt¥::&~!;f,'illif~~!lr;1RiH!k{~l?j~8Y.~f:l~t&f::ff&&§jjJt\~t:1~~~{(z~giJiR\X1;11\:m?:~~'c~@;~)};Jj~1lti!~f~!gHl0J:illj~E;\t:BJ:~t(;~lil§:\;i(~!~~j(W,Ne@TI'~~Aj~£~1~[fH;iili~il(1:g~~i::.:5\iis[~t£:1;:~:: :f'¥02£~Hj
Category scores Rank Cambodia
Ethiopia Burundi Gambia Haiti
Armenia Kyrgyzstan Iraq
Overall I Electoral Process II Functioning III Political IV Political V Civil Culture Liberties Score and Pluralism of Government Participation
105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112
4.77 4.72 4.51 4.39 4.19 4.15 4.08 4.01
5.58 4.00 4.42 4.00 5.58 4.33 5.75 4.75
6.07 3.93 3.29 4.64 3.64 3.21 1.86 0.00
2.78 5.00 3.89 4.44 2.78 3.89 2.78 5.56
5.00 6.25 6.25 5.63 2.50 3.13 5.00 5.63
4.41 4.41 4.71 3.24 6.47 6.18 5.00 4.12
3.92 3.92 3.90 3.90 3.90 3.82 3.72 3.62 3.57 3.54 3.53 3.52 3.52 3.42 3.38 3.34 3.31 3.27 3.19 3.17 3.12 3.09 3.06 3.06 2.98 2.97 2.93 2.93 2.90 2.78 2.77
4.33 3.08 3.00 3.50 2.67 3.00 4.00 2.67 5.25 5.25 3.50 1.75 3.08 0.08 1.25 2.58 3.08 0.92 1.42 2.25 1.83 1.33 6.17 0.00 2.67 0.00 1.75 0.08 2.25 0.00 0.00
5.36 3.79 3.21 3.79 3.64 3.57 1.79 2.14 2.21 1.14 2.57 4.64 1.86 3.57 2.86 2.86 0.79 3.21 2.86 2.21 4.29 4.14 0.00 2.36 2.71 4.64 2.86 3.57 2.36 3.43 3.07
0.56 3.89 4.44 2.78 2.78 2.22 2.78 3.33 2.22 1.67 2.78 3.89 4.44 2.22 3.33 3.33 3.33 2.78 2.22 2.22 2.22 1.11 2.22 2.22 2.78 2.78 2.22 3.89 1.67 1.67 1.67
4.38 5.00 5.63 5.63 6.88 5.00 5.63 4.38 3.75 3.75 5.00 4.38 4.38 5.63 5.63 4.38 3.75 5.63 5.63 5.63 3.13 5.63 2.50 6.88 4.38 6.25 3.13 5.63 5.00 5.00 5.00
5.00 3.82 3.24 3.82 3.53 5.29 4.41 5.59 4.41 5.88 3.82 2.94 3.82 5.59 3.82 3.53 5.59 3.82 3.82 3.53 4.12 3.24 4.41 3.82 2.35 1.18 4.71 1.47 3.24 3.82 4.12
2.76 2.75
4.58 0.83
0.36 4.29
3.75 4.38
2.35 1.47
2.72 2.62 2.62 2.45 2.42 2.41 2.37 2.36 2.31 2.10 2.09
0.50 0.08 0.17 1.83 0.00 0.50 2.50 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
3.21 4.64 0.79 0.79 3.07 2.14 1.43 1.79 2.14 3.21 2.86
2.78 2.78 2.22 1.11 3.89 2.22 1.11
5.63 3.75 5.63 6.25 5.00 5.63 5.00 6.88 6.25 5.00 5.00
2.06 3.53 2.65 1.18 2.94 2.65 2.35 1.47 2.06
Authoritarian regimes Pakistan
113~
Jordan
113~
Comoros Morocco Egypt Rwanda Burkina Faso Kazakhstan Sierra Leone
115~
Niger
Bahrain Cuba Nigeria Nepal C6te d'ivoire Belarus Azerbaijan Cameroon Congo Brazzaville Algeria Mauritania Kuwait Afghanistan Tunisia Yemen China Swaziland Iran Sudan Qatar
115~ 115~
118 119 120 121 122 123 124~
124~
126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135~ 135~
Oman
137 138 139= 139= 141 142 143
Democratic Republlc of Congo Vietnam
145
Gabon Bhutan Zimbabwe Tajikistan UAE Angola Djibouti Syria Eritrea laos Equatorial Guinea
144
146 147~ 147~
149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156
18
1.11
0.56 1.67 1.11 1.11 1.11
1.18
1.47 (continued)
Article 1. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy
Table 1
Economist
Unit
Index 2006 Category scores
Rank Guinea Guinea~Bissau
Saudi Arabia Uzbekistan
Libya Turkmenistan Myanmar Togo Chad Central Africa North Korea
157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167
Overall I Electoral Process II Functioning III Political IV Political V Civil and Pluralism of Government Participation Score Culture Liberties 2.02 2.00 1.92 1.85 1.84 1.83 1.77 1.75 1.65 1.61 1.03
1.00 2.08 0.00 0.08 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.42 0.83
0.79 0.07 2.36 0.79 1.64 0.79 1.79 0.79 0.00 1.43 2.50
functioning of government; political participation; and political culture.
2.22 3.33 1.11 2.78 1.11 2.78 0.56 0.56 0.00 1.67 0.56
3.75 1.88 4.38 5.00 5.00 5.00 5.63 5.63 5.00 1.88 1.25
2.35 2.65 1.76 0.59 1.47 0.59 0.88 1.76 3.24 2.65 0.00
At the same time, even our thicker, more inclusive and wider measure of democracy does not include other aspects-which some authors argue are also crucial components of democracy-such as levels of economic and social wellbeing. Thus our index respects the dominant tradition that holds that a variety of social and economic outcomes can be consistent with political democracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit's index provides a snapshot of the current state of democracy worldwide for 165 independent states and two territories. This covers almost the entire population of the world and the vast majority of the world's 192 independent states (27 micro~ states are excluded). Several things stand out. Although almost half of the world's countries can be considered to be democracies, the number of "full democracies" is relatively low (only 28). Almost twice as many (54) are rated as "flawed democracies". Of the remaining 85 states, 55 are authoritarian and 30 are considered to be "hybrid regimes". As could be expected, the developed OECD countries (with the notable excep~ tion of Italy) dominate among full democracies, although there are two Latin American, two central European and one African country, which means that the level of development is not a binding constraint. Only one Asian country, Japan, makes the grade. More than half of the world's popUlation lives in a democracy of some sort, although only some 13% reside in full democracies. Despite
The five categories are interrelated and form a coherent conceptual whole. The condition of having free and fair competitive elections,
and satisfying related aspects of political freedom, is clearly the basic requirement of all definitions. All modern definitions, except the most minimalist, also consider
civil liberties to be a vital component of what is often called "liberal democracy". The principle of the protection of basic human rights is widely accepted. It is embodied in constitutions throughout the world as well as in the UN Charter and international agreements such as the Helsinki Final Act. Basic human rights include freedom of speech, expression and the press; freedom of religion; freedom of assembly and association; and the right to due judicial process. All democracies are systems in which citizens freely make political decisions by majority rule. But rule by the majority is not necessarily democratic. In a democracy majority rule must be combined with guarantees of individual human rights and the rights of minorities. Most measures also include aspects of the minimum quality of functioning of government. If democratically based decisions cannot or are not implemented then the concept of democracy is not very meaningful or it becomes an empty shell. Democracy is more than the sum of its institutions. A democratic political culture is also crucial for the legitimacy, smooth functioning and ultimately the sustainability of democracy. A culture of passivity and apathy, an obedient and docile citizenry, are not consistent with democracy. The electoral process periodically divides the population into winners and losers. A successful democratic political culture implies that the losing parties and their supporters accept the judgment of the voters, and allow for the peaceful transfer of power. Participation is also a necessary component, as apathy and abstention are inimical to democracy. Even measures that focus predominantly on the processes of representative, liberal democracy include (although inadequately or insufficiently) some aspects of participation. In a democracy, government is only one element in a social fabric of many and varied institutions, political organisations and associations. Citizens cannot be required to take part in the political process, and they are free to express their dissatisfaction by not participating. However, a healthy democracy requires the active, freely chosen participation of citizens in public life. Democracies flourish when citizens are wil1ing to take part in public debate, elect representatives and join political parties. Without this broad, sustaining participation, democracy begins to wither and become the preserve of small, select groups.
Table 2
Democracy Index 2006 by
%of % of World Countries Countries Population Full democracies Flawed democracies Hybrid regimes Authoritarian regimes
28
16.8
13.0
54 30
32.3 18.0
38.3 10.5
55
32.9
3B.2
"World" population refers to total population of the 167 countries that are covered. Since this excludes only micro states this is nearly equal to the entire actual estimated world population in 2006. Source: Economist Intelligence Unit; CIA World Factbook
19
ANNUAL EDITIONS
2007 Watchlist Positive Watch
Negative Watch
Hong Kong: further improvements in civil liberties and democratic political practices after Donald Tsang's election as chief executive in March 2007.
Taiwan: risk of a no~confidence vote in the government that could trigger a constitutional crisis; increased pres~ sures in the runup to the 2007 parliamentary elections. Bangladesh: caretaker government will oversee general elections in early 2007. An unclear or disputed election result could trigger political crisis and rollback of democracy. Armenia: parliamentary election in May 2007 could be highly flawed, tipping the country into an outright authoritarian regime. Russia: at present a hybrid regime, with a trend towards curtailment of media and other civil liberties. A potentially highly flawed parliamentary election at the end of 2007 would reflect a further intensification of the country's apparent slide in an authoritarian direction.
Burundi: president and government intensify crackdown on opponents. The country could slide from a hybrid regime to authoritarianism. Guinea and Guinea-Bissau are already rated as authoritarian, but things could get even worse in 2007 as there is a high risk of military coups in both. In Guinea there is a risk of a military takeover in 2007 if ailing President Lansana Conte dies. In Guinea-Bissau rising discontent in the army increases the risk of a coup. Mauritania: the country is undergoing a democratic transition following a military coup in August 2005. But there is a high risk of a backlash, especially as the move from military to civilian rule has potentially destabilising interethnic implications. Hopes of democratisation are unlikely to be fulfilled.
Nigeria: a disputed April 2007 election to be followed by political turbulence and the possible installation of a military-backed interim government.
the advances in democracy in recent decades, almost 40% of the world's population still lives under authoritarian rule (with a large share of these being. of course, in China), Given the most recent trends, that are tantamount to a retreat from democracy as discussed in our article in The World in 2007, it is unlikely that this proportion will decrease significantly soon. On our ten-country watchlist for likely significant changes in 2007 (see box below) only one country is on positive watch and nine are on negative watch. The relationship between the level of development (income per head) and democracy is not clear~cut. There is an apparent association, although even in the full democracy category there are a few that are not rich OEeD countries. The simple correlation between our democracy index and GDP per head ($ at PPP) in 2006 is 0.6. This may look surprisingly low-it implies that in a simple two-variable regression of the democracy index on income per head, less than 40% of the inter~ country variation in democracy is explained by income levels. If we also control for oil wealth (with a so~called dummy variable that takes a value of 1 for major oil exporting countries and 0 otherwise), the explanatory power of the regression rises sharply to almost two~thirds of the intercountry variation in the democracy index. Although this still leaves more than one-third of the variation unexplained, it illustrates the often-observed strong negative impact on democratic development of a reliance on oil. However. the direction of causality between democracy and income is debatable. The standard modernisation hypothesis that economic development leads to-and is a necessary pre-condition for-democracy. is no longer universally accepted. Instead it has been
argued that the primary direction of causation runs from democracy to income (Rigobon and Rodrik, 2005; Acemoglu et aI, 2005). One advantage of our index compared with others is that it provides for considerable differentiation of scores, including among developed countries. The "near~perfect1t democracy is Sweden, the country with the highest score. The other Nordic countries also have high ranks, By contrast. the United States and Britain are near the bottom of the full democracy category, but for somewhat different reasons. America falls down on some aspects of governance and civil liberties. Despite low election turnouts. political participation in the United States is comparatively high. In Britain low political participation (the lowest in the developed world) is a major problem, and to a lesser extent, for now, so are eroding civil liberties. The rating for France is also comparatively low as a result of modest scores for the functioning of government, political participation and political culture. Italy performs even worse, and falls in the flawed democracies category-as a result of problems in functioning of government and the electoral process, as well as weaknesses in the political culture. These results seem to highlight the interesting hypothesis that large countries, other things being equal, tend to be less democratic. But this appears to be the case only among the developed countries. It does not hold across the whole sample-there is no significant relationship between the value of the democracy index and the size of popUlation for the entire 167~country sample. Lookingattheregionaldistributionofregimetypes,flaweddemocracies are concentrated in Latin America and eastern Europe, and to a lesser extent in Asia. Despite progress in Latin American democratisation in
20
Article 1. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy
Table 3
Across the Democracy Index Average
Number of Countries
Full Democracies
Flawed Democracies
8.64 8.60 5.76
2 21 28
2 18 2
0 2 14
6
6.37 5.44
24 28
2 3
17 12
4
9
3.53
20
0
2
2
16
4.24 5.52
44 167
7 54
13
28
30
23 55
North America West Europe Eastern Europe Latin America & the Caribbean Asia & Australasia Middle East & North Africa
Hybrid Regimes 0 1
Authoritarian Regimes 0 0 6
4
Sub~Saharan
Africa
Total
recent decades, many countries in the region remain fragile democracies. Levels of political participation are generally very low and democratic cultures are weak (with the caudillisrno phenomenon still widespread according to opinion surveys). There has also been significant backsliding
1. 2. 3. 4.
in recent years in some areas such as media freedoms.
Whether national elections are free and fair; The security of voters; The influence of foreign powers on government; The capability of the civil service to implement policies.
If the scores for the first three questions are 0 (or 0.5), one point (0.5 point) is deducted from the index in the relevant category (either the electoral process and pluralism or the functioning of government), If the score for 4 is 0, one point is deducted from the functioning~of government category index. The index values are used to place countries within one of four types of regimes:
Much of eastern Europe illustrates the difference between fonnal and substantive democracy. The new ED members from the region have pretty much equal levels of political freedoms and civil liberties as the old developed EU, but lag significantly in political participation and political culture-a reflection of widespread anomie and weaknesses of democratic development. Only two countries from the region-the Czech Republic and Slovenia (just)-are in the full democracy category. Hybrid and authoritarian regimes dominate heavily in the countries of the former Soviet Union, as the momentum towards "colour revolutions" has appeared to peter out. Most of the world's authoritarian regimes are to be found in the Middle East and Africa, although there is also a fair number in Asia. The dearth of democratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa is a well-known phenomenon, with much debate about the causes. In the statistical relationship between democracy and income discussed above, a dummy variable for Middle East and North Africa is negative and highly significant statistically even when oil wealth is controUed for in our 167-country sample-that is, Middle East and North Africa has much lower levels of democratisation than could be inferred on the basis of income levels, A similar variable for Asia is also negative, although at lower levels of statistical significance. And there is some evidence that western Europe's average democracy levels are higher than even its high income levels would suggest. For other regionsSub-Saharan Africa, eastern Europe and Latin America-average level of democratic development correspond to what would be expected on the basis of average income levels.
1. 2. 3. 4.
Full democracies-scores of 8-10. Flawed democracies-scores of 6 to 7.9. Hybrid regimes-scores of 4 to 5.9. Authoritarian regimes-scores below 4.
Threshold points for regime types depend on overall scores that are rounded to one decimal point.
The Scoring System We use a combination of a dichotomous and a three-point scoring system for the 60 indicators. A dichotomous 1-0 scoring system (1 for a yes and 0 for a no answer) is not without problems, but it has several distinct advantages over more refined scoring scales (such as the oftenused 1-5 or 1~7). For many indicators, the possibility of a 0.5 score is introduced, to capture «grey areas" where a simple yes (1) or no (0) is problematic, with guidelines as to when that should be used. Thus for many indicators there is a three-point scoring system, which represents a compromise between simple dichotomous scoring and the use of finer scales. The problems of 1-5 or I ~7 scoring scales are numerous, For most indicators under such a system, it is extremely difficult to define meaningful and comparable criteria or guidelines for each score. This can lead to arbitrary, spurious and non-comparable scorings. For example, a score of 2 for one country may be scored a 3 in another and so on. Or one expert might score an indicator for a particular country in a different way to another expert, This contravenes a basic principle of measurement, that of so~called re1iability-the degree to which a measurement procedure produces the same measurements every time, regardless of who is perfonning it. Two- and three-point systems do not guarantee reHability, but make it more likely.
Methodology The Economist InteUigence Unit's index of democracy, on a 0 to 10 scale, is based on the ratings for 60 indicators grouped in five cat~ egories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; poHtical participation; and political culture. Each cat~ egory has a rating on a 0 to 10 scale, and the overall index of democracy is the simple average of the five category indexes. The category indexes are based on the sum of the indicator scores in the category, converted to a scale of 0 to 10. Adjustments to the category scores are made if countries do not score a 1 in the following critical areas for democracy:
21
ANNUAL EDITIONS 0:
Major irregularities occur and affect the outcome Score 0 if score for question 1 is O. 3. Are municipal elections both free and fair? 1: Are free and fair 0.5: Are free but not fair 0: Are neither free nor fair 4. Is there universal suffrage for all adults? Bar generally accepted exclusions (for example, non~nationals; criminals; members of armed forces in some countries). 1: Yes 0: No 5. Can citizens cast their vote free of significant threats to their security from state or non-state bodies? 1: Yes 0: No 6. Do laws provide for broadly equal campaigning opportunities?
Second. comparability between indicator scores and aggregation
into a multi-dimensional index appears more valid with a two- or threepoint scale for each indicator (the dimensions being aggregated are similar across indicators). By contrast, with a 1-5 system, the scores are more likely to mean different things acrOSS the indicators (for example a 2 for one indicator may be more comparable to a 3 or 4 for another indicator, rather than a 2 for that indicator). The problems of a 1-5 or 1-7 system are magnified when attempting to extend the index to many regions and countries.
Some Features of the Economist Intelligence Unit's Index
Public Opinion Surveys A crucial, differentiating aspect of our measure is that in addition to experts' assessments we use, where available, public opinion surveysmainly the World Values Survey. Indicators based on the surveys predominate heavily in the political participation and political culture categories, and a few are used in the civil liberties and functioning of government categories. In addition to the World Values Survey, other sources that can be leveraged include the Eurobarometer surveys, Gallup polls, Latin American Barometer, and national surveys. In the case of countries for which survey results are missing, survey results for similar countries and expert assessment are used to fill in gaps.
1:
Yes
0.5: Yes formally, but in practice opportunities are limited for some candidates 0: No 7. Is the process of financing political parties transparent and generally accepted? 1: Yes 0.5: Not fully transparent 0: No 8. Following elections, are the constitutional mechanisms for the orderly transfer of power from one government to another clear, established and accepted? 1: All three criteria are fulfilled 0.5: 1\vo of the three criteria are fulfilled 0: Only one or none of the criteria is satisfied 9. Are citizens free to form political parties that are independent of the government? 1. Yes 0.5: There are some restrictions 0: No 10. Do opposition parties have a realistic prospect of achieving government?
Participation and Voter Turnout After increasing for many decades, there has been a trend of decreasing voter turnout in most established democracies since the 1960s. Low turnout may be due to disenchantment, but it can also be a sign of contentment. Many. however, see low turnout as undesirable, and there is much debate over the factors that affect turnout and how to increase it. A high turnout is generally seen as evidence of the legitimacy of the current system. Contrary to widespread belief, there is in fact a close correlation between turnout and overall measures of democracy-Le., developed, consolidated democracies have, with very few exceptions, higher turnout (generally above 70%) than less established democracies.
The Legis/ative and Executive Branches
1: Yes
The appropriate balance between these is much-disputed in political theory. In our model the clear predominance of the legislature is rated positively as there is a very strong correlation between legislative dominance and measures of overall democracy.
0.5: There is a dominant two-party system in which other political forces never have any effective chance of taking part in national government 0: No 11. Is potential access to public office open to all citizens?
The Model
1:
I Electoral Process and Pluralism
0.5: Fonnally unrestricted, but in practice restricted for some groups, or for citizens from some parts of the country 0: No 12. Are citizens free to fonn political and civic organisations, free of state interference and surveillance?
1. Are elections for the national legislature and head of government free? Consider whether elections are competitive in that electors are free to vote and are offered a range of choices. 1: Essentially unrestricted conditions for the presentation of candi~ dates (for example, no bans on major parties) 0.5: There are some restrictions on the electoral process 0: A single~party system or major impediments exist (for example, bans on a major party or candidate) 2. Are elections for the nationa11egislature and head of government fair? 1: No major irregularities in the voting process 0.5: Significant irregularities occur (intimidation, fraud), but do not affect significantly the overall outcome
1:
Yes
Yes
0.5: Officially free, but subject to some restrictions or interference 0: No
II Functioning of Government 13. Do freely elected representatives detennine government pOlicy? 1: Yes 0.5: Exercise some meaningful influence 0: No
22
Article 1. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy 14. Is the legislature the supreme political body. with a clear supremacy over other branches of government?
1: 0.5: 0: 25.
jf more than 70% if 50-70% if less than 50% Public confidence in government. 1: High 0.5: Moderate 0: Low If available, from World Values Survey % of people who have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in government 1: if more than 40% 0.5: if 25-40% 0: ifless than 25% 26. Public confidence in political parties. 1: High 0.5: Moderate 0: Low If available, from World Values Survey % of people who have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence 1: if more than 40% 0.5: if 25-40% 0: ifless than 25%
1: Yes 0: No 15. Is there an effective system of checks and balances on the exercise of government authority?
1: Yes 0.5: Yes, but there are some serious flaws 0: No 16. Government is free of undue influence by the military or the security services. 1: Yes 0.5: Influence is low, but the defence minister is not a civilian. If the current risk of a military coup is extremely low, but the country has a recent history of military rule or coups 0: No 17. Foreign powers do not determine important government functions or policies. 1: Yes
0.5: Some features of a protectorate 0:
No (significant presence of foreign troops; important decisions taken by foreign power; country is a protectorate) 18. Special economic, religious or other powerful domestic groups do not exercise significant political power, parallel to democratic institutions? 1: Yes 0.5: Exercise some meaningful influence 0:
III Political PartiCipation 27. Voter participation/turnout for national elections. (average turnout in par1iamentary andfor presidential elections since 2000. Turnout as proportion of population of voting age). 1: if consistently above 70% 0.5: if between 50% and 70% 0: if below 50% If voting is obligatory, score O. Score 0 if scores for questions 1 or 2 is O. 28. Do ethnic, religious and other minorities have a reasonable degree of autonomy and voice in the political process? 1: Yes 0.5: Yes, but serious flaws exist 0: No 29. Women in parliament. % of members of parliament who are women 1: if more than 20% of seats 0.5: if 10-20% 0: ifless than 10% 30. Extent of political participation. Membership of political parties and political non-governmental organisations. 1: if over 7% of population for either 0.5: if 4% to 7% 0: if under 4%. If participation is forced, score O. 31. Citizens' engagement with politics. 1: High 0.5: Moderate 0: Low If available, from World Values Survey % of people who are very or somewhat interested in politics 1: if over 60% 0.5: if 40% to 60% 0: if less than 40%
No
19. Are sufficient mechanisms and institutions in place for assuring government accountability to the electorate in between elections? 1: Yes 0.5. Yes, but serious flaws exist 0: No 20. Does the government's authority extend over the full tenitory of the country? 1: Yes 0: No 21. Is'the functioning of government open and transparent, with sufficient public access to information? 1: Yes 0.5: Yes, but serious flaws exist 0: No 22. How pervasive is corruption? 1: Corruption is not a major problem 0.5: Corruption is a significant issue 0: Pervasive corruption exists 23. Is the civil service willing and capable of implementing government policy? 1: Yes 0.5. Yes, but serious flaws exist 0: No 24. Popular perceptions of the extent to which they have free choice and control over their lives 1: High 0.5: Moderate 0: Low If available, from World Values Survey % of people who think that they have a great deal of choice/control
23
ANNUAL EDITIONS 32. The preparedness of population to take part in lawful demonstra~ tions.
1:
If available, from World Values Survey % of people who think it would be very or fairly good to have anny rule 1: if less than 10% 0.5: if 10% to 30% 0: if more than 30% 39. Perceptions of rule by experts or technocratic government; proportion of the population that would prefer rule by experts or technocrats. 1: Low 0.5: Moderate 0: High If available, from World Values Survey % of people who think it would be very or fairly good to have experts, not government, make decisions for the country 1: if less than 50% 0.5: if 50% to 70% 0: if more than 70% 40. Perception of democracy and public order; proportion of the popUlation that believes that democracies are not good at maintaining public order. 1: Low 0.5: Moderate 0: High If available, from World Values Survey % of people who disagree with the view that democracies are not good at maintaining order 1: if more than 70% 0.5: if 50% to 70% 0: if less than 50% 41. Perception of democracy and the economic system; proportion of the population that believes that democracy benefits economic perfonnance. If available, from World Values Survey % of people who disagree with the view that the economic system runs badly in democracies 1: if more than 80% 0.5: if 60% to 80% 0: ifless than 60% 42. Degree of popular support for democracy. 1: High 0.5: Moderate 0: Low If available, from World Values Survey % of people who agree or strongly agree that democracy is better than any other form of government 1: if more than 90% 0.5: if75% to 90% 0: if less than 75% 43. There is a strong tradition of the separation of church and state.
High
0.5: Moderate 0: Low If available, from World Values Survey % of people who have taken part in or would consIder attending law~ ful demonstrations 1: if over 40% 0.5: if 30% to 40% 0: if less than 30% 33. Adult literacy. 1: if over 90% 0.5: if 70% to 90% 0: if less than 70% 34. Extent to which adult population shows an interest in and follows
politics in the news, 1: High 0.5: Moderate 0: Low
If available. from World Values Survey % of population that follows politics in the news media (print, TV or radio) every day
1: if over 50% 0.5: if 30% to 50% 0: if less than 30% 35. The authorities make a serious effort to promote political partici-
pation. 1: Yes 0.5: Some attempts
0:
No
Consider the role of the education system, and other promotional efforts. Considev measures to facilitate voting by members of the diaspora. If participation is forced, score O.
IV Democratic Political Culture 36. Is there a sufficient degree of societal consensus and cohesion to underpin a stable, functioning democracy?
1:
Yes
0.5: Yes, but some serious doubts and risks
0: No 37. Perceptions of leadership; proportion of the population that desires a strong leader who bypasses parliament and elections. 1: Low 0.5: Moderate 0: High If available, from World Values Survey % of people who think it would be good or fairly good to have a strong leader who does not bother with parliament and elections 1: if less than 30% 0.5: if 30% to 50% 0: if more than 50% 38. Perceptions of military rule; proportion of the population that would prefer military. 1: Low 0.5: Moderate 0: High
1:
Yes
0.5: Some residual influence of church on state 0:
No
V Civil Liberties 44. Is there a free electronic media?
1:
24
Yes
Article 1. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy 0.5: Pluralistic, but state~controlled media are heavily favoured. One
54. The degree to which citizens are treated equally under the law, Consider whether favoured members of groups are spared prosecution under the law. I: High 0.5: Moderate
or two private owners dominate the media 0: No 45. Is there a free print media?
1: Yes 0.5: Pluralistic, but state-controlled media are heavily favoured. There is high degree of concentration of private ownership of national 0:
0:
newspapers No
I:
accepted restrictions such as banning advocacy of violence)?
Yes
0.5: Minority viewpoints are subject to some official harassment.
Libel laws restrict heavily scope for free expression 0:
0.5: Moderate 0: Low
No
47, Is media coverage robust? Is there open and free discussion of public issues, with a reasonable diversity of opinions? 1: Yes
57. Extent to which citizens enjoy personal freedoms. Consider gender equality, right to travel, choice of work and
study. I: High 0.5: Moderate
0.5: There is formal freedom, but high degree of conformity of opinion, including through self-censorship, or discouragement of minority or marginal views 0: No 48. Are there political restrictions on access to the internet? I: No 0.5: Some moderate restrictions 0: Yes 49. Are citizens free to form professional organisations and trade unions? 1: Yes 0.5: Officially free, but subject to some restrictions 0: No 50. Do institutions provide citizens with the opportunity to successfully petition government to redress grievances?
I:
0: Low 58. Popular perceptions on human rights protection; proportion of the population that think that basic human rights are well-protected. I: High
0.5: Moderate 0: Low If available, from World Values Survey % of people who think that human rights are respected in their country 1: if more than 70% 0.5: if 50% to 70% 0: ifIess than 50% 59. There is no significant discrimination on the basis of people's race, colour or creed. I: Yes 0.5: Yes, but some significant exceptions 0: No 60. Extent to which the government invokes new risks and threats as an excuse for curbing civil liberties. I: Low 0.5: Moderate
Yes
0.5: Some opportunities 0: No 51. The use of torture by the state 1: Torture is not used 0: Torture is used 52. The degree to which the judiciary is independent of government influence. Consider the views of international legal and judicial watchdogs. Have the courts ever issued an important judgment against the government, or a senior government official?
I:
0:
Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, and Pierre Yared (2005), "Income and democracy", NBER Working Paper No. 11205, March.
Low
53. The degree of religious tolerance and freedom of religious expression, Are all religions permitted to operate freely, or are some restricted? Is the right to worship permitted both publicly and privately? Do some religious groups feel intimidated by others, even if the law requires equality and protection? I: High
Coppedge, Michael (2005), "Defining and measuring democracy", Working paper, International Political Science Association, April. Dahl, Robert A (1970), "Polyarchy", New Haven, Yale University Press. Freedom House, various, www,freedomhouse.org, Horowitz, Irving Louis (2006) ''The struggle for democracy", National est, spring.
Inter~
Rigobon, Roberto and Dani Rodrik (2005), "Rule of law, democracy, openness, and income: estimating the interrelationships", Economics of Transition, Volume 13 (3).
0.5: Moderate 0:
High
References
High
0.5: Moderate
0:
Yes
0.5: Crime is so pervasive as to endanger security for large segments 0: No 56. Extent to which private property rights protected and private business is free from undue government influence. I: High
46. Is there freedom of expression and protest (bar only generally 1:
Low
55. Do citizens enjoy basic security?
Low
From The Economist, The World in 2007, pp. 1-11. Copyright © 2007 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economist.com
2S
Article 2
A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy? DONLEY
S
T. STUDLAR amending process, a simple voting majority of the House of Commons can change any law, even over the objections of the House of Lords if necessary. Individual rights are protected by ordinary law and custom, not by a constitutionally entrenched bill of rights. Officially Britain remains a unitary state, with all constitutional authority belonging to the central government, rather than a federal state with a formal, even if vague, division of powers between the center and a lower level. Some commentators argue that Britain should be considered a "union-state," since the relationship of the four parts to the central government is not uniform. Although limited devolution has been utilized in the past, especially in Northern Ireland, 1921-1972, central government retains the constitutional authority to intervene in lower-level affairs, including local government. At a parliamentary general election, voters are asked once every four or five years to choose a team of politicians to manage the central authority, based on having majority support in the House of Commons at Westminster. Under the single member plurality (SMP) electoral system, the outcome usually has been a single-party government (prime minister and cabinet). This is a fusion of power between the legislative and executive branches. Referendums have been rare and are only advisory; parliament retains final authority on all legislation. The judiciary seldom makes politically important decisions. If a court finds that the executive has exceeded its lawful authority, such a decision can be overridden by having a parliamentary majority pass an appropriate law, even retrospectively. Thus, in the United Kingdom almost any alteration of the interrelationship of political institutipns can be considered constitutional in nature. Constitutional issues were one of the subjects of major party debate during the 1997 election campaign. Labor and the third party, the Liberal Democrats, had developed an agreed agenda for constitutional change. The Conservatives upheld traditional British constitutional principles, including the unwritten constitution, no guarantees of civil liberties except through the laws of parliament, maintenance of the unitary state, and a House of Lords composed of hereditary peers and some life peers, the latter appointed by the prime minister. Other features of the British constitution have also resisted change. British government has been one of the most secretive among Western democracies, with unauthorized communication
ince its fe-election to a third consecutive term of office
under Tony Blair's leadership in 2005, assessments of "New Labor's" long-term effects on the British constitution have become more numerous and more reflective, especially since Blair pledged to leave the prime ministership by the time of the next election, which he later moved up to 2007. The most distinctive campaign policies of the first New Labor government in 1997 were those on constitutional refonn. From its earliest days in power, Labor promoted its constitutional reform agenda: (1) devolution to Scotland and Wales, (2) an elected mayor and council for London and potentially other urban areas, (3) removal of the voting rights of hereditary peers in the House of Lords, (4) incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, (5) a Freedom of Information Act, and (6) electoral reform at various levels of government, including a referendum on changing the electoral system for Members of Parliament. These reforms, plus a stable agreement for governing Northern Ireland, the constitutional implications of membership of the European Union, the question of modernization of the monarchy, and the Labor government's recent legislation for a separate Supreme Court, will be considered here. The article analyzes the nature of Labor's constitutional proposals, including their inspiration, implementation, and potential impact.
Traditional British Constitutional Principles The United Kingdom as a state in international law is made up of four constituent parts-England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland-all under the authority of the Queen in Parliament in London. The constitution is the structure of fundamental laws and customary practices that define the authority of state institutions and regulate their interrelationships, including those to citizens of the state. Although in principle very flexible, in practice the "unwritten" British constitution (no single document) is difficult to change. The socialization of political elites in a small country leads to a political culture in which custom and convention make participants reluctant to change practices that brought them to power. Even though Britain is under the rnle of law, all constitutional provisions are subject to change through parliamentary sovereignty. Instead of a written constitution with a complicated
26
Article 2. A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy? of infonnation punishable by law, principally the Official Secrets Act. Large cities did not elect their own mayors or even their
support more proportionally represented in parliament. Since 1988, a nonpartisan lobby group, Charter 88, has proposed a number of reforms, including even a written constitution and a bill of rights. Other influential thinkers on the moderate left argued that a precondition for social and economic change in an increasingly middle-class Britain was to encourage citizen involvement by limiting central government authority. In Scotland, the broadly-based Scottish Constitutional Convention encouraged devolution of power. The Electoral Reform Society has been an active proponent for a more proportional voting system. Eventually Labor and the Liberal Democrats formed a pre-election commission on constitutional matters, which continued after the election in the fonn of a special cabinet committee on constitutional reform. Skeptics have argued that public support for constitutional change is a mile wide and an inch deep. Surveys indicate that the public usually supports constitutional reform proposals in principle without understanding very much about the specifics. Intense minorities, such as Charter 88, fueled the discussion. Although constitutional issues featured prominently in elite discussions of party differences during the 1997 campaign, they did not emerge as a critical voting issue. except perhaps in Scotland. New Labor had multiple incentives for the development of an agenda for constitutional change. It provided a clear sense of party distinctiveness from the Conservatives, especially important when there were only minimal differences on social and economic policy. It also helped to alleviate threats to Labor by Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties arguing for more autonomy and even independence for their regions. There was also a longer-term prospect of a realignment of the party system through the cooptation of the Liberal Democrats into a more pennanent alliance of the center, thereby reducing both the Conservatives and die-hard socialists of the Labor party left wing to pennanent minority status. The large single-party majority that Labor surprisingly gained in the House of Commons in the 1997 election did not discourage it from pursuing most of its constitutional refonn program.
own metropolitan governing councils. The House of Commons is one of the few remaining democratic legislatures elected by the single member district, simple plurality electoral system, which rewards a disproportionate share of parliamentary seats to larger parties having geographically concentrated voting strength. Thus the membership and organization of the House of Commons has remained largely two-party despite having a mUltiparty electorate since 1974. Even though the elected Labor government proposed to institute reforms of several of these procedures, there was doubt about its commitment. Like the Conservatives, traditionally Labor had embraced the almost untrammeled formal power that the "elective dictatorship" of British parliamentary government provides for a party with a majority in the House of Commons. Although Labor sometimes voiced decentralist and reformist concerns when in opposition, in government it usually proved to be as centralist as the Conservatives.
Labor's Constitutional Promises The most radical aspect of Labor's 1997 election manifesto was constitutional reform. This program was designed to stimulate the normally passive, relatively deferential British public into becoming more active citizens with a wider range of choices. In addition to parliamentary elections, they would vote in more frequent referendums and for other levels of government with significant authority. In addition, they would have more individual civil rights. Prior to becoming prime minister, Tony Blair had advocated a more participatory British citizenship. In his book New Britain, Blair criticized the traditional Westminster system as too centralized, secretive, and unrepre"sentative. Blair called Labor's constitutional program "democratic renewal." He argued that since World War I there had been an erosion of consent, selfgovernment, and respect for rights under governments of all parties in Britain; a leftist party true to its own instincts should extend political rights as well as pursuing its recognized goals of economic and social equality.
Constitutional Change under Labor
Developing a Program for Constitutional Change
It is commonly stated in the British press that Labor's constitutional agenda, considered as a whole, represents the most fundamental changes in 400 years. There are now legislatures with devolved powers in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. All but 92 hereditary peers have been removed from the House of Lords, with the pledge of the eventual elimination of those as welL Although a report from the Independent Commission on the Voting System advocated a change in the electoral system for the House of Commons, no government legislation was proposed. The European Convention on Human Rights has been incorporated into British law through the Human Rights Act and is effective. A Freedom of Information Act was passed and implemented. In 1998, Londoners voted favorably for a referendum proposal for the city to be governed by a directlyelected mayor and assembly; these elections were held in 2000
Several events and trends focused Labor's thinking on constitutional refonn. Labor had suffered four consecutive general election losses (1979, 1983, 1987, 1992) even though the Conservatives never achieved above 43 percent of the popular vote. Eighteen consecutive years out of government made Labor fearful of ever returning as a single-party government. The possibility of pennanent opposition made the party more receptive to arguments for weakening central authority. Groups interested in constitutional reform grew more numerous. The third party in Britain, the Liberal Democrats, long have advocated several of these reforms, including decentralization, increased protection for civil liberties, and changing the electoral system. The latter would allow them to have their voting 27
ANNUAL EDITIONS
and 2004. Other cities have now adopted this measure through referendums. The judiciary has been separated to a degree from the other branches of government. The Labor government immediately set out to implement more decentralized authority, subject to its acceptance through referendums in the affected regions. The Scottish Parliament has more authority, covering nearly all of domestic policy as well as limited taxation powers while the Welsh Assembly is responsible for implementing legislation after the primary bills have passed through the Westminster House of Commons but has no taxation powers, Elections in each region in 1999 and 2003 were held under a combination of the traditional single member district, simple plurality electoral system and party list proportional representation; these yielded no clear majority in either legislature. Instead, Labor-Liberal Democrat coalition governments and minority governments have been formed. Both have functioned largely as anticipated, with another round of elections due in 2007. With an organized women's movement taking advantage of the opportunity to choose legislators in a new institution without incumbents, women's representa~ tion in both devolved chambers has been high, with the Welsh Assembly becoming the first in the world with a majority of women in 2003. Perhaps surprisingly, no major disagreements on the consti~ tutional allocation of powers have occurred. The Welsh Labor party has advocated greater authority for the Assembly, stopping short of taxation, and the Westminster Labor government has brought forward a bill for this purpose. Nevertheless, the "West Lothian" question has still not been seriously addressed. This refers to the fact that now MPs from Scotland can still vote on legislation affecting England, Wales, and Northern Ireland even though the devolved Scottish Parliament has authority over the same issue there. If the Welsh Assembly had similar powers as the Scottish Parliament, the problem would be that much more complex. Eighty percent of the population of the United Kingdom, however, lives in England, which has been treated as a residual consideration in the plans for devolution. Labor has promised to form devolved governments in "regions with strong identities of their own," as expressed through voting in referendums. However, when the region showing the greatest amount of interest, the Northeast, was offered limited devolution in 2004, it was rejected overwhelmingly. Nevertheless, with encouragement from the regional aid policies of the European Union, the Northeast does have a considerable amount of administrative devolution, even if it lacks legislative devolution. The Mayor of London is the first modern directly-elected executive in the United Kingdom. The introduction of party primary elections for mayoral candidates led to less central party control over candidates and a more personalized contest. The first mayor, re-elected in 2004, was a dissident leftwing Labor MP and former London official, Ken Livingstone, who has proven to be relatively conciliatory in office. Northern Ireland is a perennial problem, a hangover of the separation of Ireland from the United Kingdom in 1922. Six counties in the northern part of the island of Ireland, with the majority of the population consisting of Protestants favoring
continued union with Great Britain, remained in the United Kingdom. Many Catholics north and south remain convinced that there should be one, united country of Ireland on the island. This fundamental division of opinion over which country should have sovereignty over the territory led to organized violence by proponents of both sides; some 3,600 people have died in sectarian violence since 1968. The provisional Irish Republic,m Anny (IRA) was the main organization using violence in the cause of a united Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, brokered by the U.S. administration of Bill Clinton, was a peace accord that promised a different future through new institutions. In 1999, devolution of power from the Westminster parliament to the Belfast parliament ushered in a period of what the British call "power sharing," or "consensus democracy." This entailed not only joint authority over internal matters by both Protestants (Unionists) and Catholics (Nationalists) through the requirement of supermajorities in the Northern Ireland Assembly and executive, but also regular consultation between the United Kingdom and Ireland. Both countries pledged that Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom as long as a majority ofthe population in the province wishes. The latest census showed Protestants to be in the majority, 53 to 44 percent. Referendums on the Good Friday Agreement passed overwhelmingly in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic; the latter also repealed its constitutional claim over the province. As expected, devolved government in Northern Ireland has been rocky. Groups representing fonnerly armed adversaries, including Sinn Fein, closely linked to the IRA, assumed ministerial positions in the power-sharing executive. Some dissident factions refused to renounce violence. The major issues have been the need for verification of the decommissioning of weapons and renunciation of violence by the IRA, incorporation of Catholics into the overwhelmingly Protestant police service, and divisions among Protestants about how far to cooperate with the new government. In October, 2002, accusations ofIRA spying on the government led to the suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly and government for the fourth time in three years. Direct rule from the central government in London replaced the power-sharing executive. Elections in November, 2003 resulted in the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which had opposed the Good Friday Agreement as a "sell out" to Catholics, becoming the largest Protestant party while Sinn Fein became the largest Catholic party. This further complicated discussions. Subsequently the IRA moved to decommission its weapons caches and to discourage criminal activities of its members. In September 2006, the Independent Monitoring Commission confirmed the dismantling of most of these internal IRA structures, leading Prime Minister Blair to declare that "the IRA campaign is over." He considered this to be a clear commitment to move from violence to politics. Protestant paramilitary groups also have disarmed. Nevertheless, chOOSing a new, powersharing executive was stalled by the deep cleavages and lack of trust. When these disagreements frustrated the hopes of the British and Irish governments for returning devolved authority to the province, in the St. Andrews Agreement they gave the parties in Northern Ireland a deadline to begin reconstituting 28
Article 2. A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy? the power-sharing executive. This would be done according to a plan whereby Sinn Fein would recognize the authority of the police (now composed of 20% Catholics), and in return the DUP would agree to a power-sharing arrangement led by it and late March, 2007, to allow a test of Sinn Fein's support for the Northern Ireland police as well as a new legislative election.
Superficially House of Lords reform appears simple since the Parliament Act of 1949 allows a government majority in the House of Commons to override any objections from the Lords. However, the capacity of the Lords to delay legislation makes reform difficult to complete, especially when there is no agreement about new alTangements. New Labor pledged to abolish voting by hereditary peers, leaving only life peers appointed
Despite progress in making peace, "normal politics" has not
by the prime minister remaining. Life peers are often senior
emerged in this most abnormal part of the United Kingdom. Britain signed the European Convention on Human Rights in 1951. Since 1966 it has allowed appeals to the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, where it has lost more cases than any other country. Under New Labor, a law was passed
pelitical figures who want a more limited political role after a long career in the House of Commons. Critics labeled this a plan to make the second chamber one consisting solely of
Sinn Fein. The new government would not assume office until
"Tony's Cronies," an entirely patronage-based body under prime ministerial influence. In order to accomplish some early reform despite such criticism, Prime Minister Blair accepted a
incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law. British judges rather than European judges now make the decisions about whether Britain is conforming to the Convention, which enhances the ability of British citizens to
temporary arrangement in 1999 allowing 92 hereditary peers to remain in the House of Lords while eliminating 667 others.
Labor also established an independent commission to advise the Prime Minister on Lords appointments.
raise issues of human rights in domestic courts. Parliamentary sovereignty supposedly is maintained because Westminster retains final authority on whether judicial decisions will be followed, but in practice the British government has lodged appeals in such cases with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Under the Human Rights Act, suspected terrorists have appealed against government detention and extradition to countries where they could face persecution. More generally, there has been concern about courts upholding human rights over legitimate crime and security concerns of the public. In response, the government has rejected legislation but urged officials. including judges, to place a higher value on public
There followed a plethora of proposals for the second stage of Lords reform from several official sources, including a Royal
Commission, the government, a joint cross-party parliamentary committee of MPs and peers, and a cross-party group in the House of Commons. These ranged from a fully elected to a fully appointed second chamber, but getting agreement was difficult.
Critics have complained that the government's preference for a largely appointed chamber, plus possibly further limits on the power ofthe Lords to delay legislation, would lead to a weakened
second chamber, less able to act as a check on the government. In contrast, a body with at least some elected members would
safety concerns. However, this has raised questions about interference with judicial independence in deciding individual cases.
provide greater democratic legitimacy. Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats back a partially-elected second chamber. Although still committed to eventual elimination of the remaining hereditary peers, the government has agreed not to demand party unity but to allow a free vote in parliament on the question of the new composition of the Lords. The latest government plans, as previewed for a White Paper (intention to legislate), are for a mixture of 50 percent election and 50 percent appointment, with quotas for women and ethnic minorities, no single party majority (many peers already sit as
Constitutional scholar Vernon Bogdanor has argued that the Human Rights Act is now "fundamental law;' which suggests it is beyond the ordinary reach of parliament. The first-term Labor government later addressed other mea-
sures of constitutional reform-the electoral system for the House of Commons, freedom of information, and the House of Lords. The Freedom of Information Act eventually enacted
creates an independent Information Commissioner's Office and allows public access to more government information, but
"cross-benchers," or independents), a reduction in the member-
within considerable limits. Applications for information go to
the ministry involved, with an Information Commissioner handling appeals. However, department ministers still can overrule decisions of the Information Commissioner. When the act was
ship from 741 to 450, a limit of three terms of parliament for all members (no more than IS years), phased in over several years, and possibly a different electoral system. Tony Blair has indicated that consensus among members of both houses on the leg-
implemented in 2005, there were both rumors of departments destroying information beforehand and new revelations of what
islation is necessary for it to proceed. A free vote is promised in the new session of parliament which commenced in November
had transpired in previous governments, usually upon inquiries from media organizations. Nevertheless, British governments
2006, but agreement may continue to be elusive. Although the Prime Minister indicated that he was not "personally convinced" that a change in the electoral system was needed, he appointed an Independent Commission on the
can still withhold a large amount of information. Overall, the
United Kingdom remains one of the most secretive democracies in the world, under the doctrine of executive prerogatives of ministers of the crown.
Voting System to consider alternatives to the current electoral
its citizens under close watch. An independent study issued in
system for the House of Commons. In 1998, the Commission recommended what is called "Alternative Vote Plus." The single-member district system would be retained, but instead
2006, called A Report on the Surveillance Society, found the United Kingdom to be "the most surveilled country" among
of casting a vote for one person only, the electorate would rank candidates in order of preference, thus assuring a majority
Western industrialized democracies.
rather than a plurality vote for the winner. There would also
On the other hand, the British government wants to keep
29
ANNUAL EDITIONS
be a second vote for a "preferred party." These votes would be distributed regionally, with 15-20 percent of the total seats being awarded to parties based on their proportional share, a favorable development for smaller parties. Even such a relatively mild reform, however, generated substantial political controversy, as expected when the basis by which legislators gain their seats is challenged. The proposed change was criticized not only by the opposition Conservatives, but also by Labor members because it might make it more difficult for Labor to obtain a single-party parliamentary majority. With Labor winning 55 percent of the seats in the election of 2005 with only 35 percent of the popular vote (and only 22% of the electorate), there were renewed calls for a new voting system. But nothing has been done. In 2003 the government decided to move toward greater separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Previously the Lord Chancellor was a member of all three parts-a minister in the cabinet, head of the judiciary (including authority to appoint judges), and also Speaker of the House of Lords. The highest appeals court has been the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords (Law Lords) consisting of the Lord Chancellor, twelve life peers specially appointed for this purpose, and other members of the Lords who have held high judicial office. The Labor government rearranged the duties of the position of Lord Chancellor, retaining the title for court administration and ceremonial functions but creating a new position, Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, to deal with areas such as devolution, human rights, and data protection. Nevertheless, under Blair both of these positions have heen held by the same person. The government also introduced legislation to remove the judiciary from the House of Lords and to designate the highest appellate court as the Supreme Court, with a reformed Judicial Appointments Commission to make recommendations for such positions. Despite controversy, parliament eventually enacted the Constitutional Reform Act, which established the new Supreme Court and is due to take effect by 2008. Some commentators have argued that an independent judiciary could move to establish its ultimate constitutional authority by upholding "the rnle of law" even over parliamentary sovereignty, as Supreme Courts in the United States, the European Union, and Israel, among others, have done. Some analysts argue that the most significant constitutional change in the United Kingdom has been brought about not by Labor but by three actions of Conservative governmentsjoining the European Community (now European Union) in 1972, approving the Single European Act (1986), and signing the Maastricht Treaty (1992). Lord Denning famously observed that the European Union is an incoming tide that cannot be held back. Within the expanded areas of EU competence, EU law supersedes British law, includingj udicial review by the European Court of Justice. Almost one half of total annual legislation in the United Kingdom now arises from the European Union, and members of the government, civil service, and even judiciary are in almost daily contact with their counterparts in the EU and in other countries on EU matters. In the negotiations over the proposed EU Constitution, Britain was largely successful in
maintaining its "red lines" against further centralization of the EU. Although Tony Blair promised that the United Kingdom would hold a referendum on the Constitution, its defeat in referendums in the Netherlands and France in 2005 allowed him to cancel the British referendum, thus avoiding further rancorous debate on this issue. Britain continues to be a leading member of the "awkward squad" of countries within the EU who want to maintain strong state sovereignty within the organization rather than surrendering more authority to a supranational organization. It remains one of only three long-standing EU members not to join the European Monetary Union and its currency, the euro. If Britain were to join the central bank and adopt the euro, then control over monetary policy would effectively pass into the hands of the European Union. The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasury Secretary) periodically announces whether economic conditions meet the, five tests necessary for him to recommend that Britain should converge with Euroland. Tony Blair indicated that this step would only be taken with public support in a countrywide referendum.
Although not on the Labor party agenda of constitutional change, the role of the monarchy has also come under increased scrutiny in recent years. The Queen's Golden Jubilee Year in 2002, celebrating the first 50 years of her reign, was not a happy one, with two deaths and scandals in the royal family. A resolution of the Scottish Parliament, supported by some MPs and Lords at Westminster, has petitioned the government to allow the monarch or her spouse to be a Roman Catholic, a practice forbidden by the Act of Settlement (1701) at the end of a period of religious wars. The heir to the throne, Prince Charles, has proposed removing the monarch's connection to the Church of England in favor of the title of a more general "defender of faith" in what is now, despite appearances, a highly secularized country.
More vaguely, the government has suggested moving toward a "people's monarchy"-a simpler, slimmer, and less ritualized institution, perhaps with a gender-neutral inheritance. This would be more congruent with the lower profile "bicycle monarchs" common in other European countries. For the first time since Queen Victoria, there is substantial, if muted, public expression anti-monarchist (republican) sentiments, largely in elite circles on the Labor left. However, tampering with this traditional institution, still widely revered by the public, requires extremely careful preparation as many are opposed to change.
Conflicting Views on the Effects of Constitutional Change Labor's program of constitutional renewal already has brought about some changes in Britain. Instead of near-uniform use of the simple plurality electoral system, there are now five different systems in operation: Single Transferable Vote (a form of proportional representation with candidate choice) in Northern Ireland, party list proportional representation for European Parliament elections, alternative member systems (a combination of single member district and party list proportional) for the devolved legislatures in Scotland and Wales and the 30
Article 2. A Revised British Constitution: Tony Blair's Lasting Legacy?
London Assembly. and a popularly elected executive through the Supplementary Vote (voting for two candidates in order of preference) for London. Plurality elections remain the norm only for the House of Commons at Westminster and English local government elections. Until 1997 there had been only four referendums in the entire history of the United Kingdom. In its first year of office. Labor held four additional referendums (in Wales. Scotland. Northern Ireland. and London). Other countrywide ones. however, on the ED constitution, the European single currency, and the Westminster electoral system. have been canceled or postponed. There also have been local referendums on elected mayors and potentially others on regional government. Despite these increased opportunities for participation, voting turnout at all elections has plunged, reaching a low of 59 percent in the Westminster parliamentary elections of 2001 and barely increasing in 2005; turnout for the second devolved elections also decreased. Broadly. commentators have offered four interpretations of these developments. We might term these the (I) popular social liberalism, (2) lukewarm reform/symbolic politics, (3) radicalism, and (4) constitutional incoherence. These contending explanations exist at least partially because Labor itself has never outlined a comprehensive theory behind its constitutional reforms. Constitutional reform has consisted of a series of ad hoc mea-
Lords based on patronage, and a more centralized, bureaucratic European superstate. More sanguinely, The Economist foresees a weakening of Westminster's authority through the combined forces of devolution and a more integrated European Union. More recently it has warned that Blair's reform program will be judged a "hypocritical failure" unless it produces a democratically-elected second chamber. Finally, another prominent British political scientist, Anthony King, has argued that Britain no longer has a coherent set of constitutional principles. Because of the piecemeal constitutional changes over the past quarter century by both Conservative and Labor governments, traditional interpretations of the British constitution no longer adequately describe contemporary practice. But no alternative theory has emerged as a guide. Britain has moved away from its traditional status as a majoritarian democracy (all-powerful single-party governments based on holding a majority of seats in the House of Commons) without becoming a fully-fledged consensus democracy, featuring proportional representation and coalition governments.
Further Constitutional Change on the Horizon? The second and third Labor terms have consolidated and extended constitutional reforms despite their lack of emphasis in party election manifestos and discussion during election campaigns. In a \\:'hite Paper in 2006, the Labor government endorsed further, if gradual. reform through elected mayors and more decision making power to local councils in England. If Gordon Brown succeeds Tony Blair as Prime Minister, a more active constitutional reform agenda may be pursued. In his 2006 Labor Party Conference speech, Brown spoke of revitalizing the devolution agenda to give individuals and communities, including regions and local councils, more control over their own lives. including local referenda, and even hinted that Britain might need a written Constitution to enshrine its values. He also indicated that he thought it right to allow parliament to vote on war decisions, heretofore an executive prerogative, but one that became controversial in the wake of how Blair took Britain into the Iraq war on bad information. Whether such promises to shift power from the central executive would hold up when faced with the exigencies of government is an interesting question. The Conservatives have opposed measures such as an appointed House of Lords. the Human Rights Act, further devolution to Wales, and the new Supreme Court, plus, of course, greater European Union authority over member states .. They have proposed strengthening the House of Commons against the executive and an elected House of Lords. More recently. party leader David Cameron has proposed a British Bill of Rights as a better-balanced substitute for direct enforcement of general European standards through the Human Rights Act. He has established a committee under the chairmanship of former cabinet minister Kenneth Clarke to develop plans for a Conservative policy on the future of democracy. Some form of "English votes for English questions" in parliament (the West Lothian question) will be the focus of that policy.
sures rather than a general constitutional convention. The well-known American analyst of Britain, Samuel H. Beer, has compared Blair's reforms to the popular social liberalism of the early twentieth century Liberal governments. which included restricting the power of the House of Lords and devolving power to Ireland. After the First World War, however. the Conservatives came to dominate Britain electorally as the Left divided between an insurgent Labor Party and the remaining Liberals. In the first term of office for New Labor, social and constitutional reform served as a substitute for a more traditional Labor program of increased government spending. This was important for establishing the long-term political dominance of a revitalized center-left by appealing to the "median voter." Another constitutional scholar, Philip Norton. has argued that New Labor's proposals are radical in concept but moderate in form and effects, e.g., lukewarm reform. Similarly, Anthony Barnett of Charter 88 claims that the government practices constitutus interruptus. Another British academic, PatrickDunieavy, has suggested that constitutional reform for New Labor represents financially cheap activity at a time when the government is wary of alienating its middle-class supporters by appearing to be another Labor "tax and spend" administration. This amounts to little substantive change, however, until the two critical questions, electoral reform for the House of Commons and Britain's long-term relationship to the EU. are addressed. Although there has been some grudging acceptance from constitutional conservatives who originally opposed change, they are still fearful of the implications of some reforms. The former editor of The TImes, William Rees-Mogg, envisions Labor's constitutional changes eroding democracy in the United Kingdom through a semi-permanent Labor-Liberal governing coalition in Westminster, Scotland, and Wales, a House of 31
ANNUAL EDITIONS
The Liberal Democrats have the most radical positions on constitutional reform, advocating a written constitution, a bill of rights, and a more proportional voting system. An English Constitutional Convention has been formed to press for selfgoverning powers for that part of the United Kingdom. Others fear, however, that establishment of such a body would lead to the breakup of the country because of the unevenness of population distribution for four devolved legislatures. Despite Labor's constitutional refanns, commentators refer to what is often called the "Blair paradox." While the Labor government led by Blair has engaged in various constitutional innovations for decentralization and individual rights. it has not disturbed the core of the strongly executive-centered Westminster system. In fact, by dominating the cabinet, the extensive use of politically-appointed advisers throughout the executive, attempting, not always successfully, to keep the House of Commons under strong party direction, rarely attending parliamentary debates, and desire to have a completely appointed House of Lords, Blair's style has been claimed, debatably, to be more "presidential" than that of previous prime ministers. Ross McKibbin condemns the Blair government for having eviscerated any constitutional reform, including changing the electoral system, which would restrain single-party executive authority. Nevertheless, institutional rearrangements often have unanticipated consequences. Although New Labor legislation on constitutional matters claims not to disturb the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. this constitutional convention has already been compromised. Congruent with the process of decentralization in other European countries, devolution is likely to be entrenched de facto if not de jure. Some observers have begun calling Britain a "quasi-federal" political system. Although specific powers are granted to each devolved government, disputes over which level has authority over certain policies will eventually arise, especially if the governments are led by different parties. Even without a comprehensive BilJ of Rights, incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights may mean a stronger, more politically active judiciary, a form of creeping judicial review. House of Lords reform has become so controversial because it is a struggle over how much the second chamber should be allowed to check the House of Commons and the sitting government. Incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as a limited form of joint authority with Ireland over Northern Ireland and possible membership of the European common currency and central bank, suggest that Britain may be moving into new patterns of international shared authority in areas heretofore Considered exclusively within the domain of the sovereign state.
Regional policies of the European Union even may be helping regions circumvent British central authority and sustaining ethnonationalist demands. If the Scottish National Party, still committed to independence for Scotland, ever wins a majority in the Scottish Parliament, the United Kingdom could be faced with a "Quebec scenario," whereby control of a subordinate level of government enhances secessionist claims. The SNP wants Scotland to join the EU as an independent state. The "third way" ideas of Anthony Giddens, influential in the New Labor government, propose a restructuring of government to promote "subsidiarity" (the taking of decisions at the lowest level possible) and correcting the "democratic deficit" through constitutional reform, greater transparency, and more local democracy. In such a process, Britain would become a more complex polity institutionally. This would demand cultivating habits of conciliation, cooperation, and consent rather than the usual reliance upon single party government, parliamentary laws, and executive orders. Already this has occurred through the formation of coalition governments in Scotland and Wales as well as in Northern Ireland. Having additional levels of elected government also has created difficulties for central party organizations attempting to exert control over their parties in these jurisdictions. The electoral system, however, may be the linchpin of the British parliamentary system as it currently exists. Even the relatively modest changes proposed by the Commission on the Voting System could realign the party system. Because of fears this arouses within the Labor party, electoral reform at Westminster is unlikely to occur in the near future. Whatever one's view of the desirability and impact of the changes, New Labor under Tony Blair has largely pursued and fulfilled its 1997 pledges on constitutional reform. Although delays and retreats have occurred on Some issues, the implications of these changes will continue to be felt in British politics for some time to come. Especially if further changes occur under his successor, then Tony Blair may go down in history similarly to the popular social Liberals of the early twentieth century, as a constitutional innovator with a long-lasting legacy. DONLEY T. STUDLAR is Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of Political Science at West Virginia University and served as Executive Secretary of the British Politics Group from 1994 to 2005. This article originated as the 1998 Taft Lecture, delivered to the undergraduate Honors recognition ceremony of the Political Science Department, University of Cincinnati. The first printed version appeared in Harvard International Review, Spring 1999. This revised version was prepared in November, 2006.
Copyright © 2007 by Donley T. Studlar Ph.D. Reprinted by permission of the author.
32
3
Who Killed the British Prime Minister? The labour Party is kicking out its most successful prime minister for at least 50 years. Gordon Brown is both the main beneficiary and a big loser from the affair. f the old saw is true that elections are not won by oppositions but lost by governments, the events of the past fortnight must have made David Cameron, the leader of Britain's Conservatives, a happy man. In that time he has
But the current crop of Labour MPs, particularly the younger ones, have not learned to be resilient in the face of hard pounding. It was significant that the 15 signatories of the rude letter to Mr Blair were all from the 2001 intake. In their eyes, although no general election need be called for three years, a Tory lead that has yet to touch double figures in any mainstream poll spells disaster (see chart). Labour has other reasons too, however, to be rid of its leader. Mr Blair has never been loved by his followers. When they chose him in 1994 they did so only because, after 15 years in fractious opposition, the party was desperate for power and realistic enough to see that Mr Blair was the man to provide it. Since then, as part of his "projecf' to make Labour the dominant electoral force in British politics, Mr Blair has repeatedly challenged the party's collectivist instincts. He has done so by ruling out punitive tax rates and embarking on a long campaign to revitalise the public services with money (which Labour likes) and market-based reforms (which it does not).
I
seen the most potent election-winner in Labour's historysomeone senior Tories still admit they do not know how to beat-humiliatingly reduced to something close to irrelevance. He has also seen Tony Blair's probable successor stained with dishonour and a once-disciplined party suffer a collective nervous breakdown. If nothing else, when Mr Cameron greets his troops at their conference next month they will know they chose a very lucky general. Mr Cameron can claim at least some of the credit for Labour's self-destructive frenzy. Since becoming Tory leader lastDecember his strategy has been to remake the Conservative Party into one that uncommitted voters no longer find out-of-touch, uncaring and repellent. When not hugging trees or hoodies, Mr Cameron talks about social justice and nurturing communities, and castigates businesses that fail to meet the highest ethical standards. Under his guidance, the Tories have stopped seeking to exploit fears about immigration and promising tax cuts at the expense of cherished public services. Despite some mockery, his approach has worked well enough to give the Tories their first sustained lead in the opinion polls since 1992. That is part of the reason for the panic that has gripped Labour, putting pressure on Mr Blair to say when he would honour his pledge to step down from his job well before the next general election. The scales were tipped by the release of a letter on September 6th signed by 15 MPs pressing him for a departure date, followed by half of them resigning their various junior government posts. Mr Blair then said he would not be in office in a year's time. Why the panic? One ofMr Blair's unusual achievements was to have kept his party ahead in the polls, almost without interruption, for the best part of nine years in government. A consequence is that Labour MPs have become spoilt by this easy ascendancy. Under Margaret Thatcher Tory MPs grew hardened to much greater mid-term unpopUlarity, confident that the persuasiveness of Conservative ideas and the feebleness of the opposition would mean that their fortunes would recover when it mattered. at election time.
Voting intention at next general election, %
--------------------------45
Conservatives led by
_~D/a~vi~d~C;am~er~o~n~~~~::::::~
40
-L~~------------------35
--------------------------30 IfNov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep
2005
2006 (Source: Populus)
Figure 1
33
The Panic Gap.
ANNUAL EDITIONS
Last weekend Mr Brown claimed that he had given the plotters no encouragement. Had he known of the letter and planned resignations from the government, he would have said it was "completely ill-advised", he avers. Unfortunately for the chancellor, few, especially those close to Mr Blair, are inclined to believe his protestations of innocence. The revelation that Tom Watson, the most notable of the signatories and an acolyte of Mr Brown's, visited the chancellor at home in Fife the day before the letter was faxed to Downing Street is deeply embanassing for the chancellor. Apparently, Mr Watson made the l,OOOkm (600-naile) round trip just to drop in on the Browns and give them a present for their new-born son, Fraser, and politics was the last thing on their minds. This is about as convincing as Mr Brown's explanation for being photographed with a vulpine grin on his face as he left Downing Street after one of two showdown meetings with Mr B lair last week: he had just been talking about "nannies, babies ... nothing to do with politics", he said. If Mr Brown was not as distant from the plot as he wants people to think, then he is guilty of an appalling miscalculation. Two or three weeks ago, with only a few exceptions, the cabinet and rising young Blairite ministers were determined to make the best of Mr Brown's near-certain succession. The prospect may not have filled every heart with gladness, but most were hopeful that Mr Brown might become easier to work with-more relaxed, more open, less inclined to listen to only a handful of chosen favourites-once he had the top job. And given that their own prospects and those of the party depended on his success, they would do whatever they could to help and support him. All that has now been put in jeopardy.
The Unloved Asset For as long as Mr Blair was seen by his party as an indispensable electoral asset, he held sway over it But these days many believe he has become an electoral liability. That is partly because all political leaders, as Mr Blair acknowledges, eventually reach a best-before date. Mostly, however, he has been dished by Iraq and by his uncritical intimacy with a much-loathed American president The sight of Mr Blair at the G8 meeting of rich-country leaders in July playing the fawning courtier to George Bush was too much for many Labour MPs. The impulse that last week turned revulsion into action came from his failure in July to join other European leaders in demanding an immediate ceasefire, as Israeli bombers pulverised southern Lebanon. This encapsulated everything about his foreign policy that makes his MPs squirm. Coincidentally, Mr Cameron this week argued for a "rebalancing" of the special relationship and a friendship with America that was "solid, but not slavish",
Rolling Over for Bush It is not the war in Iraq itself, divisive though that was for Labour, or even the non-existence of the oft-cited weapons of mass destruction that has done the greatest harm to Mr Blair; it is the culpable lack of post-war planning, the ghastliness of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the relentlessness of the bad news and the utter lack of contrition. Mr Blair may believe it is still too soon to judge the success of what is being attempted in Iraq, but his pruty holds him personally responsible for what many regard as the greatest debacle in British foreign policy since Suez, 50 years ago. It is a measure of Mr Blair's isolation that he adnaits to having been surprised by the backlash over Lebanon, but he is uurepentant, convinced that popular opinion simply naisjudges the scale of the threat from Islamist terrorism. His defiance-he says these issues are "non-negotiable"-is seen by many MPs as a continuing provocation to the party and its supporters. For a few, the deep embarrassment of a party-finance scandal has provided a further reason for Mr Blair's removal. In his long-running battle to reduce the influence of the unions, Labour's traditional paymasters, Mr Blair hoped that the subscriptions of ordinary party members and the donations of the rich, gratified by the government's pro-business stance, would reduce the party's dependence on organised workers. But as party membership fell (in part because of Iraq), the reliance on rich individuals increased. For most of the past year the police have been investigating the possibility that peerages have been offered in exchange for loans. The awful, though remote, possibility hangs over the prime minister of leaving Downing Street in the back of a police car. If those were the immediate causes of the attempt by a section of his party to bring down the prime minister, it still does not provide quite the whole explanation. Mr Blair had given private assurances to close colleagues, including the chancellor, Gordon Brown, that he would be off by next summer. Why then risk the certain collateral damage that a putsch would cause to bundle Mr Blair out of office a few months early? And was Mr Brown, if not pulling the strings of the rebellion, acquiescent in it?
A Matter of Temperament As Mr Blair and Mr Brown stepped back from the brink at the end of last week-the prime minister by unhappily committing himself publicly to stepping down next year, the chancellor by disingenuously declaring that Mr Blair must be allowed to decide the date of his departure-Charles Clarke dared to say what many were whispering. In two newspaper interviews the former home secretary, who was dumped by Mr Blair a few months ago for failing to get to grips with the administrative chaos in his department, denounced Mr Brown's behaviour. Describing that triumphalist smirk as "stupid, absolutely stupid", he went on to cast further doubt on the chancellor's fitness for the highest office. According to Mr Clarke, Mr Brown had for years clung to the "delusion" that he could have beaten Mr Blair for the leadership; he was ~'totally uncollegiate", lacking in "courage" and had "psychological" issues. Mr Clarke painted a picture of a brooding presence who, for alI his talent and ability, had frequently undennined the work of colIeagues and the effectiveness of the government. Mr Brown's riposte was that inevitably some cabinet colleagues had become resentful as it had often been his job to deny them money. This would have been more persuasive had the Treasury not dispensed so much largesse so freely over the past six years. Mr Clarke's attack was doubly devastating because nobody could accuse him of acting on behalf of Mr Blair, since he was
34
Article 3. Who Killed the British Prime Minister? only saying in public what other ministers had been muttering for years. Despite the eagerness in some quarters to be shot of Mr Blair, plenty of people who have seen Mr Brown close up agree with the verdict of one cabinet minister, that unless the chancellor can change his modus operandi dramatically he will make a terrible prime minister. It is Mr Brown's character and temperament as much as his probable policies that make some of his colleagues, not least Mr Blair, uncomfortable about the prospect of his succession. As far as those policies are concerned, Mr Brown has been remarkably opaque for years. Although he often talks about further reform of the public services, the last time he presented a comprehen-
hiss quickly out of his campaign. Mr Cameron conveyed freshness and charm; Mr Davis, staleness and menace. What then guaranteed Mr Cameron's victory was the evidence of poll after poll that the party would do better under his leadership than under Mr Davis's: the more voters saw of the young Mr Cameron, the more they preferred him to a grizzled machine politician. Blairites who have long been infuriated by what they regard as Mr Brown's destructive and graceless behaviour reckon that, faced with a plausible rival, Mr Brown could perhaps suffer a similar fate. They were encouraged by a poll by Populus published in the Times newspaper last week which suggested that John Reid, the bullishly self-confident home secretary, would do as well as Mr Brown against the Tories, despite being far less known. The reason, according to someone close to Mr Blair, was that voters could see in Mr Reid a natural leader. Mr Blair himself is said to think that the young environment secretary, David Miliband, might be Labour's best answer to the appealing Mr Cameron, though Mr Miliband says he does not want to stand. Another much bruited name is that of Alan Johnson, the education secretary. A former union leader, Mr Johnson does not suffer, as do Mr Brown and Mr Reid, from the disadvantage of being a Scot in post-devolution England. Mr Johnson is also immensely likeable. As one admirer puts it, "He's a fully paid-up member of the human race, unlike Gordon."
sive account of his ideas on the subject was more than four years ago, when he appeared to question how far competition and choice could be taken in health and education. Since then he has often seemed happy to allow those opposed to Mr Blair's attempts to bring about change in the public sector by introducing market disciplines to think he might agree with them. That he almost certainly does not makes his past behaviour both stranger and less admirable.
Indiscriminately Unchummy If anything, he has had even less to say about foreign affairs. He signals that he would be no less robust than Mr Blair in fighting terrorism. And though his natural caution would have made him less eager for military adventures abroad, there is no reason to suppose that he would bring back British troops from Iraq or Afghanistan any faster than Mr Blair. Mr Brown might not be quite as chummy with Mr Bush as Mr Blair has been, but then he is less chummy with almost everybody. He is instinctively pro-America, however, admiring its economic dynamism and capacity for moral uplift. His Europeanism, on the other hand, is tempered by his dislike of the meetings he attends with his European Union counterparts (rarely concealed) and frustration over the lack of zeal among some of them for economic reform. But he has left it to commentators to connect the dots rather than spell out himself what he believes. At a time when ideological differences between the parties, or at least between their leaders, are too subtle for most voters to discern and class solidarity with specific parties has weakened, questions of character may now become all important. The real significance of this month's events is not that Mr Blair has lost the ability to control his political destiny but that Mr Brown's complicated personality has become the central issue in British politics. Would Mr Bush ever have become president if voters in America had not found the better-qualified Al Gore stiff and chilly? In Britain, a year ago, David Davis appeared to have the Conservative leadership election sewn up. But the moment, at the annual party conference, that a credible challenger emerged in the shape of Mr Cameron, there were enough Conservatives who remembered reasons to dislike Mr Davis-"disloyal" and "bully" were two words suddenly applied to him-for the air to
The Danger of Being Browned Off Whether they, or anyone else, will actually challenge Mr Brown for the leadership is still far from certain, for three reasons. First, a candidate must have the support of 44 MPs in order to stand. Though Mr Brown is now trying to persuade people that he positively welcomes an open contest, as long as he remains the favourite to succeed Mr Blair only the reckless or terminally unambitious are likely to come out in favour of an opponent. Second, Mr Brown has been the heir-apparent for so long that it would be a wrench for party activists and the members of affiliated trade unions to back another. On September 12th, hours after Mr Blair had been heckled and insulted at the Trades Union Congress, union leaders were cooing over Mr Brown, even though he had made clear his support for the prime minister's uncompromising reformist message, Third, as the financial steward of a government that has spewed out cash for Labour's dearest causes, many feel they owe him a debt of gratitude. That could change if it becomes clear that Mr Brown's already questionable rapport with the electorate has taken a further dive as a result of recent events. It could also change if the sullen truce within the party that has held since the weekend fails to last. In all probability, though, the crown will still pass to Mr Brown. Whether the voters will forget before polling day what they have learned this month about their next prime minister is another matter. Many people will be eager to remind them, not least the charming, lucky Mr Cameron. As Mr Brown knows better than most, politics is a brutal business.
From The Economist, September 14,2006. Copyright © 2006 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prOhibited. www.economist.com
35
Article 4
Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom DONLEY
T.
STUDLAR
West Virginia University
correspond to the voting shares because members are elected based on territorial districts, with one member winning each district, no matter how large or small her plurality (most votes, not necessarily a majority vote). There are no runoffs. Labor voters are distributed across the country in a more efficient manner than their major competitors, the Conservatives and Liberals, allowing them to win more seats than their share of the vote would justify in an electoral system of proportional representation such as used in many European countries. Furthennore, many safe Labor seats are in inner city areas, where turnout is often low. The average turnout in a Labor-won seat in 2005 was some seven percentage points higher than in a Conservative one. The number of voters in each district is only approximately the same rather than equal (the U.S. standard). Historically there are fewer voters in seats in Scotland and Wales, where Labor is strong, than in England, where the Conservatives are more competitive. Yet even in England, Labor won considerably more seats in 2005 than their share of the vote. See Table 2. Thus it is the SMP system, the multiparty system in the electorate (see below), differential turnout, and the better spread of Labor voters that has allowed it to do so well in recent elections. While voters can switch their affiliation from one election to the next, it is estimated that this "built-in advantage" for Labor in the current electoral system means that the Conservatives, the nearest opposition party, would have to lead Labor in the overall popular vote by approximately nine percentage points in order to gain a majority in the House of Commons. This formidable hurdle is not likely to be reduced appreciably by the revision to constituency boundaries by an Independent Boundary Commission, expected in 2007.
he midterm of a nonnal four or five-year government in the United Kingdom is a good time to reflect on both the past and possible future of British electoral politics. This article will concentrate more on the former, describing the patterns of the past three "New Labor" electoral triumphs of 1997, 2001, and especially 2005, but it will also look ahead to the expected competition at the next election, with Labor under a new leader who will succeed Tony Blair. That is widely expected to be his long -serving Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasury Secretary), Gordon Brown, although there may be other contenders. Blair's tenure, due to end by September 2007 (see below), represents the longest period of Labor power in government in its history. Whatever the ups and downs of ruling, as an electoral machine with broad popular appeal Labor has been formidable under Blair and has built-in advantages for the next election. The results of the last three British elections for the lower house of Parliament, the House of Commons, are shown in Tables 1 and 2. The flrst shows the overall results in terms of seats and votes, the second shows the considerable regional variation in the four parts of the United Kingdom: England, Scotland, Wales, and Nottbern Ireland. The results indicate that even when Labor had an overwhelming majority of seats in the 1997 Parliament, it was far from winning a majority of the votes cast. Furthermore, as its vote share declined, its legislative seats did not decline proportionately, allowing it to maintain a comfortable majority over all other parties. This disparity is due to the operation of the single-member plurality (SMP) electoral system in the United Kingdom. In such a system the overall result in seats does not necessarily
T
Table 1
Vote and Seat Shares in Last Three General 1997 %
votes % seats
2001
(N)
%
votes % seats
2005
(N)
% votes
% seats
(N)
Labour
43
64
(418)
41
63
(412)
35
55
(355)
Conservative
31 17 9
25 7 4
(165) (46) (30) (659)
32 18 9
25 8 5
(166) (52) (29) (659)
32 22 11
31 10 5
(198) (62) (31) (646)
Liberal Democrats Other Total seats
36
Article 4. Electoral Politics in the United Kingdom
2005
Table 2
Liberal
Conservative
Labour
% votes 0/0 seats (N) % votes % seats (N)
Others
% votes % seats (N) % votes % seats (N) Total seats
England
35
54
(285)
36
37
(193)
23
9
Scotland
40
69
(41)
16
2
(1 )
23
Wales
43
73
(29)
21
8
(3)
18
Northern Ireland Total seats, U.K.
355
198
62
9
(47) (11 )
(4)
529
22
10
(6)
59
10
(4)
17
8
(3)
40
100
100
(18)
(18)
6
31
646
much about principles as about competence to run the economy, the health system, education, and foreign policy. Under Labor, as under the previous Conservative governments, Britain has touted its position as part of the "Anglo-American model" of low taxation, flexible labor markets, and minimal social protec tion, in contrast to a continental European model. New Conservative party leader David Cameron, elected in 2005 on the basis of his youth and promise to make the Conservatives more electable, has been touted as "Blair's heir," in terms of youth, appearance, and remaking his party's image into one of greater moderation. Calling himself a "liberal" Conservative, he has avoided setting out specific policies on many issues and yet has brought the Conservatives back into a competitive position with Labor in mid-term opinion polls. The Liberals also changed leaders since the last election. Eschewing the "personality politics" of the other parties, the Liberals opted for older "gravitas" in the person of Menzies Campbell. His leadership, however, has been under internal challenge. Tony Blair became the first British prime minister to invoke term limits on himself during the 2005 election campaign; he promised to resign as party leader before the next election. This has led to an ongoing "politics of retirement" with elements in the Labor party, especially those supporting Gordon Brown, advocating that Blair go sooner rather than later in order to give a new leader time to establish his own authority before the next election in 2009 or 2010. In September 2006 several junior members of the government resigned from their executive positions over this issue, and Blair promised that he would step down within the next year. Some have suggested that the new Labor leader call a "snap election" to establish his own authority but that would depend on the government's standing with the public at the time. This episode shows a tendency toward a more American style of politics in Britain, with personalities, especially those of the leaders, becoming increasingly important at the expense of policy. This is also true in election campaigns, when the individual party leaders are at the forefront of news programs and party propaganda. Some commentators have argued that British politics is now "presidential," with the prime minister having more authority over his party and government than previously.
As the election results suggest, Britain has a two-party system in the House of Commons, with the two major parties holding around 90 percent of the seats. In the electorate, however, there is a multiparty system throughout all sections of the United Kingdom even though the strength of the parties, and even whether they run candidates at all, varies among the four parts. Labor on the left and Conservatives on the right are the main contenders, but the third-place Liberals have made a better showing in seats in recent elections. Nevertheless, they continue to be punished by an electoral system which rewards only first-place finishes, not total votes. In the parts outside England, nationalist parties claiming to represent the ethnic interests of people in these areas also contest elections-the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and several parties with support in the Protestant and Roman Catholic communities in Northern Ireland, where the major British parties do not cOllJ.pete. Thus the party system in Northern Ireland is completely different, and those in Scotland and Wales substantially so, than in England. Furthermore, the last two elections saw the lowest turnouts in British elections since 1918. Turnout has fallen particularly among the young, who do not feel moved by the political visions on offer. Despite government investigations into low turnout and allowing liberalized postal voting in 2005, there was only a slight improvement over 2001. Labor may have offered more efficient government, with continued economic growth and more spending on health and education, two key issues, but it was unexciting. Popular discontent over Tony Blair leading Britain into the war in Iraq (with the support of the Conservatives), together with a lack of clear alternatives and a long-anticipated result, further dampened voting participation. Although Labor'S move to capture the center ground in an increasingly middle class Britain through changes in policy emphasizing public-private partnerships, reducing its dependence on the trade union movement, and re-branding itself as "New Labor" had worked well for governing, it did not lead to enthusiasm in much of the electorate. Led by the Labor party under the influence of "Third Way" thinking, British politics has been de-ideologized, with the Conservatives belatedly following. The party debate is not so
M
37
ANNUAL EDITIONS
But even if true, this can be a two-edged sword, as in Blair's third term his government has suffered from increasing legislative revolts within his party and also the politics of retirement. Today Britain is a multiracial, multireligiolls, multiethnic and more sexually equal society, a huge change over the past half century. The diversity of the country is reflected in the changing makeup of the House of Commons although ethnic minorities have only 15 members. Women, mainly in the Labor party, now make up almost 20 percent of the members. Recognizing that Labor has a popular advantage among these groups, especially younger ones, Conservative leader David Cameron has advo~ cated that his party reach out to these groups by nominating mOre women and ethnic minority candidates. Already in 2005, there was a Conservative "city seats initiative" which allowed mOre women candidates to stand. After a decade of Labor domination of electoral politics, the next election is likely to be more competitive. As always, the state of the economy and trust in the competence and relative honesty of the incumbent government will be key issues. Education, housing, pensions, public sector reform, security and crime, and perhaps foreign policy are likely to be debated. But others may also be significant. A more integrated, "federal" European Union continues to be a subject of controversy in British politics, but the Conservatives have been unable to transform the widespread euroskepticism in the electorate into a winning issue, perhaps because of their own divisions. Although Tony Blair promised to be more supportive of EU projects, in practice his government has continued the United Kingdom's stance as an I'awkward European." Britain has never joined the European Monetary Union. Labor divisions over Europe have been better hidden than those of the Conservatives in recent years, but they could break out in either party. Relatively liberal immigration and especially asylum policies, combined with Islamism arising in some Muslim communities, has led to concerns about "Londonistan" as a beachhead for those advocating violence against the West, as manifested in the July 2005 London bombing. Immigration has continued to be a contentious issue, and there has been increasing concern about teaching British values and the English language among immigrants. Again the Conservatives would appear to have the advantage on this issue, but they were unable to make it work for them in 2005. But this issue is a tricky one for all parties,
who do not want to offend ethnic communities by having a strongly exclusionist policy. Especially if Scotland's Gordon Brown opposes Englishman David Cameron are the contending candidates for prime minister at the next election, the benefits and drawbacks of recent constitutional change may be on the agenda. With the regional voting divisions outlined above, the Conservatives are likely to make an issue of the "West Lothian Question", namely that under devolution, Scottish and Welsh MPs can vote on Englishonly legislation in the House of Commons even though responsibility for the same policy area in Scotland and Wales, such as education, health, and transportation, is devolved to those legislatures. Labor's 1998 Human Rights Act has also caused controversy because of liberal interpretations by judges, to the chagrin of government ministers concerned about crime and terrorism. Parliamentary reform may also be on the agenda. With both Labor and the Conservatives expressing environmental concerns, highlighted by the Stern Report on the potentially catastrophic economic effects of global warming, this issue may have a higher profile at the next election. Brown has also suggested that more should be done to end world poverty and improve international social justice. At this point the best prediction for the next election is that it will be closer between the two strongest parties than the three most recent contests. In a more competitive contest, voting turnout should increase. Because of district composition and the electoral system, it will be difficult for the Conservatives to win an outright majority, but the prospects for what the British call a "hung parliament," with no party having a majority of seats, are better. Such an outcome is likely to lead to a period ofuncertainty, maybe coalition government, and perhaps even a change in the electoral system that would better reflect the diversity of British partisan opinion. The era of Labor party dominance appears to be coming to an end. Eberly Family Distinguished Professor at West Virginia University, has written extensively on British electoral politics since his award-winning Ph.D. dissertation, "The Impact of the Colored Immigration Issue on British Electoral Politics, 1964-1970," Indiana University, 1975. He has written three books and many articles on British politics, notably Great Britain: Decline or Renewal? (Westview Press, 1996).
DONLEY T. STUDLAR.,
Copyright © 2007 by Donley T. Stud!!!r Ph.D. Reprinted by permission of the author.
38
Article 5
The End of French Europe? STEVEN
PHILIP KRAMER
Things Fall Apart
has lost the confidence of the public. Its economy has suffered from slow growth for a decade, its social welfare model is under siege, and its system of ethnic integration has been challenged by the recent riots. Meanwhile, France's positions on the EU have become increasingly self-serving and defensive. An enlarged EU has chafed under Paris' tutelage, and French citizens have grown alarmed about the implications of ED enlargement. To be sure, despite France's central role in the creation of the ED, the country's relationship with Europe has never been easy. Although Paris made European integration the cornerstone of its foreign policy after World War II, French leaders have always been reluctant to yield national sovereignty to the supranational institutions they helped midwife; witness the defeat of the European Defense Community in 1954 (an attempt to establish an integrated European army within NATO to avoid the rearmament of West Gennany on a national basis) and the near defeat of the Maastricht Treaty in a French referendum in 1992. Under the fifth Republic, France has wanted contradictory things from European integration: a supranational bloc that could stand tall in the world, but also one that required minimal sacrifice of national sovereignty from its members. French officials believed that a European community based on intergovemmentalism (with decision-making resting primarily in the hands of the representatives of the member states) offered the best means of reconciling these two goals. But it was precisely this kind of intergovernmental EU that French voters shot down last May. The vote should be taken as a warning: France needs to rethink its national strategy, just as it did after 1870 and 1945. Although French renewal is not a sufficient condition for the future development of the EU, it is a necessary one. Unfortunately, France has accomplished nothing on this front since May 2005. If anything, the situation has deteriorated.
On May 29 of last year, French voters rejected the draft of a new EU constitution in a nationwide referendum. Although not unexpected, their vote plunged the European Union into a long period-ofuncertainty. It also signaled that France itself is in crisis. In saying no to a draft worked out largely by their own leaders, French voters effectively disowned those leaders-and, in the process, exported their country's crisis to the EU. European integration and the EU constitution had largely been French endeavors, and France had long been Europe's natural leader. A year after the vote, the key question that remains is whether the no vote, as well as the subsequent riots in the Parisian banlieues (suburbs) and the more recent mass protests against youth labor refonn, has destroyed France's ability to lead the EU, an institution France did so much to create. France has faced similar crises in the past. Following its 1870 defeat in the Franco-Prnssian War and again after the disaster of 1940 (when France fell to Gennany in a mere six weeks), France struggled to maintain its national security and its rank as a great power. It tried to recover from its failure in 1870 by establishing the Third Republic, rebuilding its military, and developing alliances against Gennany. The French could not agree, however, on the underlying causes of the defeat, and this prevented the creation of a unified blueprint for rebuilding the country-a lack of cohesion that led to France's second great humiliation, in the early days of World War II. After that war ended, France adopted a more creative approach to its reconstruction. Its leaders drew up a new model for a planned economy and a welfare state and in 1958, after another political crisis, established the Fifth Republic, adopting new political institutions that favored the executive at the expense of the legislature. Starting in the late 1940s, France's leaders also turned to the project of European integration, using it to resolve the Gennan problem and achieve regional leadership (generally in partnership with West Germany). France solved its own problems by solving Western Europe's. Its solution was an existential breakthrough for Europe; European integration served Europe's interests as wen as France's. France's grand ambitions now seem to have come undone. The defeat of the EU constitution in the referendum last year resulted from two factors: a general crisis in French society and the flaws inherent in the French concept of Europe. The first reflects the fact that the postwar French model-political, economic, and social-no longer functions well. France lacks faith in itself; its elite is divided over fundamental questions and
Out of the Ashes In his famous book The Strange Defeat, the great historian Marc Bloch describes his experience as a French reserve officer during the disastrous Battle of France, in 1940, and then uses his historian's training to explain the causes of the debacle. Bloch argues that France's rapid capitulation to the Nazis was not merely a military failure but the result of more fundamental problems in French society. Bloch's argument is relevant today: like France's military humiliation more than 60 years ago, the defeat of the referendum last year revealed a deep-seated crisis of legitimacy stemming from the government's failure to resolve long-term issues.
39
ANNUAL EDITIONS
The aftermath of 1940 is also instructive. After the war, France's quick collapse produced a widespread belief that thoroughgoing change in the country's structure was necessary. But given the scale of the defeat and the fragmentation of French society, it took decades to establish a coherent response and to convince most of the French leadership and population to accept it. The basic elements of the postwar French model (modified in 1958) included a strong executive and a weak parliament; an economic system with a large state sector and a significant role for state planning; an extensive welfare system that provided generous health-care, retirement, and unemployment benefits and free higher education; support for European integration based on an intergovernmental model; the use of the FrancoGerman partnership as an instrument for maintaining peace in Europe and exercising French influence; the rebuilding of France's defense around a nuclear deterrent; and an ambivalent stance toward the United States, consisting of practical cooperation on concrete issues but doctrinal opposition to perceived U.S. hegemony. By the late 1980s, the new French model had jelled. For the first time in modern history, the French political class seemed to agree on basic issues of defense, foreign affairs, and economic and social policy. The alternation between left-wing and right-wing governments no longer resulted in significant policy shifts. Ironically, it was around this time that the model also began to fail. The simplest explanation for France's current crisis is Jacques Chirac. Chirac has been better at defeating rivals and achieving power than he has been at using that power. Many of his difficulties derive from his failure to fulfill his 1995 campaign pledge to focus on "the forgotten man," he who has been excluded from the benefits of French society. In addition, Chirac has shown a tendency toward risk-taking and impulsiveness that has often backfired. For example, in 1997 he chose to dissolve the National Assembly early without first establishing a persuasive theme for the subsequent campaign. This led to a Socialist victory in the parliamentary elections, forcing Chirac to work with a Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, for the next five years. Sticking with Jospin's Gaullist successor, the unpopular Jean-Pierre Raffarin, from 2002 to 2005 and holding an unnecessary referendum on the EU constitution were similar blunders. So, too, was Chirac's televised encounter with young people during the referendum campaign, when the elderly president seemed unable to respond to their concerns.
The fundamental constitutional problem facing France today is the same one that has bedeviled it for 200 years: how to balance the powers of the executive and the legislature. France has lurched between governmental models that grant excessive authority to the executive and those that produce all-powerful parliaments. After the failure of the Fourth Republic helped Charles de Gaulle return to power in 1958, he created a new system (the Fifth Republic) that gave great leeway to the president and stripped the Parliament of most of its independence and power. De Gaulle also established a referendum mechanism that allowed him to renew his mandate with the people directly, further marginalizing the legislature. Ironically, this same referendum procedure has become one of the few ways for the French public to demonstrate its disapproval of the government and the president. Referendums can easily tum into plebiscites, and plebiscites into fiascos. Given this fact, submitting the EU constitution to the public for a popular vote was probably unwise. Another grave problem in the French political system has been the replacement of a powerful antiestablishment party on the left with an equally powerful party on the extreme right. For over 30 years after World War II, France's Stalinist Communist Party (the Parti Communiste Fran<;ais, or PCF) exercised a stranglehold over the country's political system. The PCF intimidated and weakened France's noncommunist left, forcing it to choose between allying with the center (and losing its base) or siding with the PCF (and losing its democratic credentials). This impossible choice helped ensure that France was ruled by a solid right-wing majority for many years after 1958. Only Fran<;ois Mitterrand was able to tame the PCF-using its electoral support to win power in 1981, then keeping it hostage within his government, and finally nudging it into the dustbin of history. Mitterrand's outmaneuvering of the PCF seemed at first to open the way to a less ideological political system based on a few large centrist parties. With the sidelining of the PCF, however, much of the populist and nationalist left simply switched sides, joining with the unreconstructed extreme right to create the powerful National Front. The National Front, which has been led by Jean-Marie Le Pen since 1972, promised to protect French workers from economic and social change-and to block immigration to their neighborhoods. In the last 20 years, the party has become a durable, well-organized, and growing force of opposition, despite regular predictions of its imminent demise. The National Front's rhetoric is -fascist, raCist, xenophobic, and often anti-Semitic, as well as staunchly anti-EU. Its vocal opposition to Arab and Muslim immigration has made bigotry an acceptable part of France's national dialogue, frightening minorities, tempting the conventional right to consider tactical alliances with it on the local level, and creating a bloc of no voters on any referendum concerning Europe. Le Pen's appeal, moreover, has made him the kingmaker of French politics. In 1997, the National Front threw the parliamentary elections to the Socialists. Then, in 2002, Le Pen came in second in the first round of voting for president, forcing Jospin out of the runoff and thus assuring Chirac's victory.
The simplest explanation for France's current crisis is Jacques Chirac.
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These missteps have made it impossible for Chirac to consider running for reelection when his term expires in 2007, turning him into a lame duck. The president is the author of his own misfortunes and bears considerable responsibility for France's general problems. But Chirac's failures also reflect underlying flaws in France's political and constitutional system.
40
Article 5. The End of French Europe? In France today, by contrast, the «outsiders" do not even share a collective identity, and they lack political organization and representation in French politics. During the 1960s, white Americans at least viewed blacks as Americans, whereas in France, most inhabitants of the poor ethnic suburbs, whatever their actual nationality, are seen as foreigners by other French citizens. It does not help that many of France's ethnic poor are also Muslims at a time when Islam inspires fear throughout Europe. American blacks, moreover, eventually came to benefit from affirmative action, which helped accelerate their transition to the middle class. France's republican creed makes such policies unacceptable to the mainstream. But as the riots showed, neglect (whether benign or not) of France's ethnic poor is no longer possible. Although only long-term policies will produce fundamental change, immediate action is necessary to show that the state is committed to helping them. Such action, however, does not seem to be forthcoming. In the meantime, France's welfare state remains organized not along egalitarian lines, but in a guild-like fashion. Different professions retain different retirement systems and defend their privileges fiercely. Reform of the labor market and the welfare state is regularly blocked by groups with a stranglehold on the economy, such as railroad and metro unions. France's govern~ ments, remembering the near revolution of May 1968, back down from most confrontations with workers-as happened this spring. The result is deadlock. The failure to reform is also justified by reference to bugbears such as globalization and what Chirac, out of cynicism or actual belief, has called the ultraliberal current that could lead to an "Anglo-Saxon and Atlanticist" Europe. No matter that France competes fairly well in a global world or that there is no single "Anglo-Saxon social model" (the United Kingdom·s is actually closer to the European welfare-state model than it is to the United States'). No matter that some smaller European democracies, such as Sweden, are fairly successful in reconciling a vigorous, competitive economy and an open labor market with a higher degree of egalitarianism and social solidarity than exists in France. Together, these factors have contributed to economic stagnation and festering social problems that are undennining France's influence in Europe. After all, how can Paris lead the EU-a largely economic organization-when it cannot reduce chronic unemployment at home? France could not even manage to lower its budgetary deficit to three percent of GDP, as was required by the rules of the European Monetary Union; to avoid sanction, it had (together with Germany) to rewrite the rules.
Since 2002, the Socialist Party has done little to rebuild its strength and unify a divided left. This means that in the next election, the National Front could once again make it to the runoff-beating out either the fragmented left or the fragmented mainstream right. Indeed, current infighting within the latter camp is playing into Le Pen's hands.
Seeds of Discontent The root of the French public's political discontent is primarily economic, the result above all of chronic unemployment. After World War II, central economic planning and a large state sector helped France achieve 30 years of rapid economic growth. Starting in the 1990s, however, the government began liberalizing the economy. State planning was reduced, nationalized industries were privatized, and French firms began to compete well globally. But unemployment has remained at around ten percent for two decades. The major cause of this problem has been France's highly restricted labor market, which makes employers reluctant to hire new workers in good times because they cannot be laid off during economic downturns. To remedy this problem, French governments have tried to "share" employment by reducing the workweek to 35 hours, encouraging early retirement, and creating temporary publicsector jobs for the young. None of these measures has been effective at reducing long-term unemployment, and some, such as early retirement, have only increased the deficits incurred by the welfare state. Women, minorities, and the young have remained particularly vulnerable. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin attempted to address the problem of youth unemployment by creating temporary labor contracts for first-time employees under 25, which would have allowed them to be fired without cause in their first two years on the job. The measure was unlikely to significantly reduce unemployment, however, and it only enraged France's young people, who want the same kind of job security as their elders. The move was also unpopular with older working adults, who feared that it was the beginning of an effort to chip away at their job protections as well. The result was a month of strikes and protests, which ended when the government repealed the law. Perhaps the hardest hit by France's unemployment problem are the country's ethnic minorities. Often called "immigrants," many of these people are in fact second-generation French citizens. In many ways, the riots they staged in the fall of 2005 were reminiscent of the inner-city race riots that rocked many major U.S. cities in the 1960s. To be sure, the French riots were far less violent than their U.S. counterparts. Yet in some respects the situation for ethnic minorities in France today is worse than was the plight of African Americans in the 1960s. After all, American blacks had a mass civil rights movement to advocate on their behalf and gifted leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. American blacks were also represented in Congress, local gov~ emment, and both major political parties. President Lyndon Johnson was sympathetic to their cause and pushed a variety of civil rights and social legislation through Congress that by the end of the century had produced significant results.
Friends and Neighbors As France's influence in the EU has waned in the last few years-and especially since the EU was enlarged in 2004French leaders and the French public have begun to question whether the organization still serves their interests. The French vision of Europe has rested on three principles: an intergovernmentalism that produced the least possible infringement on French sovereignty (especially the powers of its president),
41
ANNUAL EDITIONS
French leadership (or, at least, Franco-German leadership on French terms), and a "European Europe" independent of U.S. dominance. Recently, however, all three of these basic principles have created problems. The intergovernmental model, for example, carries a high cost. Protecting French sovereignty has meant opposing a strong European Parliament and the direct election of European leaders. But this has led to an EU that is technocratic and increasingly opaque to ordinary citizens, who have no voice in its policies. France's efforts, in other words, have helped create an EU that is hard to love, easy to fear, and can be voted down without much regret-as happened in last year's referendum. Meanwhile, French influence over the EU has also started to slip. Until recently, Franco-German leadership of the EU went largely unchallenged, as had Franco-German leadership of its forerunners. When France and Germany worked together, they were usually able to create consensus; when they opposed an initiative, it failed, For years, there was no real alternative to their stewardship. The United Kingdom did not join the EU (then the European Community) until 1973, and it remained an outsider long after that because of its ambivalence toward European integration and the unattractiveness of the British socioeconomic model. More recently, however, the situation has changed radically. Thanks to EU enlargement and the divisive war in Iraq, the union now has several midsize members, such as Poland and Spain, that are unwilling to simply follow the Franco-German lead-especially since France and Germany appear more concerned these days with protecting their own interests than with protecting those of the EU as a whole. Meanwhile, London has become a more engaged EU player, and the United Kingdom now represents a more successful socioeconomic model than does either France or Germany. No wonder many in France feel they have lost their grip over the EU. Anxiety over that loss was reflected in the defeat of the constitutional referendum. Unfortunately, the vote only further weakened France's influence over the union-something likely to worsen its anxiety in the future. France's third principle-resisting U.S. influence-has been a feature of French foreign policy for years. During the Cold War, France resented what it perceived as U.S. hegemony in Europe; when the Cold War ended, Paris resented Washington's sole-superpower status even more. At the same time, France had usually stuck with the United States (at least in its own fashion) when it mattered most-whether during the Cuban missile crisis or the Persian Gulf War. This pattern changed in 2003; Iraq became a turning point in 50 years of French-U.S. relations. In response to what was arguably the most unilateral act by a post-World War II U.S. government (and one of its worst strategic judgment calls), Paris, while declaring the virtues of "multipolarity," followed Berlin's lead into confrontation with Washington. This made all the difference at the United Nations; without French support in the Security Council, neither Russia nor China (to say nothing of the smaller states) would likely have taken on the United States. With France at their side, they were emboldened, and together they dealt the United States a stinging blow.
Tactically, France's UN diplomacy led to a brilliant victory: the humiliation of the United States in the Security Council. Strategically, it was another ofChirac's blunders. France hardly managed to balance the United States: Washington simply went to war without it. In the meantime, France's action managed to disrupt both transatlantic relations-Washington rightly construed French advocacy of "multipolarity" as an attack on U.S. power-and the EU, with little advantage for Paris or any of the other parties concerned.
Lost Leader? Despite French voters' rejection of the EU constitution, France remains important to the union. Paris has, however, lost its ability to lead the EU. This is bad not just for France, but for Europe as well, for the EU cannot hope to make any real progress in areas such as institutional reform and the forging of a common foreign and defense policy without France. Still, if France is ever to resume its leadership of the union, it needs to rethink its identity, its goals, and its strategies. Above all, it needs to overcome the paralyzing fear of change--change that, if properly undertaken, would be salutary. Following World War Il, France tried to solve Europe's problems by solving its own. The same needs to be done today. This will require nothing less than a paradigm shift in the thinking of French elites and the French population at large. The French must accept the fact that the days of national and even regional economies are ov~r. Globalization presents opportunities, not just risks. To exploit them, France must make good USe of its increasingly dynamic economy and strong scientific and educational base. To improve its economic odds, France must restore the centrality of work as an instrument of empowerment and fulfillment. A freer labor market would help reduce unemployment and be more inclusive of minorities, women, and the poor. Promoting growth might mean accepting a little more insecurity, but French workers should remember that in a dynamic economy, they will be mOre likely to find new jobs if they lose the ones they have. Paris must place social benefits, such as pensions, retirement, and health care, within a national framework, one that is egalitarian and realistic. While other social democracies are raising the retirement age to above 65, France cannot continue to allow members of certain privileged groups (such as transport workers) to retire at 55 or 60. Ratherthan holding fast to a dysfunctional model and projecting its fears onto the outside world, Paris should encourage greater curiosity about the way other advanced societies (including France's neighbors) deal with labor and welfare-state reform. By focusing more on economic growth and less on the defense of the French social model, the French government could help reduce its citizens' fear of immigrants, from both within the EU (the infamous "Polish plumbers:' for example) and without. Historically, France has always benefited from its immigrants, even if it has always resented them. To address matters tOday, France must start working harder to assimilate its nonEuropean-born citizens. Last year's riots must be taken seriously. Paris should not merely improve services and opportunities 42
Article 5. The End of French Europe?
in the banlieues; it must do away with de facto segregation. The best way to prevent French Muslims from developing a separate identity and turning to radical Islam would be to offer them decent employment and a shot at social mobility. Affirmative action in the United States-even though it runs counter to U.S. values-has resulted in social mobility for a vast portion of black Americans. Something similar should be considered in France, as should efforts aimed at facilitating real involvement of minorities in political life. Such policies, along with a strong educational effort, might also reduce the appeal of the National Front. Eradicating it will not be easy-France has a long history of extreme rightwing parties-but doing so is crucial. The National Front only prospers when France's mainstream politics are defensive and limit genuine debate. The current balance between executive and legislative powers is tilted too far toward the former. When the public cannot effectively channel popular discontent and opposition through Parliament, it takes to the street. Contrary to conventional wisdom, moreover, French presidents are as much the victim of the current system as is the legislature, since they bear excessive responsibility for what does or does not get accomplished. At the very minimum, France should return to a system in which cabinet ministers are members of Parliament, and Parliament must be allowed to have stronger committees and greater budgetary powers. These changes can and should be made within the existing system; it is not necessary to invent a new one. A less defensive France would be more effective as an EU leader. France will have to find ways to make the EU more transparent and more attractive to the citizens of Europe. This can no longer be done through intergovemmentalism, which
means, in practice, technocracy and a democratic deficit. The current, incremental approach to ED reform-with successive intergovernmental conferences where member states tinker with the mechanisms of government-will not thrive now that the EU has 25 members. France must be prepared to abandon more of its sovereignty if the EU is to fulfill France's grander ambitions for Europe. Finally, Paris must redefine the place of France and Europe in the world-and their relationship with the United States. It should be apparent that the kind of intra-European split that occurred over the Iraq war cannot be repeated. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom must make a genuine effort to bring their foreign policies closer into line. Perhaps Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel will be more open to global engagement. Even so, it will remain for London and Paris to resolve the key issue that has long divided them: how to deal with Washington. Relations with the United States should be seen not as an end of strategy but as a means. Of course, this begs the question, a means to what? In order to answer it, French leaders must think long and hard about how they want the world to look in the future. Mobilizing Europe around its own strategic vision, rather than obsessing over the United States, should form the basis of a new European foreign policy that France might still be able to lead.
is Professor of National Security Studies at the National Defense University's Industrial College of the Armed Forces. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of the National Defense University or the Department of Defense.
STEVEN PHILIP KRAMER.
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006, pp. 126-138. Copyright © 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
43
Article 6
France's Murky Mix of School and Scandal KATRIN BENNHOLD International Herald Tribune
T
here are at least 160,000 living alumni of Oxford University, and more than 320,000 people with degrees
As Alain Madelin, a center-right lawmaker, famously remarked a few years ago: "Ireland has the IRA, Spain has ETA, Italy the mafia, but France has ENA." The cliquishness of the school's graduates has fed a lack of
from Harvard. So exclusive, in contrast, is France's elite
Ecole Nationale d' Administration that fewer than 6,000 of its graduates are alive today. A postgraduate college for civil servants, this school, known as ENA, is key to the way power is concentrated in France, with a small elite controlling large swaths of politics, business, and the country's powerful bureaucracy. The intimate ties forged among its graduates have frequently been linked to insider machinations; now, in the scandal currently engulfing President Jacques Chirac and the French government-which has unfolded in a bewildering sequence of revelations implicating the top figures of the land in dirty tricks-the "old boy" connections of the principal figures appear to have played a crucial role. Take the case of Jean-Louis Gergorin, 60, suspected of being the mysterious infomaer who anonymously sent judges a list of false bank accounts in a smear campaign targeting several high-level politicians, among them Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who is both leader of the governing center-right party and the chief political rival of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. Gergorin was at ENA in the 1970s, where he rubbed shoul-
transparency about government business in France, and contributed to the murkiness of this latest scandal, which involves cur-
rent and fonner cabinet ministers, intelligence officers, judges, business executives, and even Chirae, all in one way or another connected. According to Ghislaine Ottenheimer, a journalist and author
who has written extensively on the subject, the Hincestuous nature" of the French elites disables checks and balances and creates a fertile breeding ground for under-the-table dealings.
"These very exclusive networks have created a sense of opacity and impunity," said Ottenheimer, who two years ago published "The Untouchables," a volume about one powerful roster of ENA graduates: state auditors. "You move in your circle and easily forget about the law. If there is a problem, you just call
up one of your former classmates." Checks and balances have failed elsewhere as well. The United States had Watergate and Gemaany suffered through a drawn-out campaign financing scandal in the 1990s. And then there is Italy, where the legal travails of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a billionaire and media mogul, periodically make headlines. But what stands out in France is that its elite is smaller
ders with two future prime ministers and several future leaders in business and media. By the early 1980s, he was a senior and well-connected official at the Foreign Ministry-and hired Villepin, eight years his junior and also an ENA alumnus, with whom he developed what he has called "a close friendship," according to the newspaper Le Figaro. Gergorin left the ministry in 1984 when he was asked by Jean-Luc Lagardere to join his defense imperium, Matra, which has since become part of the French-German-Spanish aerospace consortium EADS. Last week, when allegations about
and more exclusive than in many other Western countries; the state is more present in the economy, further blurring the lines
between business and politics; and the elite is concentrated in one city: Paris. In a country where one's degree is often the single most important factor in being hired, the school one attends matters hugely.
Most of France's top decision makers have gone to a
his involvement in the current scandal mounted, he took a leave
"grande ecole," and the two most influential ones are ENA and Polytechnique, the country's top engineering schooL ENA produces just over 100 graduates every year. The school was established by Charles de Gaulle in 1945 with the aim of
from his post as executive vice president of EADS. Gergorin's resume gives an indication of the kind of relationships at the helm of French politics and industryrelationships so tight that some commentators have compared ENA's old-boy network to less palatable organizations reputed for the loyalty-and secretiveness-of their members.
creating a meritocratic postgraduate program for top civil servants and rebuilding a bureaucracy decimated by war and collaboration, and its graduates still fill the most influential posts
44
Article 6. France's Murky Mix of School and Scandal
in France's sprawling administrative machine. But many ENA alumni have also gone into business, the media and most impor-
"Neither judges nor journalists play their role completely in France," said Philippe Maniere, director of the Montaigne
tantly, politics. Seven of the past 10 prime ministers and two of the past three presidents, including Chirac, studied at ENA. From a quarter to a half of ministerial posts tend to go to ENA alumni, even though incoming governments routinely pledge to diversify; in the current Villepin cabinet, 8 of the 31 ministers went toENA. A single graduating class can have vast influence. The class of 1980, for example, produced ViJIepin; his cabinet director, Pierre Mongin; SegoJene Royal, the front-runner for next year's presidential elections in the opposition Socialist Party; her partner Fran,ois Hollande, the Socialist Party leader; Henri de Castries, the head of the insurer AXA; and Jean-Pierre Jouyet, a former Treasury director and head of Barclays France who is
Institute, a Paris-based research organization. The problem of an exclusive pool of elites is amplified by
the fact that the state remains very present in an economy in which until 1986 the government still controlled some prices. Almost every fourth employee works in the public sector in
France, and a penchant for state intervention that dates back to Napoleon's days has left the government with much influence
over companies. As a result, Ottenheimer says, when senior positions become vacant in business, "People aren't chosen because of their capacity or profile, but because of who they know. You want to have people who are wired on the right and on the left of the political spectrum. It's a culture of lobbying that doesn't speak
its name."
now one of the most senior officials in the Finance Ministry.
All this is compounded by the fact that in France, everything takes place in Paris. "In the United States you have elites in Chicago, you have your L.A. elite and your New York elite," Maniere said. "In France there is only one elite and that elite is in Paris." Just how small that Paris world is becomes clear when one considers the Young Leader program of the French-American Foundation, which nominates about 15 American and 15 French
In French business, Polytechnique and its annual pool of about 500 graduates is increasingly present. Fifteen of the 40 chief executives heading France's largest listed companies are Poly technique graduates. Between ENA and "X," as Poly technique is enigmatically known, that figure climbs to 21. "It's a very closed club and if you're not part of it, it's very hard to break into it," said Philippe Le Corre, an adviser to Defense Minister Michele-Alliot Marie and former journalist who spent 16 years working abroad. Nowhere are these links more obvious than in the defense industry-media-politics triangle. By some estimates, more than 70 percent of the French press is in the hands of defense
young professionals every year. Le Carre, who was chosen as
lawmaker in the Senate. His son Olivier is the chief executive of Dassault Communications, another media subsidiary, and a
one in 2004, said it was striking how none of the American nominees knew each other and virtually all of the French ones did. "It was astonishing: Everyone knew each other, had friends in common and had gone to the same schools," he said. Things are slowly evolving. When the Young Leader program was founded in 1981, more than 90 percent of the French participants were graduates of ENA. Today that proportion has fallen to 24 percent-although many still have graduated from a grande ecole and more than 80 percent come from Paris. "Luckily the elites are in the process of diversifying a bit:' Maniere said. "But we have some way to go. The mythology in
lawmaker in the National Assembly, while his late father was a Chirac supporter in the Correze region.
a plutocracy."
companies. Consider Serge Dassault, owner of the defense giant Groupe Dassault, which in tum owns Socpresse, publisher of 70 titles, including the flagship daily Le Figaro. He is also mayor of Corbeil-Essonnes, a town southeast of Paris, and a center-right
France is that we live in a meritocracy, when in fact we are in
From international Herafd Tribune, May 15,2006. Copyright © 2006 by Katrin Bennhold. Distributed by The New York Times Special Features. Reprinted by permission.
45
Article 7
Angela Merkel's Not-So-Grand Coalition Almost a year on, the wheels seem to be falling off ust over a year has passed since Germany's inconclusive election of September 2005, which after two months of hard bargaining led to a "grand coalition" between the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD). Next month the CDU leader, Angela Merkel, will mark her first anniversary as chancellor. Yet to judge from recent squabbles, her coalition is in danger of coming apart. The press is now as negative as it was in the dying days ofthe government under Gerhard SchrOder, Ms Merkel's SPD predecessor. Both parties have slumped to 30% in the polls. Although a majority of Germans still think that Ms Merkel is doing a good job, only a third now approve of her government. This is happening even though the economy has picked up. Growth could reach 2.5% this year, and unemployment is down by nearly 400,000 on a year ago, to some 4.4m. Given the economic news, what explains the reversal of political fortunes? In one sense, it is a simple case of the pendulum swinging back. Earlier this year, Germans were in love with Ms Merkel: no chancellor was ever so popular after so short a time in office. Promising a calmer style of government and cutting a good figure on her trips abroad, she managed to position herself as an anti-SchrOder. But this honeymoon was bound to end. What has turned it into a backlash against the government is the ambivalence of the electorate-the cause of last year's
overhaul financing by introducing a central health fund. This is not a bad idea: such a fund could lead to a shift from contributions linked to pay, which drive up labour costs (and unemployment). Yet the fund has turned into a monster, whose only purpose is to bridge the policy gap between the parties. The SPD wants contributions to stay linked to pay. The CDU wants to decouple them by introducing a flat-rate premium. The compromise is a fund fed largely by wage-based contributions, but with the option of a flat-rate fee on top. But on October 4th the coalition reached tentative agreement to postpone the new fund until January 2009-which may mean it never sees the light of day. Other reforms could end up equally convoluted. The SPD wants a minimum wage; the CDU prefers in-work benefits. On corporate tax, both parties agree that Germany must cut rates to around 29%, but they are quarrelling over how to make up the revenue shortfall. Even an anti-smoking law, banning smoking in bars and restaurants, seems to be beyond the scope of coali-
J
tion agreement. It would be unfair to say that the government has done nothing. It points to federalism reform, to the decision to raise the retirement age to 67 and to big cuts in subsidies, which have helped to push the budget deficit below 3% of GDP. Last week parliament approved a new benefit to encourage families in which both parents work to have more children. Nor are the coalition's failures all Ms Merkel's fault. They reflect three deeper problems. One is the inevitable tension within any grand coalition of left and right. A second is that, despite having a two-thirds majority in parliament, the grand coalition has been unable to circumvent powerful interest groups. Despite the overhaul of the federal system, state premiers still have substantial veto power. Indeed, they have even more say than under Mr SchrOder; most are CDU heavyweights who influence coalition decision-making before reforms reach the upper-house Bundesrat, where states are represented. The premiers are best seen as the country's most powerful lobbyists. On the health fund, it is the richer states such as Bavaria that are balking. Because of the way the fund's cash is distributed, richer states will subsidise poorer ones. Some CDU
inconclusive election. Germans grasp the need for reform, but they want it to be orderly and painless: an impossible hope. Ms Merkel's style is also a problem. She seems to have a good mix of firm convictions and tactical flexibility. "Let us risk more freedom;' she said in her first speech as chancellor; as a physicist, she also sees political configurations as an experiment in which she lets different forces play out before intervening. She talks of underpromising and overdelivering. Alas, recent months have shown that Ms Merkel puts aside her convictions too easily. She called an anti-discrimination law a bureaucratic nightmare, but accepted it as part of a political deal. In place of deft interventions, she has let policy differences get out of hand. Far from underpromising, she has oversold some reforms, notably in health care. The coalition's decision-making is chaotic, producing compromises that leave nobody happy. The prime example is health-care reform. Its aim was to control costs by injecting more competition into the system, and to
premiers are also manoeuvring to increase their chances of succeeding Ms Merkel. Were the health fund idea to fail, it might not make Ms Merkel a lame duck. But it would have a similar
46
Article 7. Angela Merkel's Not-Sa-Grand Coalition
effect to the failure of Bill Clinton's health-care reform early in his presidency. The third factor is that the two big parties continue to bleed support. In last month's state elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the CDU and SPD between them secured the backing of only a third of those entitled to vote, a record low. This loss of support is sapping both parties' will to make sensible compromises. The SPD wants to sharpen its own profile and make the CDU the fall guy. The atmosphere within the government is increasingly frosty. None of this means that the grand coalition will break up soon. Any other coalition is unlikely at this point, although there has been some speculation of a new one embracing the CDU, the Free Democrats and the Greens. A snap election might make
such a grouping more likely, but engineering this is constitutionally awkward, and there is a risk that it would simply reproduce last year's result. It is equally improbable that the CDU premiers will club together to oust Ms Merkel. It is more likely that the grand coalition will muddle through. Some events may even be on its side. Given the economic revival, next year's planned increase in VAT by three points to 19% may not slow growth as much as some economists feared. And in the first half of 2007 Germany's twin presidencies of the European Union and the G8 rich-country club will again let Ms Merkel cut a dash on the international stage. But unless her
government discovers a new reforming zeal at home, it risks going down in history as a disappointment-even more so than the previous grand coalition in 1966-69.
From The Economist, October 6, 2006, pp. 59-60. Copyright © 2006 by The Economist Newspaper. Ltd. AI! rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economist.com
47
Article 8
Waiting for a Wunder LUDWIG SIEGELE
Germany's economy is picking up, and its football fans hope for a World Cup victory this summer. But a lot more will have to come right before the country gets back on track, says Ludwig Siegele.
on Germany when the economy started to sag at the beginning of this decade-just as winning the 1954 World Cup, held in Switzerland, helped to heal the national psyche after the war and kicked off the Wirtschaftswunder (the post-war economic miracle). The Wunder von Bern, as the unexpected victory came to be known, helped to restore Germans' battered pride in their country. What are the chances that a Wunder von Berlin might kick off a similar cultural and economic rebirth? The answer depends on your perspective. Germany today is like one of those pictures where, depending on how you tilt it, you see two different images. In exports, it is already world-class. Many of its global companies have never been more competitive. With exports of nearly $1 trillion in 2005, this medium-sized country (smaller than the American state of Montana, but with 82m people) already sells more goods in the world market than any other. Investment and domestic demand are also picking up at last, so Germany's economic outlook at home, too, has brightened. "In case you missed it, Germany is no longer the sick man of Europe," says Elga Bartsch, an economist at Morgan Stanley, an investment bank. In 2006, she predicts, the country's economy will grow by 1.8%, the highest rate since 2000 and in line with the European average. But the labour market does not seem to have turned the comer yet: in January, unemployment before seasonal adjustment again hit Sm, or 12.1 % of the workforce. Perhaps most importantly, after years of chronic depression, the mood is much improved. According to
f you are visiting Germany this spring, watch out for footballs. They are everywhere, on posters, buses or entire buildings, even though the World Cup which the country is due to host this summer is still four months off. A German firm is even wrapping the giant globe atop east Berlin's landmark television tower to make it look like a football. If marketing departments had the technology, a German daily recently joked, they would project a football on to the moon. Nor is it just marketing people who are getting excited. For the duration of the tournament most German states willliberalise shopping hours, and the government is even thinking of deploying the army around stadiums for the first time in the Bundeswehr' s history. Germans, it seems, are taking the World Cup extremely seriously-and not just because most of them are passionate football fans. "The last time the world paid so much attention to Germany was 16 years ago when the [Berlin] Wall came down," says Angela Merkel, the country's new chancellor. Germany aims to use the attention generated by this world-class event to repair its battered image. "Made in Germany" has long since lost its ring; now government and big business have teamed up in a campaign to sell the country as the "Land of Ideas". In Berlin, where the World Cup final will be played, visitors will be treated to a "Walk of Ideas" through the capital, complete with oversized sculptures of German inventions. The hope is that a victory, or at least a respectable result, will help cure the collective depression that descended
I
48
Article 8. Waiting for a Wunder "Do you regard the new year with hope or fear?"
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2 _-'d~!1~1,u.1~!1~!!~:l~t!~.!u.'u.',-'.!~,,~,U.t!U."~1toLl',,"'~!!.w!.~,,~,Li,1!u."-'.!u..!~,,u.I~'!~!·.1..1-10 1949 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 2005 'Not including Saarland and West Berlin up to 1960 tWest Germany only up to 1991 Figure 1 Modest Expectations. Source: Institut fur Demoskopie Allensbach; Federal Statistics Office; World Bank
the Allensbach Institute. a polling organisation, 45% of Germans now say that they are hopeful for 2006 (see figure I), Business sentiment has not been so good since the new-economy bubble, Politicians, too, have changed their tune since last autumn's election that ushered in a grand coalition. The new-year address by Angela Merkel struck an upbeat note, "I want to encourage us to find out what we are capable of," she told her fellow Germans, "I am convinced we will be surprised." Look at the country from a different angle, however, as this survey will do, and it becomes clear that even if it won the World Cup for the first time since 1990. it would have plenty left to do, Germany may be in better shape than France or Italy, and many other countries would love to have its problems, but that does not mean it is in robust health. Most importantly, if it does not start tackling its structural problems in earnest soon, it may find itself stuck with something its people dread: amerikanische Verhaltnisse, or "American conditions", code for a socially
polarised society in which workers are hired and fired at an employer's whim, The risk is that Germany's labour market, in particular, will end up "Americanised", but without the good points of the American one, such as its openness and inclusiveness, argues Wolfgang Streeck, head of the Cologne-based Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, In many areas, he says, the German story has been one of "a high average and a low standard deviation": a rich society with . wealth and opportunity fairly spread, with few outliers at either end of the scale, But increasingly, he says, the story is turning into one of "a low average and an exploding standard deviation", If think-tanks have their numbers right, Germany has already ceased to be the "equitable middle-class society" that other social scientists have described, offering a "social elevator" for everybody. When it comes to social justice, Germany is already doing less well than many other European countries, according to a recent study by BerlinPolis, For instance. the risk of poverty has greatly increased in recent years, especially for the young, About a fifth of Germans under 16 now live in households with incomes below the poverty-riSk threshold. The fault does not lie primarily with globalisation and the "locusts". as many Germans have taken to calling foreign investors, Rather, it is the very systems meant to guarantee a well-balanced society, along with the attempts to preserve them, that are increasingly dividing German society, Those systems now serve vested interests, driving a wedge between well-provided-for insiders and marginalised outsiders, This survey will describe the ways in which Germany's institutions have slid from virtue to vice: in politics, in the labour market, in education, in competition policy and elsewhere, It is not that the country has not tried to change. But most of these changes have been designed to optimise existing systems rather than change them fundamentally. This survey will journey through a country struggling with change, passing through Berlin, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Cologne and Frankfurt, It will note that in some ways the future has already arrived: itis simply distributed unevenly. Much of it can be found in places where you might least expect it-such as in the eastern city of Jena, where the journey ends,
49
ANNUAL EDITIONS
In a Bind The grand coalition will need quite a lot of luck to make Germany work better
Selected countries Subjective well-being', most recent figures, net score
ermans have never been wildly cheery (see figure 2, next page); explanations for the national malaise include the weather, Protestantism, philosophy and the Nazi era. But in recent years self-criticism had been veering towards self-flagellation. German self-esteem had been badly hurt by the slide from the top of the economic and social league. The feeling was fed by the media and by professional doomsayers. Yet in the months before last September's election, people started to get fed up with despondency and started buying books that made them feel better about themselves. One of the more interesting was "Foreigners See It Differently" by Susan Neiman, an American philosopher and director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. She pointed to Germany's low crime rate, its admirable cultural infrastructure and its good public transport system and argued that in their selfpity, Germans tend to forget that their country is in better shape than most. What they badly need is some American can-do optimism. Since the new government was installed in November, the mood has much improved. Polls show that people are more willing to accept change. The political constellation also appears much more favourable for reforms: the grand coalition has a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag, Germany's lower house, and also controls the Bundesrat, the upper house, albeit by a much smaller margin. Perhaps for the first time since unification, there seems to be a real opportunity for politicians to prove that they can move fast and far enough. In the early 1980s, when America and Britain were in crisis, Germany was praised as a clockwork mechanism whose cogs meshed perfectly-rather like those wellengineered German machines that never seem to break down. The "German model", although to a large extent the result of historical accident, performed brilliantly at a time when high-quality industrial products were much in demand and the pace of economic change was still relatively slow. The political system, in particular, had proved highly effective at delivering smooth, incremental change. It was
G
o
2
3
4
Switzerland United States Britain WGermany France Spain
Italy E. Germany
Japan Poland Turkey 'Combined measure of self-reported happiness and life satisfaction
Figure 2 Could Be Worse. Source: World Values SU/vey
a machine with two big wheels in the middle, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), and a small one running in coalition with either one of the larger two, the Free Democrats (FDP). Faster-turning wheels to the right and to the left never really got anywhere, partly because of Germany's experience with fascism and partly because of communist East Germany next door. Even the Greens did not disturb this arrangement much, because they quickly became simply a left-leaning alternative to the FDP. The machine had powerful safeguards built in to keep it on track, particularly the Lander, Germany's cOllstituent states. Via the Bundesrat, their representative body in Berlin, the Lander have a say in many key areas. The "financial constitution", a cobweb of tax-revenue equalisation and joint public spending by the different levels of
50
Article 8. Waiting for a Wunder government, has allowed wealth to be spread pretty evenly across the nation Yet it is Germany's federal structure that has increasingly jammed up the country's political machine. Through legal changes and judgments by the Federal Constitutional Court, the Lander have accumulated too many veto rights, offering many points of leverage for interest groups-and making most reform exceedingly difficult. The financial constitution, for its part, has come to discourage the states from trying new solutions. German unification in 1990, welcome though it was, probably made reform even harder. To speed up eastern Germany's integration, vast amounts of money were pumped in (a total of 1.3 trilllion to date), and any plans for change were put on hold. Even now, the eastern Lander receive transfers from the western ones of 80 billion a year, or 4% of Germany's GDP. Unification gave Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of the day, a new lease of political life, and from the mid-1990s he did try to introduce some structural reforms. But tripartite talks with trade unions and employers proved fruitless, and reforms were blocked by the SPD, which at the time controlled the Bundesrat. Mr Kohl's successor, Gerhard SchrOder, found himself in a similar bind after only one term of office. Like Mr Kohl, he tried tripartite talks. When those failed, he set up commissions to draw up reform proposals, and pushed them through as his "Agenda 2010". To the dismay of his intemal opposition, the SPD's left, he operated a de facto grand coalition with the external opposition, the CDU, which had taken control of the upper house. Predictably, the result of all this manoeuvring was a bit of a mess. Agenda 2010 tried to move in the right direction, but much of it consisted of short-term fiscal repairs mixed with political compromise. Even so, it cost the SPD one regional election after another. When the party lost power in its traditional fief of North Rhine-Westphalia in May last year, Mr SchrOder realised that his method had run its course and sought new federal elections-hoping, some say, that the result would be an official grand coalition.
taking people by surprise. Ms Merkel, by contrast, is utterly methodical. A doctor of physics, she seems to view political challenges as a scientific experiment in which she allows the different forces to slug it out before intervening. This may be a useful qualification for heading a grand coalition, a configuration last tried, with limited success, in the late 1960s. In theory at least, she should manage to keep the two big parties together: both of them now need to be on their best behaviour, or run the risk of being punished at the next election. Already, the thrust of German politics has changed perceptibly since the coalition was formed in November. Ms Merkel, who during the election campaign advocated rapid reforms, now talks about the need for "small steps". At times she sounds almost like a Social Democrat. Journalists have started to complain that there are not enough leaks or backstabbing, and lobbyists are finding it harder to get traction. Yet for the new govemment to make a difference, it needs to win three gambles. The first is to reduce the budget deficit without killing the incipient recovery. This year it intends to spend a bit more, even if that will cause Germany once again to exceed the limit of 3% of GDP set by the EU's stability pact. Next year, however, it plans to cut subsidies and other spending and, above all, increase the value-added tax rate from 16% to 19%. The weaker the recovery, the more difficult it will be for Ms Merkel to win the second bet: getting the coalition partners to agree to sustainable solutions to at least some of the country's structural problems. The test case will be the financing of health care, which the government intends to tackie later this year. With medical spending expected to rise steeply because of demographic factors as well as technological progress, the big question is how to keep health-care contributions from becoming a prohibitive tax on labour. The third wager is that the Lander will do their bit to improve the way Germany is run. They have already agreed to a reform of the federal structure, which will reduce their veto rights over federal affairs, in return for gaining more local powers, notably over education. But it is quite another question whether the states will go along with a reform of Germany's "financial constitution". And Ms Merkel's rivals within the CDU, most of them state premiers, may want to keep her from becoming too successful. Much, therefore, can still go wrong on the way to further reform. And even if Ms Merkel's "small steps" lead some where, they may not solve some of the biggest problemssuch as education, the subject of the next article.
New Brooms Now that it has come to pass, will this new left-right alliance, led by Angela Merkel, make a better fist of resolving Germany's problems? It has certainly brought a change in style. Mr SchrOder trusted his instincts and was a master at
51
ANNUAL EDITIONS
Wasting Brains Germany's school system fails to make the most of the country's human capital hat is the best way of measuring improvements in a school system? Grades, perhaps; or the proportion of students getting a high-school diploma. In Genuany, though, it may be the number of cafeterias in schools. Hundreds
W
Crucially, the main beneficiaries of the present system are determined to resist change. "This is about keeping many away from society's feeding troughs," says Wilfried Bos, head of the Institute for School Development Research in Dortmund. And indeed Germany's school system is brilliant at what it was built for: selection. In most Under, following four years at elementary school, pupils are streamed into one of the three kinds of secondary schooL A pupil who happens to be a slow learner or whose family does not particularly value education will find it very hard to move up from a less demanding school to a Gymnasium. By contrast, those who cannot keep up with the pace at the Gymnasium soon find themselves demoted. Add the facts that teachers' unions wield lots of power and that schools are overregulated and underfunded, and it is easy to understand why German schools are inefficient and often ineffective. There are hundreds of curricula that describe what teachers should teach, but few mechanisms to ensure that the children have actually taken it in. Nor is much official attention given to individual support, whether for weaker or for exceptionally bright students. Instead, parents spend vast sums on supplementary private tutoring, often provided by teachers in their spare time.
are being built in a nationwide effort to create the infrastructure that will allow schools to operate all day so that children can spend more time learning, instead of being sent home in time for a hot lunch. Yet this construction activity also shows how far Germany still
has to go to modernise its school system. and to turn it into an effiw dent engine for promoting talent and brains. German schools are superb at separating insiders from outsiders. But in so doing, they squander the human capital that the country needs to prosper. "In Germany, there is nothing more controversial than education," says Helmut Rau, minister of education and cultural affairs in the state of Baden-Wtirttemberg. He has just been grilled in the state parliament in Stuttgart over- his government's school refonus. Parents have complained that even younger pupils are now required to stay in school for several afternoons a week and are given lots of homework on top. This is because Baden-Wtirttemberg has just become the fIrst western state to cut the period of secondary schooling from nine to eight years (in the east, eight years has always been the nonn). "It's just getting too much," exclaims one MP who is also a mother. To understand such complaints, you need to know a bit about the history of German education. Like other European countries, Germany from the Middle Ages developed a school system based on class. But whereas most other European countries have since moved on to more inclusive systems, Germany has essentially stuck to a three-tier structure: the Hauptschule (for students who hope to go on to an apprenticeship), the Realschule (whose graduates typically take middling white-collar jobs) and the Gymnasium (awarding the Abitur that admits the holder to university). Only at the Grundschule (elementary school) are pupils from all ability groups taught together. After the second world war the Allies tried to impose a unified school system on the country, but the Liinderrefused to play. They have always seen education as a question of local power, which explains why state governments ended up with such wide-ranging responsibilities for it. Yet in practice this has meant that German education combines the worst of both centralisation and devolution. To comply with the constitutional requirement for "equality in living conditions", the Under must agree on some common rules, which has proved a barrier to reform: the body created for that purpose, the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs, has to agree unanimously on any change. Another bamer to reform is ideology. Education has always been a battleground of ideas, particularly since the first Gesamtschulen (comprehensive schools) opened in the mid-1960s. Many on the left saw this type of school as a silver bullet to ensure equal opportunities for all. The right, for its part, made "Save the Gymnasium" its rallying cry. It seems to have won: only about 700 out of over 19,000 secondary schools are now Gesamtschulen.
Life after PISA Despite all this, Germans long considered their country's school system among the best in the world. What persuaded them otherwise was PISA, the OEeD's Programme for International Student Assessment, which compares educational achievement in different countries. The first results in 2001 came as a nasty surprise: Genuany ranked only 21st in reading skills and 20th in maths and science among 31 countries assessed. ''The loss of reputation became a powerful force for change," says Dieter Lenzen, president of Berlin's Free University. The HPISA shock", as it came to be known, did indeed trigger much reform activity, but all within the existing system. Western Under began shortening the Gymnasium course, clearing out their curricula and controlling their schools' output through state-wide exams. Their standing conference is now working on drawing up nationwide educational standards. And the federal government has started a 4 billion programme to create Ganztagsschulen, or full-time schools. The state of Baden-Wtirttemberg is generally seen as a model in education, partly because its school system provides for some upward mobility and partly because it started out on reforms even before PISA. It was the first west Gennan state to shorten the Gymnasium course by a year. But the core of the reforms, says Mr Rau, the education minister, are the new curricula, which give each school a fair amount of autonomy. "It has always been an illusion to think that we are able to tell schools exactly what to do," says MrRau. Since the reform, the schools themselves can decide how to fill a third of the lessons. The character of the curricula has changed
52
Article 8. Waiting for a Wunder background than in any other big industrial country (see figure 3). In Germany, the child of a professor is four times more likely to go to a Gymnasium than the equally bright child of a manual worker. The chances of an immigrant's child will be even more skewed. Look at almost any Hauptschule, and you will soon discover that schools are not created equal either. The Pestalozzischule in Rohr, another suburb of Stuttgart, is certainly one of the better~ run, and Maria Pfadt, the principal, goes to great lengths to give her students a good start. She works closely with local businesses, which regularly give presentations at the school (and one recently donated 250,000 for a building to house such events), She even gives classes in manners, and takes students to the opera to reduce social barriers. Yet if the Geschwister-Scholl-Gymnasium comes across as a secondhand Mercedes in good repair, the Pestalozzischule is more like a beat-up Volkswagen. Its teachers give more lessons to larger classes but are paid less. More than a third of its students are immigrants' children, compared with 7% at the Gymnasium on the other side of Stuttgart (although, to be fair, fewer of them live in its catchment area). In the centres of big cities, the children of immigrants often make up the majority of a class, and sometimes all of it. Even more disappointing for the students who attend a Hauptschule, Gennany's famed "dual model" for apprentices (who spend half their time on the shop~floor and the other half in a vocational school) is no longer the social elevator it once was. Many would-be apprentices are crowded out by graduates of grander schools. And the maths demanded in some apprenticeships can be far too hard for somebody with only basic schooling. Besides, many German firms simply no longer take in apprentices. All this explains why more than half of vocational-school students no longer do a classic apprenticeship but enrol in some other professional programme. At stake are not just equal opportunities, but the future prospects of the Gennan economy. "The Gennan education system is wasting valuable potential," says Andreas Schleicher, a co~ordinator of PIS A research at the OECD. He has become something of a persona non grata among Germany's education establishment, perhaps because he dares to criticise his own country. Mr Schleicher thinks that in its education policy Gennany needs to become more like Finland, which twice topped the PISA charts for literacy. For instance, it could start teaching children in nursery school rather than simply letting them play, stop selecting students for different types of schools so young, and create a culture of individual support. In the long run, Geonany may have no choice but to do away with its three-tier school system. Such attempts have failed before, but two new forces are now at work. One is demography: as the number of pupils drops rapidly, having just one, comprehensive, !dnd of school may be more efficient than maintaining three. The other force is business, which cannot thrive without welleducated employees. It was a lobbying organisation for Bavarian business, the Vereinigung der Bayerischen Wirtschaft, that in 2003 pubHshed the most comprehensive study so far on how to refoon Gennany's education system. According to the PISA study, Bavaria has the best students in the country but the smallest proportion of those awarded the Abitur; which means that it has to import them from other Lander. In fact, in Gennany as a whole the share of students who qualify for admission to university is low by international standards: the current number is only 35%, compared with an OEeD average of 56%,
Student performance in mathematics and importance of socio-economic background
OECD:
AVERAGE:
~
25-----------·~---------
.gE "c:
~
Germany
_Turkey
120 "
United StatesPol~nd -
1 .2
-France • Sweden
~ '~ 15 OECD______ !~~Iy.~_~ _____________ JMao __
i ,~
" :;
10AVERAGE
(;" 5
Russi:
i •
i
cana! Finland
---------:--------'-"'.="--
:S ~
g> ~
0;
o~--~--~~--~--~--~
400 425 450 475 500 525 550 Average student performance in mathematics
Source:OECD, PISA study 2003 Figure 3 Class Act.
as well. In the past, for instance, English teachers in 10th grade were told how many words and which grammatical rules they had to teach their students and exactly what they should tell them about America. Now the cunicula are all about "competencies", general skills that students are expected to master. To make sure they do, they have to take state-wide tests every other year.
Some schools are already learning to make use of their new-found autonomy. At the Geschwister-Scholl-Gymnasium in Sillenbuch, a suburb of Stuttgart, the new curriculum has led to a series of internal refonns, says Inngard Brendgen, the school's principal. Subject teachers, for instance, have had to start co-operating with each other and draw up guidelines for their area of expertise. Because school days are now much longer, the school decided to do away with the 45-minute lessons that are customary in Gennany and replace them with periods of 90 minutes. This, in tum, set off new thinking about the best teaching methods for such a period. "It has been a demanding, but also a very positive process," says Ms Brendgen. Yet elsewhere things have not gone so smoothly. Many Gymnasien in Baden-Wlirttemberg seem to be stuck in their old ways: they do what they have always done, and just cram the same syllabus into a shorter period of time-hence the protests from parents. Yet critics also blame the plethora of new tests: schools will now teach to the tests instead of taking advantage of their greater independence. At any rate, such refoIDls will not resolve the other big problem of Gennany's education system: social segregation. Again, it has been PISA that has forced the country to face reality, When another round of results made headlines in November last year, Gennan students' performance turned out somewhat better than the first time, but a different measure attracted more attention: a 15-yearold's school record depended more heavily on socio-economic
53
ANNUAL EDITIONS
Thinning Blood On immigration, Germany is torn between its past and its future
A
sk Heribert Bruchhagen about the ethnic composition of his football team, and he has to consult his secretary. It is not that the boss of Eintracht Frankfurt, once one of
prove German ancestry were invariably welcomed. Immigrants without German roots were also admitted in large numbers, but on differentterms: under Germany's 'lguestwworkermodel", they were expected to go home when they were no longer needed.
the more successful Gennan clubs, does not care. But when he recruits players, passports and origins are not much on his mind. More important is their price tag. And even more critical, all must speak. German, and at least a third must hail from the Frankfurt area. "In times of crisis, the coach needs to be able to talk directly to the players," Mr Bruchhagen explains in his office overlooking Frankfurt's stadium. "And the team must be rooted in the region." The resulting Eintracht squad includes quite a few names that suggest origins further afield: Du-Ri Cha, Jermaine Jones, Mounir Chaftar. Nearly half of them are foreign-born or have at least one non-German parent, but most of the second group grew up around Frankfurt. The recruitment policy seems to be working: after a bad start to the season, the club worked its way up to tenth place in Gennany's premier league. Every city, goes the joke, gets the football club it deserves. Thanks to its huge airport, its financial district and at one time the presence of many American companies' German headquarters, Frankfurt has become the country's most diverse city: some 40% of its population of 655,000 hold a foreign passport or come from an immigrant background. This has made Frankfurt unusually tolerant. lOWe have always welcomed immigrants", explains Albrecht Magen, head of the city's integration department. "because we live and die by our internationalism." The politicians in Berlin, alas, are being less positive. After a brief period in 1999 when Germany at last seemed to have accepted that it was an immigration country-and even began to see foreigners as an asset-things have again changed for the worse. "In Germany, immigration is still seen as hurting society," says Klaus Bade, a professor at Osnabrock University.
Here to Stay Predictably, though, many of the 14m guest workers whom Germany allowed in between 1955 and 1973 stayed on, particularly the Turks. They also brought their families over, which resulted in many German-born foreigners. Add other immigrants, refugees and EU citizens (who can come and go as they please), and it is easy to see why the number of foreigners grew rapidly, from 500,000 after the second world war to 6.7m (8% of the population) today. Another 7m or so Germans are naturalised immigrants. In record time, all this has turned Germany into nearly as much of a nation of immigrants as America. Yet it took German politics until the late 1990s to accept this reality. Both big parties often felt they had to pander to antiimmigrant, if not xenophobic views. There were fears that immigrants would take unfair advantage of Germany's still-generous welfare state. And integration often did not go smoothly. Many Turks, in particular, found it hard to settle in, not least because a large contingent came from rural Anatolia and had to get used to living in an industrial society as well as a Christian one. It was only when the coalition of Social Democrats and Greens carne to power in 1998 that things began to change. The first government of Gerhard Schroder passed a law making naturalisation much easier (although some Liinder have now put up various new barriers). Yet faced wjth the threat of terrorism and a deteriorating economic situation, the federal government abandoned plans to liberalise immigration rules and instead concentrated on tightening security and improving integration. For example, a new immigration law passed in 2004 requires new inunigrants to take German lessons. Learning German is doubtless important, notes Ismail Ersan, chairman of the Ttirkisches Volkshaus, a cultural organisation for Turkish imrnigrants in Frankfurt. But those who push hardest for it, he thinks, really want assimilation, not integration. Turning immigrants into Germans should not be the objective, he argues: "We need to find ways to live together, giving everybody equal opportunities." As yet, that is a distant dream. The third generation of Turkish immigrants, in particular, is increasingly marginalised-and not just because of the school system and the labour market. The exclusion starts when they become teenagers, explains Mr Ersan: they often switch to a Turkish football club at that point because their old German club makes it clear to them that they do not really belong there. When they have finished school, they are rarely offered even an unpaid internship, let alone an apprenticeship. That is if they manage to finish school at all. According to a 2001 study by Bamberg University, 15.6% of young foreigners in Frankfurt failed to do so, compared with 6.5% of Germans. Far too many left school at 14. For Germany as a whole, the nurnbers are
Blood or Soil? Germany is not the only country that has problems with immigration, but it faces a special dilemma. In a way, it is torn between its past and its future: it still yearns for cultural homogeneity, but will in fact need more immigrants, particularly highly skilled ones, to make up for its low birth rate and to keep its economy competitive. It is the "legacy of romanticism", in the words of Dieter Obernd5rfer, a political scientist at Freiburg University, that holds Germany back. Thinkers such as Friedrich Julius Stahl, a 19thcentury lawyer, developed the idea that Germans are a people based on descent. HThe older and purer the tribe," he wrote, "the more it will be a nation." This became mainstream thinking, at least among the ruling classes, and helps to explain why, some time after Germany had become a nation at last in the late 19th century, it decided to base citizenship on blood rather than soiL The emphasis on ethnic origin also explains why Germany has seen a huge influx of foreigners with German roots since the sec~ ond world war, mostly from eastern Europe. Individuals who could
54
Article 8. Waiting for a Wunder even worse. «The situation is certainly not as bad as in France," says Mr Ersan, "but if things don't improve, cars may also be burning here one day." The Turkish community is also to blame. Many have retreated into ethnic ghettos: the availability of a complete Turkish infra~ structure makes it possible for them to live in Gennany without having much contact with Gennans. The fact that Turkish men in Germany increasingly look for wives in Turkey does not help: their children are often raised the traditional way and do not learn enough German to integrate properly. Immigration is not just about Turks, however, insists Helga Nagel, head of Frankfurt's office for multicultural affairs. Indeed, although they are certainly the most visible, they make up only about 20% of the city's foreign population (which more or less mirrors the national mix, see figure 4). Another 22% come from former Yugoslavia and 9% from Italy. And most, says Ms Nagel, are better integrated than you might expect. If so, then her department deserves some of the credit. Frankfurt was the first German city to create such an office, back in 1989, after the Greens fonned a coalition with the Social Democrats to run the city. When the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats took over in 1995, they did not abolish the office, as some had feared, and even kept its name. Today, the office co~ordinates an impressive array of programmes. Apart from the obvious language classes and translation service, the staff also helps immigrants to find their way through the complicated German education system, get health care and sort out problems. The office also tries to monitor the state of integration-not an easy task because, perhaps unsurprisingly, Germany does not collect much information about its immigrants. Other German cities have since copied Frankfurt's approach. But is that enough to integrate immigrants, particularly youths from a Turkish background? Unlike other countries, including France, Germany has never seriously discussed affinnative action for immigrants. Nor has it grasped that immigration policy today is no longer about keeping foreigners out or turning them into good Germans, but about competing actively in the global war for tal~ ent, says Thomas Straubhaar, president of the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, a think-tank. In a globalised knowl~ edge economy, he argues, the wealth of a country will increasingly depend on highly skilled individuals. Yet such people are mobile and can choose where they want to live.
Foreign nationals' in Germany, countries of origin 2004, '000
o Turkey
200
400
600
_ _ _ _:vm
Italy Former Yugoslavia Greece Poland Croatia Russia Austria
Bosnia and Herzegovina Ukraine *Including German·born
Figure 4 Welcome Guests? Sources: Federal Statistics Agency
to Germany is declining: in the II months to November 2005, only 900 arrived, compared with 2,300 in 2004. Mr Bade of Osnabrock University thinks this is all the more serious because many highly qualified Gennans are leaving. The numbers are hard to pin down, but between 1991 and 2003 an average of 115,500 people emigrated, many of them young and holding a university degree, according to the 2004 report of the Expert Council on Inunigration and Integration, of which Mr Bade was deputy chairman (and which has since been disbanded). A couple of hours' drive south from Frankfurt lies Stuttgart, Germany's second most international city, which has produced a raft of ideas for retaining and attracting highly skilled people. In 2001, the city launched an action plan to prepare itself for becoming even more international. To foster integration, Stuttgart offers much the same activities as Frankfurt. But in addition, it tries to make itself as attractive as possible to the global creative crowd. Foreign students, for instance, are offered help with things like finding their way through the thickets of German bureaucracy. More recently, Stuttgart has started to combine its efforts to attract skilled individuals with policies to boost the low birth rate: it wants to become Germany's most family~friendly city. Over the next few years, it plans to introduce a range of measures to make life easier for parents and children, for instance by providing more day care, playgrounds and bicycle routes. This is not ideology or public relations but sheer pragmatism, says Wolfgang Schuster, Stuttgart's (Christian Democrat) mayor. To prosper, the city needs both more immigrants and more children. What is good for Stuttgart, the home of DaimlerChrysler, might well be worth considering for Germany as a whole. Yet immigration does not seem to rank high on Gennany's political agenda. The grand-coalition agreement mentions it only in passing, under the heading "security". If that foreshadows neglect of the issue, it could turn out to be a serious mistake.
Tempt Me If Richard Florida, an economist at George Mason University,Virginia, has his numbers right, Germany still has more work to do to become a top choice for what he calls "high poten~ tials". In his 2005 book, "The Flight of the Creative Class", he produces an index measuring the competitiveness of nations in terms of the "3 Ts" of economic growth: technology, talent and tolerance. Germany does not come out too badly on tolerance, but it lags in developing talent and implementing technology. Overall, it ranks only tenth in the "global creativity index". Gennany's 2004 immigration law win do nothing to improve that ranking. Foreigners who have graduated from German universities can still be sent packing even if they have found a job. And highly qualified workers stilI do not get permanent residence permits. As a result, the numbers of these "high potentials" moving
55
ANNUAL EDITIONS
Reincarnation Valley The city of Jena provides a tantalising glimpse of the way Germany could be going
f you seek Paradise, go to Jena. The bosses of this city in the eastern German state of Thuringia, twoand-a-half hours south of Berlin, may have been a little ambitious when they named the main railway station after an eponymous nearby park. Jena is clearly no Garden of Eden. Like any city, it has its problems, not least an unemployment rate of 12%. But it also offers a glimpse of Germany's future-and shows that Germany's east is not all bad. Historically, Jena embodies the famous dictum by Louis Pasteur, the French chemist, that "chance favours the prepared mind." It was a fluke of nature that the city, by the river Saale and surrounded by heavily forested uplands, found itself near large deposits of quartz sand, chalk and soda. Thus endowed, people began making glass in the region in the 16th century. Yet what turned Jena into a 19th-century Silicon Valley was its renowned university, which attracted not only famous thinkers such as Goethe, Hegel and Fichte, but also more business-oriented folk such as Ernst Abbe. Having developed new ways of making microscopes, he found himself what today would be called a contract manufacturer, Carl Zeiss, and a component supplier, Otto Schott. By the beginning of the 20th century, the firm Carl Zeiss had more than 1,000 employees. It continued to grow rapidly, helped by the two world wars, but also suffering from them. Many of its plants were destroyed at the end of the second world war, and what remained was taken away, first by the Americans, then by the Russians. Still, Jena soon became the base of a huge Kombinat, as the big state-owned businesses were called in communist East Germany. This one had 27,000 employees when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, about half of them in Jena, of whom more than 90% lost their jobs after the economic shock of unification. Now Jena's city centre has been completely modernised, thanks to tons of money from western Germany. The former Zeiss factory has made way for the university
and a big, smart shopping centre. What makes Jena different from many other eastern cities is that there is plenty of life on the streets. In some ways, the city seems a double of Berkeley, California, complete with well-wooded hills dotted with professors' villas. Alexander von Witzleben, the boss of Jenoptik, the successor firm to Carl Zeiss Jena, has a splendid view of the city from his top-floor office on campus. "Frankly, if we were in the textile business, we would no longer be here," he says. The optics industry is hot again, he explains, particularly photonics-things like high-end lasers, optical sensors and specialised cameras, which Jenoptik is good at. To general surprise, the city was listed in a 2004 study as eastern Germany's most promising business location. Jena could easily have gone the way of other eastern industrial centres, where firms were bought by western competitors and then gutted or even closed down. Carl Zeiss owes its survival to Lothar Spath, the former premier of Baden-Wiirttemberg, who became its chief executive in 1991. Counterintuitively, he bought a firm in the west, a builder of clean rooms and other industrial facilities, to give Jenoptik a western face and the cash flow to develop its photonics business. The firm, M+W Zander, was only recently sold off to allow Jenoptik to concentrate on its core business. Moreover, explains Mr von Witzleben, as a former politician Mr Spath knew how to keep this species at bay. And he had the foresight to protect what is perhaps Jena's most important asset: its network of highly skilled people. Former Carl Zeiss employees were allowed to use the firm's facilities to create their own companies, spawning many start-ups. This has given Jena an entrepreneurial ecosystem that is rare elsewhere in Germany.
I
Creative Destruction There are start-ups all over the city and several research centres on a campus up the hill. There is also the Technology
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Article 8. Waiting for a Wunder
and Innovation Park Jena, with about 60 finns, which demonstrates that Jena no longer relies mainly on optics. Near the entrance is an incubator for biotechnology finns called Biocentiv. Stefan Russwunn, founder of SIRS-Lab, a diagnostics finn, says the experience of radical change when the Wall came down played a big part in his decision to start his company: "Otherwise I would not have had the flexibility. Back then, the world fell apart once a week." Mr Russwunn chose Jena because he found conditions there particularly favourable. Almost a third of the city's working population have an academic degree, the highest share in Gennany. They take pride in being Jenenser and don't go home early. Jena also has a tradition of liberalism. It was here that the first Burschenschaft, or fraternity, was founded in 1815, starting the free-speech movement of its time. In the 1980s, the city was the centre of the eastern German peace movement, and became one of the first to mount Monday rallies, the regnlar demonstrations that helped to bring down the communist regime in 1989. All of this goes a long way towards explaining the unusual political landscape in Jena today. The city conncil is controlled by a very grand coalition that includes all of Gennany's bigger parties except for the extreme right. The (directly elected) mayor, Peter Rohlinger, is a Free Democrat who was a vet before winning his first vote in 1990. "Citizens here are quite demanding," he says. "They want us to make the most of our opportunities." This has often meant doing things differently. For example, Jena did not shnt down its nursery schools when money was tight, but persuaded their staff to work parttime. It also chose to build its shopping centre right in the middle of town rather than on the outskirts, which has kept the city centre alive. Most importantly, Jena is trying new ways of dealing with long-tenn unemployment and education. Some of the results can be seen on the Tatzendpromenade, one of the city's main streets. On one side there is Jenarbeit, the agency run by the city to find jobs for those who are unemployed for more than a year. When labour-market refonns were brought in last year, the city decided against an Arbeitsgemeinschaft with the Federal Employment Agency, which it felt would not have taken enough account of local conditions, Instead, it set up an independent local
organisation to look after its long-tenn unemployed, the only eastern city to do so, The comprehensive school across the street, called Jenaplan, aims to ensure that its pupils will not become unemployed in the first place. Visit the school, and you may see a couple dressed in black doing the tango as part of a project about the dance, Such projects are an important component of the school's life and often involve a mixture of age groups. "This allows for much more individualised learning," says Gisela John, the principaL The Jenaplan school exists because a group of teachers took the initiative to revive this particular form of learning, originally developed in the 1920s, and the city of Jena as well as the Land of Thuringia let them get on with it. Jena's education system is exceptionally diverse for a city of 100,000 people: it includes several all-day schools, a Montessori school, a bilingual high school and another one specialising in sport. Given so much variety, the usual distinctions between the Gymnasium and other forms of secondary education fade into the background, In some ways Jena has had an easier time of it than other Gennan cities: foreigners make up only around 5% of its popnlation. This is not because it is especially xenophobic (though there have been cases of racially motivated violence that have prompted citizens' protests), but because the fonner eastern Gennan government let in only small numbers of immigrants, mainly from Vietnam, However, the numbers are bound to rise, if only to fill the gaps created by the low birth rate (which is even more pronounced in eastern than in western Gennany) and the continuing migration of younger people to the west. "By 2009 at the latest, we won't have enough good candidates for all our apprenticeships," worries Jenoptik's Mr von Witzleben. For Jena's economic dynamism to continue, he says, it may have to try to attract highly qualified foreigners. Jena has other weaknesses too, not least that its two other large firms, Jenaphann and Schott, are being downgraded to mere manufacturing sites by their parent companies in west Gennany; and that there is a marked absence of the Silicon Valley kind of venture capitalist. But the city is still the best preview availahle of what Gennany might be capable of if the state let go,
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Letting Go Germany needs to loosen up-or face decline ngela Merkel has a mission: putting Gennany back among the "first three" of Europe's top nations within ten years. The German chancellor has yet to explain what exactly that would mean. But if things went well, a repeat of this survey in 2015 should be able to report that in the past decade the country had thoroughly modernised its education system; that unemployment had fallen to a bearable 3m; that recent years had seen a boom in basic service jobs; and that Germany had become a top destination for the world's creative crowd. Alas, not everybody believes that this will come to pass. Wolfgang Streeck at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, one of Germany's foremost social thinkers, reckons that things are getting worse rather than better. Back in 2003, he wrote: "There is little hope that the German political system will overcome its present immobility, making continued social and economic decline the most likely scenario for the future." Today he goes further: he argues that even a grand coalition will have to face the fact that the Gennan state, "has, perhaps irreversibly, exhausted its means". To make a real difference, the government would have to do a whole host of things at once: cut payroll and corporate taxes, balance the budget, reduce debt, invest more in education and infrastructure and integrate immigrants. Yet given that the state's coffers are empty and growth is likely to remain moderate, that is an impossible task. So what is an "exhausted state" to do? To find an answer, think about Gennany's post-war history. Perhaps the main reason for the country's success has been its rebirth as a "semi-sovereign state", a term coined by Peter Katzenstein, a political scientist at Cornell University. The state was weak and fragmented and had to rely on non-governmental bodies. such as trade unions and employers' associations, to get things done. Yet over time, this system, which originally was quite flexible, has become ossified. Changes in one part of the system have became extremely difficult because they often have undesirable consequences in another. According to a well-worn Gennan political adage, "everything is linked with everything." Germany needs to loosen up, and in some ways it is already doing so. For example, trade unions have quietly abandoned rigid industry-wide collective bargaining. But the state itself still needs to learn how to let go. Thorough refonn of the
federal system, one that includes an overhaul of the "financial constitution", would give the Liinder more freedom to do their own thing. But the Lander, too, must let go, not least by giving schools and universities much more autonomy.
A
If You Can't Beat It, Join It Liberalisation is already making inroads anyway, although sometimes to the detriment of society's outsiders. Education? More and more private schools are being opened for those who can pay for them. The labour market? Illicit work is rampant, with estimates putting it at 15% of GDP. Immigration? According to some experts. Germany is now home to around 1m illegal immigrants. All this suggests that Germany's future lies in greater diversity. It would help the country's outsiders to share in and contribute to its success-and not just the economically underprivileged ones, but also those who simply see and do things differently, perhaps because they have lived abroad for a while. They, too, are all too often shut out or not taken seriously. With the World Cup approaching, football may offer a lesson for Gennany. The nation's favourite sport is currently facing problems similar to those of the country as a whole: not only have other countries' teams got much better, but foreign players have crowded out native ones in the Gennan premier league. In the ranking of the International Federation of Football Associations, the national team has dropped from second place in 1998 to 16th now. It was only after the country's humbling in the European Cup in 2004 that the Gennan Football Association, a clunky, overconfident organisation, accepted the need for action. It hired JUrgen Klinsmann, a former German soccer star, as national coach. Mr Klinsmann, who lives in California and is seen as a "West Coast German", has refused to move to Germany and still runs his own company. He exudes optimism and is willing to fight to get his way. Gennan football, it seems, is more willing to embrace change than the country as a whole. "A monopoly that isn't capable of innovating from within will be swept away at some point," says Theo Zwanziger, the Football Association's new vice-president. Gennany would be well advised to heed his words.
E;l;~:J:l[ll.-w.ati~~
From The Economist, February 9, 2006. Copyright © 2006 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission, Further reproduction prohibited. www.economist.com
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Article 9
Japanese Spirit, Western Things When America's black ships forced open Japan, nobody could have predicted that the two nations would become the world's great economic: powers pen up. With that simple demand, Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Japan's Edo (now Tokyo) Bay with his "black ships of evil mien" 150 years ago this week. Before the black ships arrived on July 8th 1853, the Tokugawa shoguns had run Japan for 250 years as a reclusive feudal state. Carrying a letter from America's president, Millard Fillmore, and punctuating his message with cannon fire, Commodore Perry ordered Japan's rulers to drop their barri-
Nowadays, although poor countries still want Japan (along with America and the European Union) to free up trade in farm goods, most rich-country complaints about Japan are aimed at its approach to macroeconomics and finance, rather than its trade policies. Japan's insistence on protecting bad banks and worthless companies, say its many critics, and its reluctance to let foreign investors help fix the economy, have prevented Japanese demand from recovering for far too long. Once again, the refrain goes, Japan is unfairly taking what it can get from the world economy-exports and overseas profits have been its only source of comfort for years-without giving anything back. While these complaints have always had some merit, they have aJl too often been made in a way that misses a crucial point: Japan's economic miracle, though at times paired with policies ranging from protectionist to xenophobic, has nevertheless proved a huge blessing to the rest of the world as well. The "structuraJ impediments" that shut out imports in the 1980s did indeed keep Japanese consumers and foreign exporters from enjoying some of the fruits of that miracle; but its export prowess allowed western consumers to enjoy better and cheaper cars and electronics even as Japanese households grew richer. Similarly, Japan's resistance to inward investment is indefensible. not least because it allows salvageable Japanese companies to wither; but its outward investment has helped to transform much of East Asia into a thriving economic region, putting a huge dent in global poverty. Indeed, one of the most impressive aspects of Japan's economic miracle is that, even while reaping only half the potential gains from free trade and investment, it has still managed to do the world so much good over the past haJf-century.
O
ers and open the country to trade. Over the next century and a
half, Japan emerged as one of history's great economic success stories. It is now the largest creditor to the world that it previously shunned. Attempts to dissect this economic "miracle" often focus intently on the aftermath of the second world war. Japan's occupation by the Americans, who set out to rebuild the country as a pacifist liberal democracy, helped to set the stage for four decades of jaw-dropping growth. Yet the origins of the miracle-and of the continual tensions it has created inside Japan and out-stretch further back. When General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan's surrender in 1945 aboard the battleship Missouri, the Americans made sure to hang Commodore Perry's flag from 1853 over the ship's rear turret. They had not only ended a brutaJ war and avenged the attack on Pearl Harbour-they had also, they thought, won an argument with Japan that was by then nearly a century old. America's enduring frustration-in the decades after 1853, in 1945, and even today-has not been so much that Japan is closed, but that it long ago mastered the art of opening up on its own terms. Before and after those black ships steamed into Edo Bay, after all, plenty of other countries were opened to trade by western cannon. What set Japan apart-perhaps aided by America's lack of colonial ambition-was its ability to decide for itself how to make the process of opening suit its own aims. One consequence of this is that Japan's trading partners, especially America, have never tired of complaining about its economic practices. Japan-bashing reached its most recent peak in the 1980s, when American politicians and businessmen blamed "unfair" competition for Japan's large trade surpluses. But similar complaints could be heard within a few decades of Commodore Perry's mission. The attitude was summed up by "Mr Dooley", a character created by Peter Finley Dunne, an American satirist, at the close of the 19th century: "Th' trouble is whin the gallant Commodore kicked opn th' door, we didn't go in. They come out."
Setting an Example Arguably, however, Japan's other big effect on the world has been even more important. It has shown clearly that you do not have to embrace "western" culture in order to modernise your economy and prosper. From the very beginning, Japan set out to have one without the other, an approach encapsulated by the saying "Japanese spirit, western things". How did Japan pull it off? In part, because the historical combination of having once been wide open, and then rapidly slamming shut, taught Japan how to control the aperture through which new ideas and practices streamed in. After eagerly absorbing Chinese culture,
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
philosophy, writing and technology for roughly a millennium, Japan followed this with 250 years of near-total isolation. Christianity was outlawed, and overseas travel was punishable by death. Although some Japanese scholars were aware of developments in Europe-which went under the broad heading of "Dutch studies"-the shoguns strictly limited their ability to put any of that knowledge to use. They confined all economic and other exchanges with Europeans to a tiny man-made island in the south-western port of Nagasaki. When the Americans arrived in 1853, the Japanese told them to go to Nagasaki and obey the rules. Commodore Perry refused, and Japan concluded that the only way to "expel the barbarians" in future would be to embrace their technology and grow stronger. But once the door was ajar, the Japanese appetite for "western things" grew unbounded. A modern guidebook entry on the port city of Yokohama, near Tokyo, notes that within two decades of the black ships' arrival it boasted the country's first bakery (1860), photo shop (1862), telephone (1869), beer brewery (1869), cinema (1870), daily newspaper (1870), and public lavatory (1871). Yet, at the same time, Japan's rulers also managed to frustrate many of the westerners' wishes. The constant tension between Japan's desire to measure up to the West-economically, diplomatically, socially and, until 1945, militarily-and its resistance to cultural change has played out in countless ways, good and bad, to this day. Much of it has reflected a healthy wish to hang on to local traditions. This is far more than just a matter of bowing and sleeping on futons and tatami, or of old women continuing to wear kimonos. The Japanese have also clung to distinct ways of speaking, interacting in the workplace, and showing each other respect, all of which have helped people to maintain harmony in many aspects of everyday life. Unfortunately, however, ever since they first opened to the West, anti-liberal Japanese leaders have preferred another interpretation of "Japanese spirit, western things". Instead of simply trying to preserve small cultural traditions, Japan's power-brokers tried to absorb western technology in a way that would shield them from political competition and protect their interests. Imitators still abound in Japan and elsewhere. In East Asia alone, Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad, Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra, and even the Chinese Communist Party all see Japan as proof that there is a way to join the rich-country club without making national leaders or their friends accountable. These disciples of Japan's brand of modernisation often use talk of local culture to resist economic and political threats to their power. But they are careful to find ways to do this without undennining all trade and investment, since growth is the only thing propping them up. Japan's first attempt to pursue this strategy, it must never be forgotten. grew increasingly horrific as its inconsistencies mounted. In 1868, while western writers were admiring those bakeries and cinemas, Japan's nationalist leaders were "restoring" the emperor's significance to that of an imaginary golden age. The trouble, as Ian Buruma describes in his new book, "Inventing Japan" (see article), is that the "Japanese spirit" they valued was a concoction that mixed in several bad western ideas: German theories on racial purity, European excuses for colonialism, and the observation from Christianity that a single
overarching deity (in Japan's case the newly restored emperor) could motivate soldiers better than a loose contingent of Shinto gods. This combination would eventually whip countless young Japanese into a murderous xenophobic frenzy and foster rapacious colonial aggression. It also led Japan into a head-on collision with the United States, since colonialism directly contradicted America's reasons for sending Commodore Perry. In "The Clash", a 1998 book on the history of American-Japanese relations, Walter LaFeber argues that America's main goal in opening Japan was not so much to trade bilaterally, as to enlist Japan's support in creating a global marketplace including, in particular, China. At first, the United States opened Japan because it was on the way to China and had coal for American steamships. Later, as Japan gained industrial and military might, America sought to use it as a counterweight to European colonial powers that wanted to divide China among their empires. America grew steadily more furious, therefore, as Japan turned to colonialism and tried to carve up China on its own. The irony for America was that at its very moment of triumph, after nearly a century of struggling with European powers and then Japan to keep China united and open, it ended up losing it to communism. A half-century later, however, and with a great deal of help from Japan, America has achieved almost exactly what it set out to do as a brash young power in the 1850s, when it had barely tarned its own continent and was less than a decade away from civil war. Mainland China is whole. It has joined the World Trade Organisation and is rapidly integrating itself into the global economy. It is part of a vast East Asian trade network that nevertheless carries out more than half of its trade outside the region. And this is all backed up by an array of American security guarantees in the Pacific. The resemblance to what America set out to do in 1853 is striking. For both Japan and America, therefore, the difficult 150year relationship has brought impressive results. They are now the world's two biggest economies, and have driven most of the world's technological advances over the past half-century. America has helped Japan by opening it up, destroying its militarists and rebuilding the country afterwards, and, for the last 50 years, providing security and market access while Japan became an advanced export dynamo. Japan has helped America by improving on many of its technologies, teaching it new manufacturing techniques, spurring on American firms with its competition, and venturing into East Asia to trade and invest.
And Now? What, then, will the continuing tension between Japanese spirit and western things bring in the decades ahead? For America, though it will no doubt keep complaining, Japan's resistance to change is not the real worry. Instead, the same two Asian challenges that America has taken on ever since Commodore Perry sailed in will remain the most worrying risks: potential rivalries, and the desire by some leaders to form exclusive regional economic blocks. America still needs Japan, its chief Asian ally, to combat these dangers. Japan's failure to reform, however, could slowly sap its usefulness.
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Article 9. Japanese Spirit, Western Things
For Japan, the challenges are far more daunting. Many of them stern from the increasing toll that Japan's old wa.ys are taking on the economy. Chief among these is Japan's hostility towards competition in many aspects of economic life. Although competitive private firms have driven much of its innovation and growth, especially in export-intensive industries, Japan's political system continues to hobble competition and private enterprise in many domestic sectors. In farming, health care and education, for example, recent efforts to allow private companies a role have been swatted down by co-operatives, workers, politicians and civil servants. In other inefficient sectors, such as construction and distribution, would-be losers continue to be propped up by government policy. Now that Japan is no longer growing rapidly, it is harder for competitive forces to function without allowing some of those losers to fail. Japan's foreign critics are correct, moreover, that its macroeconomic and financial policies are a disgrace. The central bank, the finance ministry, the bank regulators, the prime minister and the ruling-party politicians all blame each other for failing to deal with the problems. All the while, Japan continues to limp along, growing far below its potential as its liabilities mount. Its public-sector debt, for instance, is a terrifying 140% ofGDP. Lately, there has been much talk about employing more western things to help lift Japan out of its mess. The prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, talks about deregulatory measures that have been tried in North America, Europe and elsewhere. Western auditing and corporate governance techniques-applied in a Japanese way, of course-are also lauded as potential fixes. Even inward foreign direct investment is held out by Mr Koizumi as part of the solution: he has pledged to double it over the next five years. The trouble with all of these ideas, however, is that nobody in Japan is accountable for implementing them. Moreover, most of the politicians and bureaucrats who prevent competitive pressures from driving change are themselves protected from political competition. It is undeniable that real change in Japan would bring unwelcome pain for many workers
and small-business owners. Still, Japan's leaders continue to use these cultural excuses, as they have for 150 years, to mask their own efforts to cling to power and prestige. The ugly, undemocratic and illiberal aspects of Japanese traditionalism continue to lurk behind its admirable elements. One reason they can do so is because Japan's nationalists have succeeded completely in one of their original goals: financial independence. The desire to avoid relying on foreign capital has underlain Japan's economic policies from the time it opened up to trade. Those policies have worked. More than 90% of government bonds are in the hands of domestic investors, and savings accounts run by the postal service playa huge role in propping up the system. ParadoxicallY, financial self-reliance has thus become Japan's curse. There are worse curses to have. of course: compare Japan with the countless countries that have wrecked their economies by overexposing themselves to volatile international capital markets. Nevertheless, Japan's financial insularity further protects its politicians, who do not have to compete with other countries to get funding. Theories abound as to how all of this might change. Its history ought to remind anyone that, however long it takes, Japan usually moves rapidly once a consensus takes shape. Potential pressures for change could come from the reversal of its trade surpluses, an erosion of support from all those placid postal savers, or the unwinding of ties that allow bad banks and bad companies to protect each other from investors. The current political stalemate could also give way to a coherent plan, either because one political or bureaucratic faction defeats the others or because a strong leader emerges who can force them to co-operate. The past 150 years suggest, however, that one important question is impossible to answer in advance: will it be liberalism or its enemies who turn such changes to their advantage? Too often, Japan's conservative and nationalist leaders have managed to spot the forces of change more quickly than their liberal domestic counterparts, and have used those changes to seize the advantage and preserve their power. Just as in the past, East Asia's fortunes still greatly depend on the outcome of the struggle between these perennial Japanese contenders.
From The Economist, July 10,2003. Copyright@2003byTheEconomistNewspaper,Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economist.com
61
Article 10
Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual NORIMITSU ONISHI
What's more, far-reaching electoral reforms pushed through by a coalition of minor parties during the Liberal Democrats' lO-month ouster from power in 1993 laid the foundation for the changes under Mr. Koizumi. He pressed for painful economic reforms despite opposition from inside his own party. Those changes included deregulating industries, cleaning up the banks' bad loans and slashing the enormous and frequently wasteful public spending that had won his party votes for decades.
okyo, Sept. 18-Junichiro Koizumi swept to power in 2001 promising to "destroy" his ruling Liberal Democratic Party and, by extension, Japan's encrusted postwar order. To a remarkable extent, he succeeded-though hardly as radically as he had hoped. When Mr. Koizumi, 64, retires on Sept. 26, he will leave a Japan with new bearings: a smaller central government, greater faith in free markets and a new assertiveness in world affairs. But his vision of a new Japan has already produced a backlash among Japanese who believe he has destroyed, along with the bad, much that was good of the old Japan. Yet, while his pOlicies were often unpopular, he has consistently drawn high approval ratings from voters hungry for charismatic, strong leadership. Even as Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and other politicians have suffered for their endorsement of the war in Iraq, Mr. Koizumi-who to this day has expressed only the staunchest support for the war-has remained unscathed. He retires with an approval rate hovering around 50 percent, the highest of any long-serving postwar prime minister, perhaps because voters believe that he has fulfilled his promise of shaking up the old Japan and that it will be up to his successors to lead them to a new one. Clearly, though, there is no going back to the old ways, no matter who is elected as the leader of the Liberal Democrats on Wednesday and then chosen as prime minister next Thesday. "He's dramatically changed everything about how Japanese politics worked," said Park Cheol-hee, an expert in Japanese politics at Seoul National University in South Korea. "Future prime ministers will have to follow his path. I don't think they can go back to the good old days of relying on interest groups and bureaucrats. The public will expect prime .ministers to take real policy initiatives. Things have fundamentally' changed." How much of that change is attributable to Mr. Koizumi's policies is constantly debated among experts. The move away from ·.the Liberal Democrats' politics of vested interests and patronage was inevitable, because Japan simply does not have the money it had before the collapse of its real estate-inflated "bubble economy" in the late 1980's, and after the succeeding years of little or no growth.
T
But the revival of Japan's economy, many experts say, owes
as much, if not more, to private companies' own restructurings and the booming trade with China's explosive economy. Whatever his share of the credit, Mr. Koizumi articulated more than anybody else the need for Japan to change. In the decade before his election, Japan went through a succession of weak leaders bewildered as to how to even begin guiding the nation out of an all-encompassing malaise. Mr. Koizumi was blunt. He told the Japanese, in some of his most famous slogans, to expect "pain to accompany structural reforms," and said he would cany out "structural reforms without exceptions." To the surprise of almost everyone, his blunt talk and actions won him widespread support. "The conventional wisdom was that Japanese prime ministers were inherently incapable of exerting leadership;' said Takeshi Sasaki, a political scientist at Gakushuin University and a former president of the University of Tokyo. "But Koizumi exercised leadership with great tenacity and tried many new things-things that prime ministers had not said or done until now." Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Koizumi eschewed the compromises that had led to paralysis. In a society that values consensus, he was famous for making decisions on his own and seemed to excel in making 'political enemies. He was-in the words of his first foreign minister, Makiko Tanaka-a "weirdo." And the public loved him. Each time voters had a chance to choose between him and Japan's old-fashioned politicians and bureaucrats, they backed him in large numbers. Last year, for example, he could have been stymied after members of his own party voted down a bill to reform the country's massive postal savings system-effectively a savings bank that paid very low interest on deposits and had long lubricated
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Article 10. Departing Japanese Leader Shook Up Politics as Usual
But critics say Mr. Koizumi used foreign opposition to the shrine visits to rally nationalist sentiments among Japanese, who had lost their self-confidence because of the long economic slump and had grown fearful of China's rise. Under Mr. Koizumi, nationalist politicians and scholars who would like to whitewash Japan's militarist past have found fertile soil and moved into the mainstream. Government~sanctioned school textbooks increasingly omit facts from Japan's wartime history, like the use of slave labor and "comfort women" during the years it occupied Korea and Manchuria, or the massacre of 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese in Nanjing. Japan's troubles with its neighbors, especially China, eventually grew so severe that policy makers and scholars in Washington in the past year began expressing worries that Mr. Koizumi's policy was hurting Japanese-and Americaninterests in Asia. But Mr. Koizumi's open appeals to nationalist symbols like Yasukuni won him and his party votes, a lesson that was absorbed by his likely successor, Shinzo Abe, the chief cabinet secretary. At home, Mr. Koizumi diminished the role of the central government and the bureaucracy and gave local governments more authority. He deregulated industries, opened opportunities for entrepren~urs and freed big companies to hire a greater percentage of temporary workers. Japan's economy has bounced back, though its long-term recovery is uncertain. In a backlash against Mr. Koizumi's promarket policies. an increasing number of critics have said that the changes have favored the rich and corporations, and that they have contributed to a widening in income gaps and a fraying of Japan's vaunted egalitarianism. Mr. Koizumi showed little interest in addressing those con~ cerns. After passing the law to change the postal savings system last fall, which Mr. Koizumi had long regarded as the glue that held together the old Japan, he appeared to lose passion for his job. In June, he refused to extend a parliamentary session despite unfinished legislative business. He could not wait to leave the building, it was said, so that he could go to the United States and travel with Mr. Bush to Graceland.
the Liberal Democrats' political machine. But Mr. Koizumi responded by calling a snap election. After winning a landslide, he easily won approval to privatize the post office, potentially freeing its enormous reserves to serve the economy rather than the politicians.
He extended his single-mindedness to foreign policy, cementing Japan's alliance with the United States after a decade in which the value of the alliance had been questioned. He pushed through a special law to deploy troops to Iraq on a reconstruction mission, in a move that many Japanese considered to be against the spirit, if not the letter, of the country's pacifist Constitution. He tied the Japanese armed forces closer to the American military by participating in missile defense. "The better our relations with the United States, the easier it will be for us to build good relations with China, South Korea,
Asian and other countries in the world," Mr. Koizumi said during a visit to Japan by President Bush last November. "That's my basic belief."
Mr. Koizumi may have nurtured such an ironclad relationship with Mr. Bush that he was rewarded with a farewell road trip to Graceland. But he brought Japan's relations with China to their lowest point in decades, and presided over the rise of a
narrow nationalism at home and Japan's diplomatic isolation in the region. He made annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto memorial where Japan's war dead and war criminals are enshrined. Most of his predecessors had avoided the shrine, regarded as a symbol of Japanese militarism in this region. Because of the visits, China and South Korea have refused to hold talks with Japan. Japan's hawks, though, say Mr. Koizumi's priorities were right. "I give him a perfect score," said Hisahiko Okazaki, a fonner senior diplomat and a leading conservative commentator. China's long-term strategy, Mr. Okazaki said, is to weaken the Japan-United States alliance. "If that's the case, Japan's grand diplomatic strategy toward China is obvious," he said. "What Mr. Koizumi did, as a strategy toward China, was correct."
From The New York Times, September 19, 2006. Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
63
UNIT2
Pluralist Democracies: Factors in the Political Process Unit Selections 11 . Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis?, The Economist 12. Political Parties: Empty Vessels?, The Economist 13. Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures, The Economist 14. Women in National Parliaments, Inter-Parliamentary Union 15. The True Clash of Civilizations, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris 16. What Political Institutions Does Large-Scale Democracy Require?, Robert A. Dahl 17. What Democracy Is ... and Is Not, Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl 18. Judicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe, The Economist 19. Referendums: The People's Voice, The Economist 20. The Great Divide, Timothy Garton Ash 21. Living With a Superpower, The Economist 22. The Case for a Multi-Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective, Christopher S. Allen
Key Points to Consider • Explain the terms "Left" and "Righf' in European politics. Why have the terms "center-left" and "center-righf' come into use? • How do you explain the apparent shifts toward the political center made by parties of the moderate Left and moderate Right in recent years? • Why are women so poorly represented in Parliament and other positions of political leadership? In what way has this begun to change, where, and why? • What are the democratic essentials as discussed by Philippe Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl? • What are some of the major arguments made in favor of the parliamentary system of government? Do all parliamentary systems function as well in reality? • Why do you think Christopher S. Alien includes a multiparty system in his discussion of institutional transplantation? • Why did de Gaulie include a national referendum in the constitution of the Fifth Republic? • How does the use of judicial review in a country like Germany compare with our own? • Do you agree with Robert Kagan, that "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus?" Why or why not?
Student Web Site
www.mhcls.com/online
Internet References
Further information regarding these Web sites may be found in this book's preface or online.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace http://www.ceip.org
Inter-American Dialogue (lAD) http://www..;adialog,org
The North American Institute (NAMI) http/lwww.northamericaninstitute.org
64
Observers of contemporary Western societies frequently refer to the emergence of a "new politics" in lhese countries, but there is no consensus on what is novel in the political pro~ cess or why it is significant. Although no one would dispute that there have been major changes in the politics of these societies during the last ,three decades or more, it is more difficult to establish comparable patterns of transformation or to gauge their impact and endurance. Yet a central task of the comparative study of government is to help us identify, describe, and explain continuities and changes in the political patterns of
occasional newcomers are admitted to the c!ub-or excluded from it. Each country's party system remains uniquely shaped by its political history, but it is possible to delineate some very general patterns of development. One frequently observed trend is toward a narrowing of the ideological distance between the moderate Left and Right in many European countries. Because of this partial political convergence, it now often makes more sense to speak of the Center~left and Center~ Right. Even where such a convergence is observable, there are still some important ideological and practical differences between the two orientations. The Right is usually far more ready to accept as "normal"
society.
or "inevitable" the existence of socia! or economic inequalities, and
In two important lines of inquiry, political comparativists have exam~
normally favors lower taxes and the promotion of market forces-with
ined the rise and spread of a new set of "postmaterial" values and,
some very important exceptions intended to protect the nation as a whole
more recently, the growing signs of political disaffection in both "older"
(national defense and internal security) as well as certain favored values
and "newer" democracies. The articles in this unit also explore some
and interest groups (clienteles). In genera!, the Right sees the state
other trends with major impacts on contemporary politics. Very high on
as an instrument that should provide security, order, and protection
the list are the uneven advancement of women in politics, especially
for an established way of life. The Left, by contrast, traditionally
their rise into high elective and appointive public office, and the recent
emphasizes that government has an important task in opening greater
wave of democratization-the uneven, incomplete, and unstable but nevertheless remarkable spread of democratic forms of
opportunities or "life chances" for
governance to
everyone, delivering
affordable
public services, and generally reducing social Inequalities,
many countries during the last three decades.
EVen as the ideological distance between mainstream Left and Right
Since the early 1970s, political scientists have followed Ronald
narrows, there are also signs of some political differentiation within each
Inglehart and others who first noted a marked increase in what they
camp. On the Center~Right side of the party spectrum in European politics,
calted postmaterial values, especially among younger and more highly
economic neoliberals must be clearly distinguished from social con~
educated people in Western Europe. Such voters showed less interest in
servatives. European liberalism has its roots in a tradition that favors
traditional material values of economic well*being and security, instead
civil liberties and tolerance but that also emphasizes the importance of
stressing particlpatory and environmental concerns in politics as a way
individual achievement and laissez*faire economics. For neoliberals, the
of improving democracy and the genera! "quality of life." Studies of post·
state has an important but limited role to play in providing an institutional
materialism form a very important addition to our ongoing attempt to
framework within which individuals and social groups pursue their inter"
interpret and explain not only the so-called youth revolt but also some
ests without much government intervention. Traditional social conser-
more lasting shifts in lifestyles and political priorities. But the shift in the
vatives, by contrast, emphasize the importance of stability and continuity.
postmaterial direction has not been complete, nor is it necessarily per-
They often value the strong state as an instrument of order, but many of
manent: note the apparent revival of material concerns among some
them also show a paternalist or pragmatic appreciation for welfare state
younger people, as economic prosperity and security seem to have
programs that will help keep ''the social fabric" from tearing apart.
become far less certain. Political reform activities also seem to evoke
On the Left, democratic socialists and ecologists stress that the
considerably less interest and commitment than they did in the 1970s.
sorry record of
This should not be mistaken for a return to the political patterns of
communist~ruled
states in no way diminishes the validity
of their own commitment to social justice and environmental protection
the past. Instead, we may be witnessing the emergence of a new mix of
in modern industria! society. For them, capitalism wi!! continue to pro~
material and postmaterial orientations, along with "old" and "new" forms
duce acute socia! problems and dissatisfactions that require politically
of political self-expression by the citizenry. Established political parties
directed redress. Today, many on the Left show a pragmatic acceptance
appear to be in somewhat of a quandary: the traditional bonding of many
of the modified market economy as an arena within which to promote
voters to one or another party seems to have become weaker, a phe~
their goals of redistribution. Social Democrats in Scandinavia and
nomenon also known as dealignment. Some observers perceive a con-
Germany have long been known for taking such positions; in recent
dition of political malaise in advanced industrial countries, suggesting
years their colleagues in Britain, Spain, and, to a lesser degree, France
that the decline of confidence in public officials and government shows
have followed suit by abandoning some traditional symbols and goals,
up not only in opinion polls but also in voting behavior.
such as major programs of nationalization.
The readings in this unit begin with three political briefs that present
Some other West European parties, originally further to the Left, have
a comparative perspective on public disillusionment with politics and the
also moved in the centrist direction In recent years. Two striking examples
decline in voter turnout, the partial weakening of the political parties,
of this shift can be found among the Greens in Germany and in what used
and the apparent growth of special interest lobbying. Most established
to be the Communist Party of Italy. The German Greens are by no means
parties seem to have developed an ability to adjust to change, even
an establishment party, but they have served as a coalition partner with
as the balance of power within each party system shifts over time and
the Social Democrats in several state governments and have gained
65
respect for their mixture of practical competence and idealism. They now
in voter turnout has been practically eliminated in recent decades, and
appear to have become a firmly established small party with a distinctive
younger women show a more liberal orientation than formerly in their foreign
program and a solid record in coalition politics. The Italian Communists
and social policy preferences. These are aggregate differences, of course;
have come an even longer way in reaching their present Center-Left posi-
women, like men, do not present a monolithic bloc in political attitudes and
tion, abandoning the Leninist revolutionary tradition and adopting reform-
behavior but are divided by a variety of interests and priorities. One general~
ist goals and strategies similar to those identified with social democratic
izallon seems to hold; there is much less inclination among women to sup-
parties elsewhere in Western Europe. Renamed the Left Democrats (OS),
port parties or candidates that have a decidedly "radical" image. While European women still tend to be employed at !ower wages and
they joined Center-Left coalition governments in 1998 and 2006. in
Both Center"Left and Center"Right moderates in Europe face a challenge from the populist tendency on the Far Right that usuaUy seeks to
lower~skilled
jobs than their male counterparts, the socioeconomic
status of women in other parts of the world is often far worse. According
curtail, halt, or even reverse immigration, sometimes with a separate
to reports of the UN Development Program, there have been some rapid
neo-fascist appeal. (A charismatic leader like Jorg Haider of the Austrian
advances for women in the field of education and health opportunities,
Freedom Party can speak to both orientations.) The electoral revival of the
but the doors to economic opportunities are barely ajar. In the field of
far-Right parties can be linked in considerable part to anxieties and tensions
political leadership, the picture is more varied, as the UN reports indi-
that affect some socially and economically insecure groups in the lower-
cate, but women generally hold few positions of importance in national
middle and working classes; these parties typically eschew a complex
politiCS. Rwanda is an exception. The recent genocide has left women,
explanation of the structural and cyclical problems that beset the European
now nearly two-thirds of the country's population, in positions of leader-
economies, instead blaming external scapegoats, namely immigrants and
ship. Another notable exception is Costa Rica, the only "older democ-
refugees from Eastern Europe as well as developing countries in Africa
racy" located in Latin America.
and Asia. Nowhere are these parties in control of a national government,
The institutional framework of representatlve government is the
but they represent a potentia! threat to the established parties, which have
subject of the third section of this unit. Here the authors examine and
responded by making concessions on immigration and refugee policy.
compare a number of institutional arrangements: (1) essential charac~
Women in polities are the concern of the second section in this unit.
terisUcs and elements of a pluralist democracy, (2) two major forms of
While there continues to be a strong pattern of under~representation
representative government, (3) varieties of judicial review, and (4) the
of women in positions of political and economic leadership practically
use of national and regional referendums as well as other forms of direct
everywhere, there are some notable differences from country to coun-
democracy. The topic of pluralist democracy is a complex one and needs
try and party to party. Generally speaking, the parties of the Left have
to be discussed from different perspectives. Robert Dahl draws on a life-
been far more ready to place women in positions of authority, with some
long commitment to present what he regards as the basic institutional
remarkable exceptions (Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Angela Merkel in
infrastructure of a representative form of government. Philippe Schmitter
Germany, and Simone Weil in France).
Far~Right
parties tend to draw
and Terry Lynn Karl present a superb discussion of what a democracy
markedly less support from female voters, but at least one of them is led
"is and "is not." The next two political briefs examine the remarkable
by a woman: Pia Kjaersgaard founded and still heads the People's Party
growth and variety of forms taken by judicial review in recent years as
of Denmark. In structural terms, proportional representation systems
weI! as the arguments for and against the use of the referendum as a
give parties both a tool and an added incentive to run female candidates.
way of increasing the electoral involvement with
t~ere
po!icy~making.
must also be an organized
The last articles in this unit examine American Politics in Compa-
will and a strategy among decision makers to use the available tool for
rative Perspective. Timothy Garton Ash critically reviews Robert Kagan's
the purpose of such a clearly defined reform.
argument about the "Great Divide"between the United States and Western
But here too, there can be exceptions;
Where the political will exists, affirmative action can become such a
Europe in the prevailing approach to international relations. Without
strategy for promoting change; such a breakthrough has happened in
dismissing the alleged differences, Ash points to some shared values
the Scandinavian countries, which have a markedly higher representa-
and interests that continue to link the two. In its discussion of American
tion of women in parliament and in party leadership. In the Scandinavian
beliefs and values, The Economist also sees areas of similarity and dis-
countries, the political center of gravity falls somewhat to the Left, and
similarity, singling out the high incidence of traditional bellefs in the
proportional representation makes it possible to set up party lists that
United States as opposed to the more secular orientation prevailing
are more representative of the population as a whole. It usually does
in Europe.
not take long for the more centrist or moderately conservative parties to
Finally, Christopher S. Allen brings U.S. political institutions into
adopt the new concern of gender equality, and these parties may even
our comparative framework. His article can be seen as part of a long
move toward the forefront Even a decidedly non~feminjst politician like
tradition of American interest in the parliamentary form of govern-
Angela Merkel can benefit from reforms that have a feminist origin, as
ment and, to a lesser degree, in a multiparty system. Allen organizes
Myra Marx Ferree plausibly argues in her article in this unit. Outside
his argument as a mental experiment in institutional transplantation,
Scandinavia, signs of the growing political prominence of women can
in order to explo're how a multiparty parliamentary system would be
been seen in traditionally conservative countries such as the Republic of
likely to change the American political process. His intriguing rear-
Ireland, Switzerland, and Japan.
rangement of our familiar political setting serves as a reminder that institutions are not neutral but have important consequences for the
Changes that erode gender inequality have already occurred in areas other than representation in government. For example, the gender gap
political process.
66
Article 11
Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis? After the collapse of communism, the world saw a surge in the number of new democracies. But why are the citizens of the mature democracies meanwhile losing confidence in their political institutions? This is the first in a series of articles on democracy in transition. veryone remembers that Winston Churchill once called democracy the worst form of government-except for all the others. The end of the cold war seemed to prove him right. All but a handful of countries now claim to embrace democratic ideals. Insofar as there is a debate about democracy, much of it now centers on how to help the "emerging" democracies of Asia. Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe catch up
E
~
Germany;
"
with the established democratic countries of the West and Japan. The new democracies are used to having well-meaning observers from the mature democracies descend on them at election time to ensure that the voting is free and fair. But is political life in these mature democracies as healthy as it should be?
If opinion research is any guide, the mature democracies have troubles of their own. In the United States in particular.
~~
11
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Figure lOur Elected Rascals. Political Confidence, annul % Change 67 L
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ANNUAL EDITIONS in Canada, Germany, Britain, Sweden and the United States. World-wide polls conducted in 1981 and 1990 measured con-
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small increases in confidence were Iceland and Denmark. I
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• In the late 1950s and early 1960s Americans had a touching faith in government When asked "How many times can you trust the government in Washington to do
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Canada
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Japan
Other findings summarised by Mr Putnam and his colleagues make uncomfortable reading:
E'@¥#I?
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Austria
Italy
gained public tnlSt, but on average confidence in them decreased by 6% over the decade (see figure 2). The only countries to score
':51
Germany 1%
8elgium
fidence in five institutions: parliament, the armed services, the judiciary, the police and the civil service. Some institutions
wMi§ffl,1
r
Spain
ao
··..!.:.:..~.:;....:'.-.:.:.;:i·
Norway
what is right?", three out of four answered "most of the time" or '~ust about always". By 1998, fewer than four out of ten trusted the government to do what was right In 1964 only 29% of the American electorate agreed that "the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking after themselves". By 1984, that figure had risen to 55%, and by 1998 to 63%. In the 1960s, two-
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thirds of Americans rejected the statement "most elected
Sources; R. Dalton; World Values Surveys
Figure 2 Losing Faith.
officials don't care what people like me think". In 1998, nearly two-thirds agreed with it The proportion of
Confidence in Political Institutions', %
Americans who expressed "a great deal of' confidence in the executive branch fell from 42% in 1966 to 12% in 1997; and trust in Congress fell from 42% to 11 %. • Canadians have also been losing faith in their politicians. The proportion of Canadians who felt that "the government doesn't care what people like me think" rose from 45% in 1968 to 67% in 1993. The proportion expressing "a great deal of' confidence in political parties fell from 30% in 1979 to 11% in 1999. Confidence in the House of Commons fell from 49% in 1974 to 21 % in 1996. By 1992 only 34% of Canadians were satisfied with their system of government, down from 51% in 1986. • Less information is available about attitudes in Japan. But the findings of the few surveys that have been carried out there match the global pattern. Confidence in political institutions rose in the decades following the smashing of the country's old politics in the second world war. Happily for democracy, the proportion of
the high opinion which people had of their government has declined steadily over the past four decades. Regular opinion surveys carried out as part of a series of national election studies in America show that the slump set in during the I 960s. The civil-rights conflict and the Vietnam war made this an especially turbulent decade for the United States. But public confidence in
politicians and government continued to decline over the next quarter-century. Nor (remember the student unrest in Paris and elsewhere in 1968) was this confined to the United States. It is hard to compare attitudes toward democracy over time,
and across many different countries. Most opinion surveys are carried outnation-by-nation: they are conducted at different
times and researchers often ask different sorts of questions. But some generalizations can be made. In their introduction to aforthcoming book "What is Troubling the Trilateral Democracies?", Princeton University Press, 2000) three academics-Robert Putnam, Susan Pharr, and Russell Dalton-have done their best to analyze the results of surveys conducted in most of the rich
Japanese voters who agree that "in order to make Japan better, it is best to rely on talented politicians, rather than to let the citizens argue among themselves" has been falling for 40 years. However, the proportion who
countries. Figure 1 summarises some of these findings. The downward slopes show how public confidence in politicians seems to be falling, measured by changes in the answers voters give to ques-
feel that they exert at least "some influence" on national politics through elections or demonstrations also fell steadily between 1973 and 1993. Although it is harder to generalize about Western En-
tions such as "Do you think that politicians are trustworthy?"; "Do members of parliament (MPs) Care about voters like you?"; and "How much do you trust governments of any party to place the needs of the nation above their own political party?" In most of the mature democracies, the results show a pattern of disillusionment with politicians. Only in the Netherlands is there clear
rope, confidence in political institutions is in decline in most countries. In 1985 48% of Britons expressed quite a lot of confidence in the House of Commons. This number had halved by 1995. The proportion of Swedes disagreeing with the statement that "parties are only interested
evidence of rising confidence. Nor is it only politicians who are losing the public's trust Surveys suggest that confidence in political institutions is in decline as well. In 11 out of 14 countries, for example, confidence in parliament has declined, with especially sharp falls
in people's votes, not in their opinions" slumped from 51 % in 1968 to 28% in 1994. In 198551% expressed confidence in the Rikstad (parliament); by 1996 only
68
Article 11. Public Opinion: Is There a Crisis? c:::::J first two 1950$ eJeetions _ Two most reeent elections~ o 20 40 60 SO Iceland
may be declining. this does not seem to have diminished popular support for democratic principles. On average, surveys show, more than three out of four people in rich countries believe that democracy is the best form of government. Even in countries where the performance of particular governments has been so disappointing as to break up the party system itself (such as Japan and Italy in 1993-95), this has brought no sedous threat to fundamental democratic principle. It may seem paradoxical for people to express strong support for democracy even while their confidence in politicians and political institutions crumbles. But it hardly amounts to the "crisis of democracy" which political scientists tend to proclaim from time to time. Nor, though, is it a ringing endorsement, especially given that the evidence of opinion surveys is reinforced by other trends. These include a decline both in the membership of political parties and in the proportion of people who turn out to vote. Numbers compiled by Martin Wattenberg, also at the University of California, show that in 18 out of 20 of the rich established democracies the proportion of the electorate voting has been lower than it was in the early 1950s (see figure 3), with the median change being a decline of 10%. More controversially, some political scientists see the growth of protest movements since the I 960s as a sign of declining faith in the traditional institutions of representative democracy, and an attempt to bypass them. Others reckon that the most serious threat comes from the increasingly professional pressure groups and lobbying organisations that work behind the scenes to influence government policy and defend special interests, often at the expense of the electorate as a whole. What is to be done? Those who believe that government has over-reached itself call on governments to become smaller and to promise less. Thus, it is hoped, people will come to do more for themselves. But whatever the appropriate size and reach of governments, there is also scope for making the machinery of democracy work better. Indeed, some commentators see the public's declining confidence in political institutions as an opportunity for democratic renewal. Pippa Norris, at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, hails the advent of a new breed of «critical citizens" (in a book of that name, Oxford University Press, 1999) who see that existing channels of participation fall short of democratic ideals and want to reform them. There are some signs of this. Countries as different as Italy, Japan, Britain and New Zealand have lately considered or introduced changes in their electoral systems. Countries around the world are making growing use of referendums and other forms of direct democracy. Many are reducing the power of parliaments by giving judges new powers to review the decisions that elected politicians make. And governments everywhere are introducing new rules on the financing of politicians and political parties. The rest of the articles in this series will look at some of these changes and the forces shaping them.
100
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Denmark F
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Source: Martin P. Wattenberg, University of Califomia, Irvine
Figure 3 Staying Home. Voter Turnout, % 19% did. In Gennany, the percentage of people who said they trusted their Bundestag deputy to represent their interests rose from 25% in 1951 to 55% in 1978, but had fallen again to 34% by 1992. The percentage of Italians who say that politicians "don't care what people like me think" increased from 68% in 1968 to 84% in 1997. Such findings are alarming if you take them at face value. But they should be interpreted with care. Democracy may just be a victim of its own success. It could just be that people nowadays expect more from governments, impose new demands on the state, and are therefore more likely to be disappointed. After all, the idea that governments ought to do such things as protect or improve the environment, maintain high employment, arbitrate between moral issues, or ensure the equal treatment of women or minorities, is a relatively modern and still controversial one. Or perhaps the disillusionment is a healthy product of rising educational standards and the scepticism that goes with it. Or maybe it is caused by the media's search-light highlighting failures of government that were previously kept in the dark. Whatever the causes, the popularity of governments or politicians ought not to be the only test of democracy's health. Moreover, there is encouraging evidence to put beside the discouraging findings. Howevermuch confidence in government
From The Economist, July 17, 1999, pp. 49-50. Copyright© 1999 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economist.com
69
L
Article 12
Political Parties: Empty Vessels? Alexis de Tocqueville called political parties an evil inherent in free governments. The second of our briefs on the mature· democracies in transition asks whether parties are in decline other things, a marriage bureau for the better-off. Today, belonging to a British political party is more like being a supporter of some charity: you may pay a membership fee, but will not necessarily attend meetings or help to tum out the vote at election time.
hat would democracy look like if there were no political parties? It is almost impossible to imagine. In every democracy worth the name, the contest to win the allegiance of the electorate and form a govemment takes place through political parties. Without them, voters would be hard put to work out what individual candidates stood for or intended to do once elected. If parties did not "aggregate" people's interests, politics might degenerate into a fight between tiny factions, each promoting its narrow self-interest. But for the past 30 years, political scientists have been asking whether parties are "in decline". Are they? And if so, does it matter? Generalising about political parties is difficult. Their shape depends on a country's history, constitution and much else. For example, America's federal structure and separation of powers make Republicans and Democrats amorphous groupings whose main purpose is to put their man in the White House. British parties behave quite differently because members of Parliament must toe the party line to keep their man in Downing Street. An American president is safe once elected, so congressmen behave like local representatives rather than members of a national organisation bearing collective responsibility for government. Countries which, unlike Britain and America, hold elections under proportional representation are different again: they tend to produce multi-party systems and coalition governments. Despite these differences, some trends common to almost all advanced democracies appear to be changing the nature of parties and, on one view, making them less influential. Those who buy this thesis of decline point to the following changes: People's behaviour is becoming more private. Why join a political party when you can go fly fishing or surf the web? Back in the 1950s, clubs affiliated to the Labour Party were places for Britain's working people to meet, play and study. The Conservative Party was, among
W
Running Out of Ideas
(
Politics is becoming more secular. Before the 1960s, political struggles had an almost religious intensity: in much of Western Europe this took the form of communists versus Catholics, or workers versus bosses. But ideological differences were narrowing by the 1960s and became smaller still after the collapse of Soviet communism. Nowadays, politics seems to be more often about policies than values, about the competence of leaders rather than the beliefs of the led. As education grows and class distinctions blur, voters discard old loyalties. In America in 1960, two out of five voters saw themselves as "strong" Democrats or "strong" Republicans. By 1996 less than one in three saw themselves that way. The proportion of British voters expressing a "very strong" affinity with one party slumped from 44% to 16% between 1964 and 1997. This process of "partisau de-alignment" has been witnessed in most mature democracies. The erosion of loyalty is said to have pushed parties· towards the ideological centre. The political extremes have not gone away. But mainstream parties which used to offer a straight choice between socialists and conservatives are no longer so easy to label. In the late 1950s Germany's Social Democrats (spo) snipped off their Marxist roots in order to recast themselves is a Volkspartei appealing to all the people. "New" Labour no longer portrays itself as the political arm of the British working class or trade-union movement. Bill Clinton, before he became president, helped to shift the Democratic Party towards an appreciation of business and free trade. Neat ideological labels
70
Article 12. Political Parties: Empty Vessels?
than party-centred), and Japan (where political loyalties revolve around ties to internal factions rather than the party itself). In Scandinavia, by contrast, where class-based parties are still relatively strong, turnout has held up much better since the 1950s.
have become harder to pin on parties since they have had to contend with the emergence of what some commentators call post-material issues (such as the environment, personal morality and consumer rights) which do not slot elegantly into the old left-right framework The mass media have taken over many of the information functions that parties once performed for themselves. "Just as radio and television have largely killed off the door-to-door salesman," says Anthony King, of Britain's Essex University, "so they have largely killed off the oldfashioned party worker." In 1878 the German SPD had nearly 50 of its own newspapers. Today the mass media enable politicians to communicate directly with voters without owning printing presses or needing party workers to knock on doors. In many other ways, the business of winning elections has become more capital-intensive and less labour-intensive, making political donors matter more and political activists less. Another apparent threat to the parties is the growth of interest and pressure groups. Why should voters care about the broad sweep of policy promoted during elections by a party when other organisations will lobby all year round for their special interest, whether this is protection of the environment, opposition to abortion, or the defence of some subsidy? Some academics also claim that parties are playing a smaller role, and think tanks a bigger one, in making policy. Although parties continue to draw up election manifestos, they are wary of being too specific. Some hate leaving policymaking to party activists, who may be more extreme than voters at large and so put them off. Better to keep the message vague. Or why not let the tough choices be taken by referendums, as so often in Switzerland? Academics have found these trends easier to describe than to evaluate. Most agree that the age of the "mass party" has passed and that its place is being taken by the "electoral-professional" or "catch-all" party. Although still staffed by politicians holding genuine beliefs and values, these modem parties are inclined to see their main objective as winning elections rather than forming large membership organisations or social movements, as was once the case. Is this a bad thing? Perhaps, if it reduces participation in politics. One of the traditional roles of political parties has been to get out the vote, and in 18 out of 20 rich countries, recent turnout figures have been lower than they were in the 1950s. Although it is hard to pin down the reasons, Martin Wattenberg, of the University of California at Irvine, points out that turnout has fallen most sharply in countries where parties are weak: Switzerland (thanks to those referendums), America and France (where presidential elections have become increasingly candidate- rather
Running Out of Members It is not only voters who are turned off. Party membership is falling too, and even the most strenuous attempts to reverse the decline have faltered. Gelmany is a case in point. The Social Democrats there increased membership rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Christian Democrats responded by doubling their own membership numbers. But since the end of the 1980s membership has been falling, especially among the young. In 1964 Britain's Labour Party had about 830,000 members and the Conservatives about 2m. By 1997 they had 420,000 and 400,000 respectively. The fall is sharper in some countries than others, but research by Susan Scarrow of the University of Houston suggests that the trend is i common to most democracies (see figure I). With their membership falling, ideological differences blun-ing, and fewer people turning out to vote, the decline thesis looks hard to refute. Or does it? The case for party decline has some big holes in it. For a start, some acadentics question whether political parties ever really enjoyed the golden age which other academics hark back to. Essex University's Mr King points out that a lot of the evidence for decline is drawn from a handful of parties-Britain's two main ones, the German SPD, the French and Italian Communists-which did indeed once promote clear ideologies, enjoy mass memberships, and organise local branches and social activities. But neither of America's parties, nor Canada's, nor many of the bourgeois parties of Western Europe, were ever mass parties of that sort. Moreover, in spite of their supposed decline, parties continue to keep an iron grip on many aspects of politics. In most places, for example, parties still control nomination for public office. In almost all of the mature democracies, it is rare for independent candidates to be elected to federal or state legislatures, and even in local government the proportion of independents has declined sharply since the early 1970s. When state and local parties select candidates, they usually favour people who have worked hard within the party. German parties, for example, are often conduits to jobs in the public sector, with a say over appointments to top jobs in the civil service and to the boards of publicly owned utilities or media organisations. Even in America, where independent candidates are more common in local elections, the parties still run city, county
71
ANNUAL EDITIONS
Britain's 1997 election, the New Labour media operation run from Millbank Tower in London was even slicker. Another way to gauge the influence of parties is by their reach-that is, their power, once in office, to take control of the governmental apparatus. This is a power they have retained. Most governments tend to be unambiguously under the control of people who represent a party, and who would not be in government if they did not belong to such organisations. The French presidential system mdy appear ideal for independent candidates, but except-arguablyfor Charles de Gaulle, who claimed to rise above party, none has ever been elected without party support.
and state "machines" in which most politicians start their careers. Naturally, there are some exceptions. In 1994 Silvio Berlusconi, a media tycoon, was able to make himself prime minister at the head of Forza ltalia, a right-wing movement drawing heavily on his personal fortune and the resources of his television empire. Ross Perot, a wealthy third-party candidate, won a respectable 19% vote in his 1992 bid for the American presidency. The party declinists claim these examples as evidence for their case. But it is notable that in the end Mr Perot could not compete against the two formidable campaigning and money-raising machines ranged against him. This suggests that a decline in the membership of parties need not make them weaker in money and organisation. In fact, many have enriched themselves simply by passing laws that give them public money. In Germany, campaign subsidies to the federal parties more than trebled between 1970 and 1990, and parties now receive between 20% and 40% of their income from public funds. In America, the paid professionals who have taken over from party activists tend to do their job more efficiently. Moreover, other kinds of political activity-such as donating money to a party or interest group, or attending meetings and rallies-have become more common in America. Groups campaigning for particular causes or candidates (the proRepublican Christian Coalition, say, or the pro-Democrat National Education Association) may not be formally affiliated with the major party organisations, but are frequently allied with them. The role of the mass media deserves a closer look as well. It is true that they have weakened the parties' traditional methods of communicating with members. But parties have invested heavily in managing relations with journalists, and making use of new media to reach both members and wider audiences. In Britain, the dwindling of local activists has gone hand-in-hand with a more professional approach to communications. Margaret Thatcher caused a stir by using an advertising firm, Saatchi & Saatchi, to push the Tory cause in the 1979 election. By the time of
N.w _ _ _ __ zealand,
The Fire Next Time Given the cautions that must be applied to other parts of the case for party decline, what can be said about one of the declinists' key exhibits, the erosion of ideological differences? At first sight, this is borne out by the recent movement to the centre of left-leaning parties such as America's Democrats, New Labour in Britain, and the SPD under Gerhard SchrOder. In America, Newt Gingrich stoked up some fire amongst Republicans in 1994, but it has flickered out. The most popular Republican presidential hopefuls, and especially George W. Bush, the frontrunner, are once again stressing the gentler side of.their conservatism. Still, the claim of ideological convergence can be exaggerated. It is not much more than a decade since Ronald Reagan and Mrs Thatcher ran successful parties with strong ideologies. And the anecdotal assumption that parties are growing less distinct is challenged by longer-term academic studies. A look at the experience of ten western democracies since 1945 ("Parties, Policies and Democracy", Westview Press, 1994) concluded that the leading left and right parties continued to keep their distance and maintain their identity, rather than clustering around the median voter in the centre. Paul Webb of Britain's BruneI University concludes in a forthcoming book ("Political Parties in Advanced Indust,ial Democracies", Oxford University Press) that although partisan sentiment is weaker than it was, and voters more cynical, parties .have in general adapted well to changing circumstances. Besides, even if party differences are narrowing at present, why expect that trend to continue? In Western Europe, the ending of the cold war has snuffed out one source of ideological conflict, but new sparks might catch fire. Battered right-wing parties may try to revive their fortunes by pushing the nationalist cause against the encroachments of the European Union. In some places where ideas are dividing parties less, geography is dividing
" 20
" Japan
--.;.-.-;;,;:;~
1950s
• • __ ....
'"
'"
'"
Source; Susan E, Scarrow, Centre for German and European Studies Working Paper 2.59, University of California, Berkeley
Figure 1 The Few Not the Many. of electorate
Party members as %
72
Article 12. Political Parties: Empty Vessels?
them more. Politics in Germany and Britain has acquired an increasingly regional flavour: Labour and the Social Democrats respectively dominate the north, Conservatives and Christian Democrats the south. Disaffected Ossis are flocking to the Party of Democratic Socialism in eastern Germany. Britain, Italy, Canada and Spain have strong separatist parties. So there is life in the party system yet. But the declinists are on to something. The Germans have a word for it. One reason given for the rise of Germany's Greens in the 1980s and America's Mr Perot in 1992 was Parteienverdrossenheit--disillusionment with mainstream parties that seemed to have abandoned their core beliefs and no longer offered meaningful choices. A "new politics" of citizens' protests appeared to be displacing conventional politics.
In the end, far from undermining the domination of the parties, the German Greens ended up by turning themselves into one and joining the government in an uneasy coalition with the SPD. The balance of evidence from around the world is that despite all the things that are changing them, parties continue to dominate democratic politics. Indeed, there are grounds for wondering whether their continuing survival is more of a worry than their supposed decline. Is it so very comforting that parties can lose members, worry less about ideas, become detached from broader social movements, attract fewer voters and still retain an iron grip on politics? If they are so unanchored, will they not fall prey to special-interest groups? If they rely on state funding instead of member contributions, will they not turn into creatures of the state? The role of money in politics will be the subject of another brief.
From The Economist, July 24, 1999, pp. 51-52. Copyright © 1999 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economisl.com
73
Article 13
Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures The last article in our series on the mature democracies asks whether they are in danger of being strangled by lobbyists and single-issue pressure groups
P
revious briefs in this series have looked at the imperfections in democracy as it is currently practised in the
Individual motorists will be tempted to reason that, with millions of other people involved, they do not need to do anything themselves, but can instead hitch a "free ride" on the efforts of
rich countries, and at some of the efforts that different
countries are making to overcome them. Evidence that all is not
everyone else.
well includes declining public confidence in politicians, falling membership of political parties and smaller turnouts for elec-
This simple insight has powerful implications. Indeed, in a later book Olson went on to argue that his theory helped to explain why some nations flourish and others decline. As pressure groups multiply over time, they tend to choke a nation's vitality by impairing the government's ability to act in the wider interest. That, he argued, is why countries such as Germany and Japan-whose interest groups had been cleared away by a traumatic defeat-had fared better after the secolia world war than
tions. Ideas for improvement range from making greater use of referendums and other forms of direct democracy, to giving more power to courts to check the power of politicians. This article asks a different question: far from being too powerful,
are elected politicians in modern democracies too weak? When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 19th century, he was impressed by the enthusiasm of Americans for joining associations. This, he felt, spread power away from the centre and fostered the emergence of democratic habits and a civil society. Until quite recently, most political scientists shared De Tocqueville's view. Lately, however, and especially in America, doubts have set in. At a certain point, say the doubters, the cumulative power of pressure groups, each promoting its own special interests, can grow so strong that it prevents elected politicians from adopting policies that are in the interest of the electorate as a whole.
Britain, whose institutions, had survived intact. With its long record of stability, said Olson, "British society has acquired so many strong organisations and collusions that it suffers from
an institutional sclerosis that slows its adaptation to changing circumstances and changing technologies:' Olson's ideas have not gone unchallenged. But they have had a big impact on contemporary thinking about what ails American democracy. In "Demosderosis" (Times Books, 1994), Jonathan Rauch, a populariser of Olson's work, says that America is afflicted by "hyperpluralism". With at least seven
out of ten Americans belonging to at least one such association,
A key text for such critics was a short book published in 1965 by Mancur Olson, an American economist. Called "The Logic of Collective Action", this took issue with the traditional idea that the health of democracy was served by vigorous competition
the whole society, not just "special" parts of it, is now involved in influence peddling. The result is that elected politicians find it almost impossible to act solely in the wider public interest. Bill Clinton wants to reform the health system? The health-insurance industry blocks him. China's membership in the World Trade Organisation
between pressure groups, with governments acting as a sort of
would benefit America's consumers? America's producers' of
referee, able to choose the best policy once the debate between the contending groups was over. The traditional view, Olson argued, wrongly assumed that pressure groups were more or less equal. In fact, for a reason known to economists as the freerider problem, they weren't. Why? Take the example of five car firms, which form a lobbying group in the hope of raising the price of cars. If they succeed, each stands to reap a fifth of the gains. This makes forming the group and working for its success well worth each firm's investment of time and money. If the car makers succeed, of course, motorists will suffer. But organising millions of individual motorists to fight their corner is a great deal harder because it involves co-ordinating millions of people and because the potential gain for each motorist will be relatively small.
textiles and steel stand in the way. Jimmy Carter complained when he left the presidency that Americans were increasingly drawn to single-issue groups to ensure that, whatever else happened, their own private interest would be protected. The trouble is, "the national interest is not always the sum of all our single
A Hitchhiker's Guide
or special interests". Pressure groups are especially visible in the United States. As Oxford University's Jeremy Richardson puts it ("Pressure Groups", Oxford University Press, 1993), "pressure groups take account of (and exploit) the multiplicity of access points which
is so characteristic of the American system of government-the presidency, the bureaucracy, both houses of Congress, the powerful congressional committees, the judiciary and state and local
government." 74
Article 13. Interest Groups: Ex Uno, Plures Nevertheless pressure groups often wield just as much influence in other countries. In those where parliaments exercise
The Case for the Defense So pressure groups are Ubiquitous. But are they so bad? Although it has been influential, the Olson thesis has not swept all before it. Many political scientists argue that the traditional view that pressure groups create a healthy democratic pluralism is nearer the mark than Olson's thesis. The case in favour of pressure groups begins with some of the flaws of representative democracy. Elections are infrequent and, as a previous brief in this series noted, political parties can be vague about their governing intentions. Pressure groups help people to take part in politics between elections, and to influence a government's policy in areas that they care and know about. Pressure groups also check excessive central power and give governments expert advice. Although some groups may flourish at the expense of the common weal, this danger can be guarded against if there are many groups and if all have the same freedom to organise and to put their case to govemment Critics of Olson's ideas also point out that, contrary to his prediction, many broad-based groups have in fact managed to flourish in circumstances where individual members stand to make little personal gain and should therefore fall foul of his "freerider" problem. Clearly, some people join pressure groups for apparently altruistic reasons-perhaps simply to express their values or to be part of an organisation in which they meet likeminded people. Some consumer and environmental movements have flourished in rich countries, even though Olson's theory suggests that fIrms and polluters should have a strong organisational advantage over consumers and inhalers of dirty air. Moreover, despite "demosclerosis", well-organised pressure groups can sometimes ease the task of government, not just throw sand into its wheels. The common European practice of giving pressure groups a formal status, and often a legal right to be consulted, minimises conflict by ensuring that powerful groups put their case to governments before laws are introduced. Mr Richardson argues in a forthcoming book ("Developments in the European Union", Macmillan, 1999) that even the pressure groups clustering around the institutions of the EU perform a valuable function. The European Commission, concerned with the detail of regulation, is an eager consumer of their specialist knowledge. As the powers of the European Parliament have grown, it too has attracted a growing band of lobbyists. The parliament has created scores of "intergroups" whose members gain expertise in specific sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, from industry and consumer lobbies. Governments can learn from pressure groups, and can work through them to gain consent for their policies. At some point, however, the relationship becomes excessively cosy. If pressure groups grow too strong, they can deter governments from pursuing policies which are in the wider public interest. The temptation of governments to support protectionist trade policies at the behest of producer lobbies and at the expense of consumers is a classic example supporting Olson's theories. But problems also arise when it is governments that are relatively strong, and so able to confer special status on some pressure groups and withhold it from others. This puts less-favoured groups at a disadvantage, which they often seek to redress by
tighter control of the executive-Canada, Britain or Germany,
say-the government controls the parliamentary timetable and the powers of committees are much weaker. This means that pressure groups adopt different tactics. They have more chance of influencing policy behind closed doors, by bargaining with the executive branch and its civil servants before legislation comes before parliament. In this way pressure groups can sometimes exert more influence than their counterparts in America.
Political Tribes
l
Many European countries have also buttressed the influence of pressure groups by giving them a semi-official status. In Germany, for example, the executive branch is obliged by law to consult the various big "interest organisations" before drafting legislation. In some German states, leading interest groups (along with political parties) have seats on the supervisory boards of broadcasting firms. French pressure groups are also powerful, despite the conventional image of a strong French state dominating a relatively weak civil society. It is true that a lot afFrance's interest groups depend on the state for both money and membership of a network of formal consultative bodies. But a tradition of direct protest compensates for some of this institutional weakness. In France, mass demonstrations, strikes, the blocking of roads and the disruption of public services are seen as a part of normal democratic politics. In Japan, powerful pressure groups such as the Zenchu (Central Union of Agricultural Co-operatives) have turned large areas of public policy into virtual no-go areas. With more than 9m members (and an electoral system that gives farming communities up to three times the voting weight of urban voters), farmers can usually obstruct any policy that damages their interests. The teachers' union has similarly blocked all attempts at education reform. And almost every ~ector of Japanese society has its zoku gUn (political tribes), consisting of Diet members who have made themselves knowledgeable about one industry or another, which pays for their secretaries and provides campaign funds. A Diet member belonging to the transport tribe will work hand-in-glove with senior bureaucrats in the transport ministry and the trucking industry to form what the Japanese call an "iron triangle" consisting of politicians, bureaucrats and big business. Pressure groups are also increasingly active at a transnational level. Like any bureaucracy, the European Union has spawned a rich network of interest groups. In 1992 the European Commission reckoned that at least 3,000 specialinterest groups in Brussels employing some 10,000 people· acted as lobbyists. These range from big operations, such as the EU committee of the American Chamber of Commerce, to small firms and individual lobbyists-for-hire. Businesses were the first to spot the advantages of influencing the EU'S law making. But trade unions swiftly followed, often achieving in Brussels breakthroughs (such as regulations on working conditions) that they could not achieve at home.
75
ANNUAL EDITIONS
finding new and sometimes less democratic ways of making their voices heard. In Germany, for example, disenchantment with what had come to be seen as an excessively cosy system of bargaining between elite groups helped to spark an explosion of protest movements in the 1980s. In many other countries, too, there is a sense that politics has mutated since the 1960s from an activity organised largely around parties to one organised around specialised interest groups on the one hand (such as America's gun lobby) and broader protest and social movements on the other (such as the women's movement, environmentalism and consumerism). One reason for the change is clearly the growth in the size and scope of government. Now that it touches virtually every aspect of people's lives, a bewildering array of groups has sprung up around it. Many of Olson's disciples blame pressure groups for making government grow. As each special group wins new favours from the state, it makes the state bigger and clumsier, undennining the authority of elected parties, loading excessive demands on government in general, and preventing any particular government from acting in the interest of the relatively disorganised majority of people. By encouraging governments to do too much, say critics on the right, pressure groups prevent governments from doing anything well. Their solution is for governments to do less. Critics on the left are more inclined to complain that pressure groups exaggerate inequalities by giving those betterorganised (ie, the rich and powerful) an influence out of all proportion to their actual numbers. So what is to be done? A lot could be, but little is likely to be. There is precious little evidence from recent elections to suggest that the citizens of the rich countries want to see a radical cut in the size or scope of the state. As for political inequality, even this has its defenders. John Mueller, of America's University of
Rochester, argues that democracy has had a good, if imperfect, record of dealing with minority issues, particularly when compared with other forms of government But he claims that this is less because democratic majorities are tolerant of minorities and more because democracy gives minorities the opportunity to increase their effective political weight-to become more equal, more important, than their arithmetical size would imply-on issues that concern them. This holds even for groups held in contempt by the majority, like homosexuals. Moreover, the fact that most people most of the time pay little attention to politics-the phenomenon of political apathy-helps interested minorities to protect their rights and to assert their interests.
Adaptability This series of briefs has highlighted some of the defects in the practice of democracy, and some of the changes that the mature democracies are making in order to improve matters. But the defects need to be kept in perspective. One famous critic of democracy claimed that for most people it did nothing more than allow them "once every few years, to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class should be in parliament to represent and oppress them". When Marx wrote those words in the 19th century, they contained an element of truth. Tragically, Lenin treated this view as an eternal verity, with calamitous results for millions of people. What they both ignored was democracy's ability to evolve, which is perhaps its key virtue. Every mature democracy continues to evolve today. As a result, violent revolution in those countries where democracy has taken deepest root looks less attractive,
and more remote, than ever.
~"Eii\1i:lik'"'h>®1'J:l~·EW-ml;l::wlt~"::l!Z1,"~I>$..".fm~Zi!.n:ll:&'Illii.lO.'i:i!j(fr¥Z~l'SA~.J!2;:'"~\lW~]S..~~I$I:~i!"~wm~~;jj~~<7l1~W-,&ll,Z".';:XS:~lX1~il!ii3!!];')
From The Economist, August 21, 1999. pp. 44-45. Copyright © 1999 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economisl.com
76
Article 14
Women in National Parliaments
T
regional parliamentary assemblies elected by direct suffrage can be found on separate pages. You can use the PARLINE database to view detailed results of parliamentary elections by country.
he data in the table below has been compiled by the Inter-Parliamentary Union on the basis of information provided by National Parliaments by 30 November 2006. 190 country are classified by descending order of the percentage of women in the lower or single House. Comparative data on the world and regional averages as well as data concerning the two
New: you can now consult an archive of statistical data on women in National Parliaments.
World Classification Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
Country Rwanda Sweden Costa Rica Finland Norway Denmark Netherlands Cuba Spain Argentina Mozambique Belgium Iceland South Africa 1 Austria New Zealand Germany Burundi United Rep. of Tanzania Uganda Seychelles Peru Belarus Guyana Andorra The F.Y.R. of Macedonia
Lower or single House Elections Seats' Women %W 092003 092006 022006 032003 092005 022005 11 2006 012003 032004 102005 122004 052003 052003 042004 102006 092005 092005 072005 122005 022006 122002 042006 102004 082006 042005 072006
80 349 57 200 169 179 150 609 350 257 250 150 63 400 183 121 614 118 319 332 34 120 110 69 28 120
39 165 22 76 64 66 55 219 126 90 87 52 21 131 59 39 194 36 97 99 10 35 32 20 8 34
48.8 47.3 38.6 38.0 37.9 36.9 36.7 36.0 36.0 35.0 34.8 34.7 33.3 32.8 32.2 32.2 31.6 30.5 30.4 29.8 29.4 29.2 29.1 29.0 28.6 28.3
Upper House or Senate Elections Seats' Women %W 092003
26
9
,34.6
062003
75
22
29.3
032004 102005
259 72
60 31
23.2 43.1
052003
71
27
38.0
042004 N.A.
54 62
18 17
33.3 27.4
NA 072005
69 49
15 17
21.7 34.7
11 2004
58
18
31.0
(continued)
77
ANNUAL EDITIONS
World Classification (cc.lnti'nujed) Rank
25 26 27 28
" 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43
44 " 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 " 53 54 55 56 57
Lower or single House Elections Seats' Women % W
Country Afghanistan Viet Nam Namibia Grenada Iraq Suriname Timor-Leste 2 Lao People's Democratic Rep. Ecuador Switzerland Lithuania Australia Liechtenstein Honduras Luxembourg Tunisia Mexico Bulgaria Eritrea Ethiopia Republic of Moldova Croatia Pakistan Portugal Singapore
3
Mauritania Canada Monaco Poland China Oem. People's Rep. of Korea Bahamas Slovakia Dominican Republic United Kingdom Trinidad and Tobago Guinea Senegal Latvia Estonia
092005 052002 11 2004 11 2003 122005 052005 082001 042006 102006 102003 102004 102004 032005 11 2005 062004 102004 072006 062005 021994 052005 032005 11 2003 102002 022005 052006 112006 012006 022003 092005 022003 082003 052002 062006 052006 052005 102002 062002 042001 102006 032003
249 498 78 15 275 51 87 115 100 200 141 150 25 128 60 189 500 240 150 529 101 152 342 230 85 43 308 24 460 2980 687 40 150 178 646 36 114 120 100 101
68 136 21 4 70 13 22 29 25 50 35 37 6 30 14 43 113 53 33 116 22 33 73 49 18 9 64 5 94 604 138 8 30 35 127 7 22 23 19 19
27.3 27.3 26.9 26.7 25.5 25.5 25.3 25.2 25.0 25.0 24.8 24.7 24.0 23.4 23.3 22.8 22.6 22.1 22.0 21.9 21.8 21.7 21.3 21.3 21.2 20.9 20.8 .20.8 20.4 20.3 20.1 20.0 20.0 19.7 19.7 19.4 19.3 19.2 19.0 18.8
Upper House or Senate Elections Seats' Women % W
092005
102
23
22.5
112004 112003
26 13
7
4
26.9 30.8
102003
46
11
23.9
102004
76
27
35.5
072005 072006
112 128
15 22
13.4 17.2
102005
112
21
18.8
032006
100
17
17.0
N.A.
100
35
35.0
092005
100
13
13.0
052002
16
7
43.8
052006 N.A. 102002
32 751 31
1 142 10
3.1 18.9 32.3
(continued)
78
Article 14. Women in National Parliaments
World Classification Rank
58 59
Lower or single House Upper House or Senate Elections Seats' Women "loW Elections Seats' Women "loW Saint Vincent & the Grenadines 122005 22 4 18.2
Country
Equatorial Guinea Venezuela
60 61
Sudan Tajikistan Uzbekistan
62 63 64 65
Italy Mauritius Bolivia EI Salvador Panama
66 67
United States of America Turkmenistan Zimbabwe
68 69
Czech Republic Cape Verde Philippines
70 71 72
Nicaragua Bangladesh
4
Angola Chile
73 74 75
Zambia Sierra Leone Bosnia and Herzegovina Cyprus
76 77 78 79 80
Israel Guinea-Bissau Malawi Republic of Korea Barbados Ireland
81 82 83 84 85 86
Gambia Greece Dominica Liberia Niger France Slovenia
87
Maldives Serbia
042004 122005 082005 022005 122004 042006 072005 122005 032006 052004 11 2006 122004 032005 062006 012006 052004 11 2006 102001 091992 122005 092006 052002 102006 052006 032006 032004 042004 042004 052003 052002 012002 032004 052005 102005 11 2004 062002 102004 012005 122003
100 167 450 63 120 630 70 130 84 78 431 50 150 200 72 236 92 345 220 120 157 124 42 56 120 100 191 299 30 166 53 300 31 64 113 574 90 50 250
18 30 80 11 21 109 12 22 14 13 70 8 24 31 11 36 14 52 33 18 23 18 6 8 17 14 26 40 4
22 7 39 4 8 14 70 11 6 30
18.0 18.0 17.8 17.5 17.5 17.3 17.1 16.9 16.7 16.7 16.2 16.0 16.0 15.5 15.3 15.3 15.2 15.1 15.0 15.0 14.6 14.5 14.3 14.3 14.2 14.0 13.6 13.4 13.3 13.3 13.2 13.0 12.9 12.5 12.4 12.2 12.2 12.0 12.0
082005 032005 012005 042006
50 34 100 322
2 8 15 44
4.0 23.5 15.0 13.7
122005
27
1
3.7
112006
100
16
16.0
11 2005 102006
66 81
21 12
31.8 14.8
052004
24
4
16.7
122005
38
2
5.3
102002
15
1
6.7
052003 072002
21 60
5 10
23.8 16.7
102005
30
5
16.7
092004 122002
331 40
56 3
16.9 7.5
(continued)
79 L
ANNUAL EDITIONS
World Classification Rank
88
89
90 91 92 93
94
Country
Syrian Arab Republic Burkina Faso Jamaica Lesotho San Marino Azerbaijan Fiji Indonesia Romania Botswana Uruguay Ghana Djibouti Morocco Swaziland Antigua and Barbuda Central African Republic
95
Hungary Kazakhstan
96 97 98
Mali Paraguay Cambodia Russian Federation
99
Georgia Japan Gabon Malta Malaysia Cameroon Ukraine Montenegro Togo Congo Cote d'ivoire Oem. Republic of the Congo India Guatemala Samoa Somalia Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110
Lower or'single House Elections Seats' Women % W
032003 052002 102002 052002 062006 11 2005 052006 042004 11 2004 102004 102004 122004 012003 092002 102003 032004 052005 042006 092004 072002 042003 072003 122003 032004 092005 122001 042003 032004 062002 032006 092006 102002 052002 122000 072006 042004 11 2003 032006 082004 032006
250 111 60 120 60 124 71 550 331 63 99 230 65 325 65 19 105 386
77 147 80 123 447 235 480 119 65 219 180 450 81 81 129 223 500 545 158 49 269 468
30 13
7 14
7 14 8 62 37 7 11 25 7 35
7 2 11 40 8 15 8 12
44 22 45 11 6 20 16 39 7 7 11 19 42 45 13 4 21 36
12.0 11.7 11.7 11.7 11.7 11.3 11.3 11.3 11.2 11.1 11.1 10.9 10.8 10.8 10.8 10.5 10.5 10.4 10.4 10.2 10.0 9.8 9.8 9.4 9.4 9.2 9.2 9.1 8.9
8.7 8.6 8.6 8.5 8.5 8.4 8.3 8.2 8.2 7.8
Upper House or Senate Elections Seats' Women % W
102002 N.A.
21 33
12
19.0 36.4
062006
32
5
15.6
112004
137
13
9.5
102004
31
3
9.7
092006 102003 032004
270 30 17
3 9 3
1.1 30.0 17.6
092004
39
2
5.1
042003 012006 N.A.
45 61 178
4 9 6
8.9 14.8
072004 022003
242 91
35 14
14.5 15.4
032004
70
18
25.7
102005
60
8
13.3
082003 072006
120 242
3
2.5 10.7
4
26
3.4
7.7 (continued)
80
Article 14. Women in National Parliaments
World Classification Rank
111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139
Country Kenya Sao Tome and Principe Benin Albania Kiribati Madagascar Belize Mongolia Chad Algeria Nigeria Nepal Saint Lucia Jordan Armenia Sri Lanka Lebanon Turkey Bahrain Iran (Islamic Rep. of) Vanuatu Tonga Comoros Marshall Islands Bhutan Oman Haiti Egypt Kuwait 5 Papua New Guinea Yemen Kyrgyzstan Micronesia (Fed. States of) Nauru Palau Qatar Saint Kitts and Nevis Saudi Arabia Solomon Islands Tuvalu
Lower or single House Elections Seats' Women %W
122002 032006 032003 072005 052003 122002 032003 062004 042002 052002 042003 051999 122001 062003 052003 042004 052005 11 2002 11 2006 022004 072004 032005 042004 11 2003 N.A.
102003 022006 11 2005 062006 062002 042003 022005 032005 102004 11 2004 062005 102004 042005 042006 082006
219 55 83 140 42 160 30 76 155 389 360 204 18 110 131 225 128 550 24 290 52 30 33 33 150 83 88 442 65 109 301 72 14 18 16 35 15 150 50 15
16 4 6 10 3 11 2 5 10 24 22 12 1 6 7 11 6 24 1 12 2 1 1 1 4 2 2 9 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
7.3 7.3 7.2 7.1 7.1 6.9 6.7 6.6 6.5 6.2 6.1 5.9 5.6 5.5 5.3 4.9 4.7 4.4 4.2 4.1 3.8 3.3 3.0 3.0 2.7 2.4 2.3 2.0 1.5 0.9 0.3 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Upper House or Senate Elections Seats' Women %W
032001 032003
90 12
10 3
11.1 25.0
122003 042003 062001 122001 11 2005
144 109 18 11 55
4 4 3 4 7
2.8 3.7 16.7 36.4 12.7
11 2006
40
6
15.0
022006 052004
58 27 264
9 4 18
15.5 14.8 6.8
042001
111
2
1.8
11 2004
9
0
0.0
N.A.
(continued)
81
Article 15
The True Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington was only half right. The cultural fault line that divides the West and the Muslim world is not about democracy but sex. According to a new survey, Muslims and their Western counterparts want democracy, yet they are worlds apart when it comes to attitudes toward divorce, abortion, gender equality, and gay rights-which may not bode well for democracy's future in the Middle East. RONALD INGLEHART AND PIPPA NORRIS
D
emocracy promotion in Islamic countries is now one of
Christopher Shays of Connecticut, after sitting through hours of testimony on U.S.-Islamic relations on Capitol Hill last October, testily blurted, "Why doesn't democracy grab hold in the Middle East? What is there about the culture and the people and so on where democracy just doesn't seem to be something they strive for and work for?" Huntington's response would be that the Muslim world lacks the core political values that gave birth to representative democracy in Western civilization: separation of religious and secular authority, rule of law and social pluralism, parliamentary institutions of representative government, and protection of individual rights and civil liberties as the buffer between citizens and the power of the state. This claim seems all too plausible given the failure of electoral democracy to take root throughout the Middle East and North Africa. According to the latest Freedom House rankings, almost two thirds of the 192 countries around the world are now electoral democracies. But among the 47 countries with a Muslim majority, only one fourth are electoral democracies-and none of the core Arabic-speaking societies falls into this category.
the Bush administration's most popular talking points. "We reject the condescending notion that freedom will not grow in the Middle East," Secretary of State Colin Powell declared last December as he unveiled the White House's new Middle East Partnership Initiative to encourage political and economic reform in Arab countries. Likewise, Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush's national security advisor, promised last September that the United States is committed to "the march of freedom in the Muslim world."
Republican Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut: "Why doesn't democracy grab hold in the Middle East? What is there about the culture and the people and so on where democracy just doesn't seem to be something they strive for and work for?" 1\' '::''-''c'",
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But does the Muslim world march to the beat of a different drummer? Despite Bush's optimistic pronouncement that there is "no clash of civilizations" when it comes to "the common rights and needs of men and women," others are not so sure. Samuel Huntington's controversial 1993 thesis-that the cultural division between "Western Christianity" and "Orthodox Christianity and Islam" is the new fault line for conflict-resonates more loudly than ever since September 11. Echoing Huntington, columnist Polly Toynbee argued in the British Guardian last November, "What binds together a globalized force of some extremists from many continents is a united hatred of Western values that seems to them to spring from Judeo-Christianity." Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Republican Rep.
••• the real fault line between the West and Islam ••. concerns gender equality and sexual liberation ... the values separating the two cultures have much more to do with eros than demos. Yet this circumstantial evidence does little to prove Huntington correct, since it reveals nothing about the underlying beliefs of Muslim publics. Indeed, there has been scant empirical evidence whether Western and Muslim societies
83 L
ANNUAL EDITIONS
The Cultural Divide Approval of Political and Social Values in Western and Muslim Societies
SOURCE: WORLD VALUES SURVEY, POOLED SAMPLE 1995·2001; CHARTS (3) BY JARED SCHNEIDMAN FOR FP
The chart above draws on responses to various political and social issues in the World Values Survey. The percentages indicate the extent to which respondents agree/disagree with or approved/disapproved of the following statements and questions:
Democratic Performance
Gender Equality
• Democracies are indecisive and have too much quibbling. •
(Strongly disagree.) Democracies aren't good at maintaining order. (Strongly disagree.)
• • •
Democratic Ideals • •
• Democracy may have problems, but it's better than any • other form of government. (Strongly agree.) Approve of having a democratic political system. (Strongly agree.)
On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do. (Strongly disagree.) When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women. (Strongly disagree.) A university education is more important for a boy than for a girl. (Strongly disagree.) A woman has to have children in order to be fulfilled. (Strongly disagree.) If a woman wants to have a child as a single parent but she doesn't want to have a stable relationship with a man, do you approve or disapprove? (Strongly approve.)
Strong Leaders
Divorce
•
•
•
Approve of having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country. (Strongly disagree.) Approve of having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections. (Strongly disagree.)
Abortion •
Religious Leaders • •
Politicians who do not believe in God are unfit for public office. (Strongly disagree.) It would be better for [this country] if more people with strong religious beliefs held public office. (Strongly disagree.)
Divorce can always be justified, never be justified, or something in between. (High level of tolerance for divorce.)
Abortion can always be justified, never be justified, or something in between. (High level of tolerance for abortion.)
Homosexuality •
84
Homosexuality can always be justified, never be justified, or something in between. (High level of tolerance for homosexuality.)
Article 15. The True Clash of Civilizations
exhibit deeply divergent values-that is, until now. The cumulative results of the two most recent waves of the World Values Survey (wvs), conducted in 1995-96 and 2000-2002, provide an extensive body of relevant evidence, Based on questionnaires that explore values and beliefs in more than 70 countries, the wvs is an investigation of sociocultural and political change that encompasses over 80 percent of the world's population. A comparison of the data yielded by these surveys in Muslim and non-Muslim societies around the globe confirms the first claim in Huntington's thesis: Culture does matter-indeed, it matters a lot. Historical religious traditions have left an enduring imprint on contemporary values. However, Huntington is mistaken in assuming that the core clash between the West and Islam is over political values. At this point in history, societies throughout the world (Muslim and Judeo-Christian alike) see democracy as the best form of government. Instead, the real fault line between the West and Islam, which Huntington's theory completely overlooks, concerns gender equality and sexual liberalization. In other words, the values separating the two cultures have much more to do with eros than demos. As younger generations in the West have gradually become more
Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey), 12 traditionally Orthodox societies (such as Russia and Greece), 11 predominately Catholic Latin American countries, 4 East Asian societies shaped by Sino-Confucian values, 5 sub-Saharan Africa countries, plus Japan and India. Despite Huntington's claim of a clash of civilizations between the West and the rest, the wvs reveals that, at this point in history, democracy has an overwhelmingly positive image tbroughout the world. In country after country, a clear majority of the population describes "having a democratic political system" as either "good" or "very good." These results represent a dramatic change from the 1930s and 1940s, when fascist regimes won overwhelming mass approval in many societies; and for many decades, Communist regimes had widespread support. But in the last decade, democracy became virtually the only political model with global appeal, no matter what the culture. With the exception of Pakistan, most of the Muslim countries surveyed think highly of democracy: In Albania, Egypt, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Turkey, 92 to 99 percentofthe public endorsed democratic institutionsa higher proportion than in the United States (89 percent). Yet, as heartening as these results may be, paying lip service to democracy does not necessarily prove that people genuinely support basic democratic norms-or that their leaders will allow them to have democratic institutions. Although constitutions of authoritarian states such as China profess to embrace democratic ideals such as freedom of religion, the rulers deny it in practice. In Iran's 2000 elections, reformist candidates captured nearly three quarters of the seats in parliament, but a theocratic elite still holds the reins of power. Certainly, it's a step in the right direction if most people in a country endorse the idea of democracy. But this sentiment needs to be complemented by deeper underlying attitudes such as interpersonal trust and tolerance of unpopular groups-and these values must ultimately be accepted by those who control the army and secret police. The wvs reveals that, even after taking into account differences in economic and political development, support for democratic institutions is just as strong among those living in Muslim societies as in Western (or other) societies [see box, The Cultural Divide]. For instance, a solid majority of people living in Western and Muslim countries gives democracy high marks as the most efficient form of government, with 68 percent disagreeing with assertions that "democracies are indecisive" and "democracies aren't good at maintaining order." (All other cultural regions and countries, except East Asia and Japan, are far more critical.) And an equal number of respondents on both sides of the civilizational divide (61 percent) firmly reject authoritarian governance, expressing disapproval of Hstrong leaders" who do not "bother with parliament and elections." Muslim societies display greater support for religious authorities playing an active societal role than do Western societies. Yet this preference for religious authorities is less a cultural division between the West and Islam than it is a gap between the West and many other less secular societies around the globe, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. For
liberal on these issues, Muslim nations have remained the most traditional societies in the world. This gap in values mirrors the widening economic divide between the West and the Muslim world. Commenting on the disenfranchisement of women tbroughout the Middle East, the United Nations Development Programme observed last summer that "no society can achieve the desired state of well-being and human development, or compete in a globalizing world, if half its people remain marginalized and disempowered." But this "sexual clash of civilizations" taps into far deeper issues than how Muslim countries treat women. A society's commitment to gender equality and sexual liberalization proves time and again to be the most reliable indicator of how strongly that society supports principles of tolerance and egalitarianism. Thus, the people of the Muslim world overwhelmingly want democracy, but democracy may not be sustainable in their societies.
Testing Huntington Huntington argues that "ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, [and] the separation of church and state" often have little resonance outside the West. Moreover, he holds that Western efforts to promote these ideas provoke a violent backlash against "human rights imperialism." To test these propositions, we categorized the countries included in the wvs according to the nine major contemporary civilizations, based largely on the historical religious legacy of each society. The survey includes 22 countries representing Western Christianity (a West European culture that also encompasses North America, Australia, and New Zealand), 10 Central European nations (sharing a Western Christian heritage, but which also lived under Communist rule), 11 societies with a Muslim majority (Albania, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh,
85
ANNUAL EDITIONS
A Barometer of Tolerance Gender Equality and Democracy
Note:This chart represents a partial sampling of countries from the World Values Survey. 'Sum of Freedom House ratings, 1981-1998 tPercentage disagreeing with statement: "Men make better political leaders than women:' Sources: World Values Survey, pooled sample 1995-2001; Freedom in the World: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Uberties (New York: Freedom House, 1981-1998),
instance, citizens in some Muslim societies agree overwhelmingly with the statement that "politicians who do not believe in God are unfit for public office" (88 percent in Egypt, 83 percent in Iran, and 71 percent in Bangladesh), but this statement also garners strong support in the Philippines (71 percent), Uganda (60 percent), and Venezuela (52 percent). Even in the United States, about two fifths of the public believes that atheists are unfit for public office.
distinctively less permissive toward homosexuality. abortion, and divorce. These issues are part of a broader syndrome of tolerance, trust, political activism, and emphasis on individual autonomy that constitutes "self-expression values," The extent to which a society emphasizes these self-expression values has a surprisingly strong bearing on the emergence and survival of democratic institutions. Among all the countries included in the wvs, support for gender equality-a key indicator of tolerance and personal freedom-is closely linked with a society's level of democracy [see box, A Barometer of Tolerance].
Today, relatively few people express overt hostility toward other classes, races, or religions, but rejection of homosexuals is widespread. About half of the world's populations say that homosexuality is "never" justifiable.
Muslim societies are neither uniquely nor monolithically low on tolerance toward sexual orientation and gender equality. .. . However, on the whole, Muslim countries not only lag behind the West but behind all other societies as well.
However, when it comes to attitudes toward gender equality and sexual liberalization, the cultural gap between Islam and the West widens into a chasm. On the matter of equal rights and opportunities for women-measured by such questions as whether men make better political leaders than
In every stable democracy, a majority of the public disagrees with the statement that "men make better political leaders than women." None of the societies in which less than 30 percent of the public rejects this statement (such as Jordan, Nigeria, and Belarus) is a true democracy. In China, one of the world's least
women or whether university education is more important for boys than for girls-Western and Muslim countries score 82 percent and 55 percent, respectively. Muslim societies are also
86
Article 15. The True Clash of Civilizations
A
Generation
Support for Gender Equality, by Age and Type of Society
'The 1OO'point Gender Equality Scale is based on responses to the following five statements and questions: "If a woman wants to have a child as a single parent but she doesn't want to have a stable relationship with a man, do you approve or disapprove?"; "When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women"; "A university education is more important for a boy than a girl"; "Do you think that a woman has to have children in order to be fulfilled or is this not necessary?"; and "On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do:' The scale was constructed so that if all respondents show high scores on all five items (representing strong support for gender equality), it produces a score of 100, while low scores on all five items produce a score of O. Source: World Values Surveys, pooled 1995-2001
democratic countries, a majority of the public agrees that men make better political leaders than women, despite a party line that has long emphasized gender equality (Mao Zedong once declared, "women hold up half the sky"). In practice, Chinese
extra-judicialldllings. The status of Indian women reflects this duality. Women's rights are guaranteed in the constitution, and Indira Gandhi led the nation for 15 years. Yet domestic violence and forced prostitution remain prevalent throughout the country, and, according to the wvs, almost 50 percent of the Indian populace believes only men should run the government.
women occupy few positions of real power and face widespread discrimination in the workplace. India is a borderline case. The country is a long-standing parliamentary democracy with an independent judiciary and civilian control of the armed forces, yet it is also marred by a weak rule of law, arbitrary arrests, and
The way a society views homosexuality constitutes another good litmus test of its commitment to equality. Tolerance of well-liked groups is never a problem. But if someone wants
87
ANNUAL EDiTIONS
Want to Know More? Samuel Huntington expanded his controversial 1993 article into a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order(NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Among the authors who have disputed Huntington's claim that Islam is incompatible with democratic values are Edward Said, who decries the clash of civilizations thesis as an attempt to revive the "good vs. evil" world dichotomy prevalent during the Cold War ("A Clash of Ignorance," The Nation, October 22, 2001); John Vall and John Esposito, who argue that "The Muslim heritage ... contains concepts that provide a foundation for contemporary Muslims to develop authentically Muslim programs of democracy" ("Islam's Democratic Essence," Middle East Quarterly, September 1994); and Ray Takeyh, who recounts the efforts of contemporary Muslim scholars to legitimize democratic concepts through the reinterpretation of Muslim texts and traditions ("Faith-Based Initiatives," FOREIGN POLICY, November/December 2001). An overview of the Bush administration'S Middle East Partnership Initiative, including the complete transcript of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech on political and economic reform in the Arab world, can be found on the Web site of the U.S. Department of State. Marina Ottaway, Thomas Carothers, Amy Hawthorne, and Daniel Brumberg offer a stinging critique of those who believe that toppling the traqi regime could unleash a democratic tsunami in the
Arab world in "Democratic Mirage in the Middle East" (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002). In a poll of nearly 4,000 Arabs, James Zogby found that the issue of "civil and personal rights" earned the overall highest score when people were asked to rank their personal priorities (What Arabs Think: Values, Beliefs and Concerns, WaShington: Zogby International, 2002). A poll available on the Web site of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press ("Among Wealthy Nations .•• U.S. Stands Alone in Its Embrace of Religion," December 19, 2002) reveals that Americans' views on religion and faith are closer to those living in developing nations than in developed countries. The Web site of the World Values Survey (wvs) provides considerable information on the survey, including background on methodology, key findings, and the text of the questionnaires. The second iteration of the A.T. Kearney/ FOREIGN POLICY Magazine Globalization Index ("Globalization's Last Hurrah?" FOREIGN POLICY, January/February 2002) found a strong correlation between the wvs measure of "subjective well-being" and a society's level of global integration. For links to relevant Web sites, access to the FP Archive, and a comprehensive index of related FOREIGN POLICY articles, go to www.foreignpolicy.com.
to gauge how tolerant a nation really is, find out which group is the most disliked, and then ask whether members of that group should be allowed to hold public meetings, teach in schools, and work in government. Today, relatively few people express overt hostility toward other classes. races, or religions, but rejection of homosexuals is widespread. In response to a wvs question about whether homosexuality is justifiable, about half of the world's population say "never." But, as is the case with gender equality, this attitude is directly proportional to a country's level of democracy. Among authoritarian and quasi-democratic states, rejection of homosexuality is deeply entrenched: 99 percent in both Egypt and Bangladesh, 94 percent in Iran, 92 percent in China, and 71 percent in India. By contrast, these figures are much lower among respondents in stable democracies: 32 percent in the United States, 26 percent in Canada, 25 percent in Britain, and 19 percent in Germany. Muslim societies are neither uniquely nor monolithically low on tolerance toward sexual orientation and ge~9.er equality. Many of the Soviet successor states rank as low as most Muslim societies. However, on the whole, Muslim countries not only lag behind the West but behind all other societies as well [see box, A Widening Generation Gap]. Perhaps more significant, the figures reveal the gap between the West and Islam is even wider among younger age groups. This pattern suggests that the younger generations in Western societies have become progressively more egalitarian tihan their elders, but the younger generations in Muslim societies have remained almost
as traditional as their parents and grandparents, producing an expanding cultural gap.
Clash of Conclusions "The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation," President Bush declared in a conunencement speech at West Point last summer. He's right. Any claim of a "clash of civilizations" based on fundamentally different political goals held by Western and Muslim societies represents an oversimplification of the evidence. Support for the goal of democracy is surprisingly widespread among Muslim publics, even among
those living in authoritarian societies. Yet Huntington is correct when he argues that cultural differences have taken on a new importance, forming the fault lines for future conflict. Although nearly the entire world pays lip service to democracy, there is still no global consensus on the self-expression values-such as social tolerance, gender equality, freedom of speech, and interpersonal trust-that are crucial to democracy. Today, these divergent values constitute the real clash between Muslim societies and the West. But economic development generates changed attitudes in virtually any society. In particular, modernization compels systematic, predictable changes in gender roles: Industrialization brings women into the paid work force and dramatically reduces fertility rates. Women become literate and begin to participate
88
Article 15. The True Clash of Civilizations
in representative government but still have far less power than
around the world were women. In 1965, the figure rose to 8 percent, in 1985 to 12 percent, and in 2002 to 15 percent. The Unit~d States cannot expect to foster democracy in the Muslim world simply by getting countries to adopt the trappings of democratic governance, such as holding elections and
men. Then, the postindustrial phase brings a shift toward greater
gender equality as women move into higher-status economic roles in management and gain political influence within elected and appointed bodies. Thus, relatively industrialized Muslim
societies such as Turkey share the same views on gender equality and sexual liberalization as other new democracies.
having a parliament. Nor is it realistic to expect that nascent
Even in established democracies, changes in cultural
reminiscent of the velvet revolutions that swept Eastern Europe
attitudes-and eventually, attitudes toward democracy-seem to be closely linked with modernization. Women did not attain the
in the final days of the Cold War. A real commitment to democratic reform will be measured by the willingness to commit the
right to vote in most historically Protestant societies until about
resources necessary to foster human development in the Muslim
1920, and in much of Roman Catholic Europe until after World War II. In 1945, only 3 percent of the members of parliaments
world. Culture has a lasting impact on how societies evolve. But culture does not have to be destiny.
democracies in the Middle East will inspire a wave of reforms
From Foreign Policy, March/April2003. pp. 63-70. Copyright © 2003 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Reprinted with permission. www.forcignpolicy.com
89
Article 16
What Political Institutions Does Large-Scale Democracy Require? ROBERT
A.
W
hat does it mean to say that a country is governed
DAHL they tended to justify their demands by appealing to democratic and republican ideas. What political institutions did they seek, and what were actually adopted in these countries?
democratically? Here, we will focus on the political institutions of democracy on a large scale, that
is, the political institutions necessary for a democratic country. We are not concerned here, then, with what democracy in a very small group might require, as in a committee. We also
Alternatively, we could examine countries where the government is generally referred to as democratic by most of the people in that country, by many persons in other countries, and by scholars, journalists, and the like. In other words, in ordinary speech and scholarly discussion the country is called a democracy. Third, we could reflect on a specific country or group of countries, or perhaps even a hypothetical country, in order to
need to keep in mind that every actual democracy has always fallen short of democratic criteria. Finally, we should be aware that in ordinary language, we use the word democracy to refer both to a goal or ideal and to an actuality that is only a partial attainment of the goaL For the time being, therefore, I'll count on the reader to make the necessary distinctions when I use the words democracy, democratically, democratic government, democratic country, and so on. I
imagine, as realistically as possible, what political institutions would be required in order to achieve democratic goals to a substantial degree. We would undertake a mental experiment, so to speak, in which we would reflect carefully on human experi-
ences, tendencies, possibilities, and limitations and design a set
How Can We Know?
of political institutions that would be necessary for large-scale democracy to exist and yet feasible and attainable within the
How can we reasonably determine what political institutions are necessary for large-scale democracy? We might examine
limits of human capacities.
the history of countries that have changed their political insti-
Fortunately, all three methods converge on the same set
tutions in response, at least in part, to demands for broader popular inclusion and effective participation in government
of democratic political institutions. These, then, are minimal requirements for a democratic country (Figure I).
and political life. Although in earlier times those who sought to
gain inclusion and participation were not necessarily inspired
The Political Institutions of Modern Representative Democracy
by democratic ideas, from about the eighteenth century onward
Figun: 1
Briefly, the political institutions of modern representative dem-
ocratic government are
• Elected officials. Control over government decisions
What Political Institutions Does Large-Scale Democracy Require?
about policy is constitutionally vested in officials elected by citizens. Thus modern, large-scale democratic gov-
ernments are representative. • Free, fair and frequent elections. Elected officials are chosen in frequent and fairly conducted elections in which coercion is comparatively uncommon. Freedom of expression. Citizens have a right to express themselves without danger of severe punishment on political matters broadly defined, including criticism of officials, the government, the regime, the socioeconomic order, and the prevailing ideology.
Large-scale democracy requires: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Elected officials Free, fair, and frequent elections Freedom of expression Alternative sources of information Associational autonomy Inclusive citizenship
90
Article 16. What Political Institutions Does Large-Scale Democracy Require? o
Access to alternative sources of information. Citizens have a right to seek out alternative and independent
the full light of day. In the legislative bodies. what once were "factions" became political parties. The ('ins" who served in the government of the day were opposed by the Houts," or what in Britain came to be officially styled His (or Her) Majesty's Loyal Opposition. In eighteenth-century Britain, the faction supporting the monarch and the opposing faction supported by much of the gentry in the "country" were gradually transformed into Tories and Whigs. During that same century in Sweden, partisan adversaries in Parliament somewhat facetiously called themselves the Hats and the Caps.' During the final years of the eighteenth century in the newly formed republic of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, the vice president, and James Madison, leader of the House of Representatives, organized their followers in Congress to oppose the policies of the Federalist president. John Adams, and his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. To succeed in their opposition. they soon realized that they would have to do more than oppose the Federalists in the Congress and the cabinet: they would need to remove their opponents from office. To do that. they had to win national elections, and to win national elections they had to organize their followers throughout the country. In less than a decade, Jefferson. Madison, and others sympathetic with their views created a political party that was organized all the way down to the smallest voting precincts, districts, and municipalities, an organization that would reinforce the loyalty of their followers between and during election campaigns and make sure they came to the polls. Their Republican Party (soon renamed Democratic Republican and, a generation later, Democratic) became the first popularly based electoral party in the world. As a result. one of the most fundamental and distinctive political institutions of modem democracy, the political party, had burst beyond its confines in parliaments and legislatures in order to organize the citizens themselves and mobilize party supporters in national elections. By the time the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, the first five democratic political institutions described above had already arrived in America. The institutions seemed to him so deeply planted and pervasive that he had no hesitation in referring to the United States as a democracy. In that country, he said, the people were sovereign, "society governs itself for itself," and the power of the majority was unlimited.' He was astounded by the multiplicity of associations into which Americans organized themselves, for every purpose, it seemed. And towering among these associ~ ations were the two major political parties. In the United States, it appeared to Tocqueville, democracy was about as complete as one could imagine it ever becoming. During the century that followed. all five of the basic democratic institutions Tocqueville observed during his visit to America were consolidated in more than a dozen other countries. Many observers in Europe and the United States concluded that any country that aspired to be civilized and progressive would necessarily have to adopt a democratic form of government. Yet everywhere, the sixth fundamental institutioninclusive citizenship-was missing. Although Tocqueville affirmed that "the state of Mary land, which had been founded
sources of information from other citizens, experts, newspapers, magazines, books, telecommunications, and the like. Moreover, alternative sources of information actually exist that are not under the control of the government or any other single political group attempting to influence public political beliefs and attitudes. and these alternative sources are effectively protected by law. Associational autonomy. To achieve their various rights, including those required for the effective opera-
tion of democratic political institutions, citizens also have a right to form relatively independent associations or organizations, including independent political parties and interest groups.
Inclusive citizenship. No adult permanently residing in the country and subject to its laws can be denied the rights that are available to others and are necessary to the five political institutions just listed. These include the right to vote in the election of officials in free and fair elections; to run for elective office; to free expres~ sion; to form and participate in independent political organizations; to have access to independent sources of information; and rights to other liberties and opportunities that may be necessary to the effective operation of the political institutions of large-scale democracy.
The Political Institutions in Perspective Ordinarily these institutions do not arrive in a country all at once; the last two are distinctly latecomers. Until the twentieth century. universal suffrage was denied in both the theory and practice of democratic and republican government. More than any other single feature. universal suffrage distinguishes modern representative democracy from earlier forms of democracy. The time of arrival and the sequence in which the institutions have been introduced have varied tremendously. In countries where the full set of democratic institutions arrived earliest and have endured to the present day, the "older" democracies, elements of a common pattern emerge. Elections to a legislature arrived early on-in Britain as early as the thirteenth century, in the United States during its colonial period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The practice of electing higher lawmaking officials was followed by a gradual expansion of the rights of citizens to express themselves on political matters and to seek out and exchange information. The right to fonn associations with explicit political goals tended to follow still later. Political "factions" and partisan organization were generally viewed as dangerous, divisive, subversive of political order and stability, and injurious to the public good. Yet because political associa· tions could not be suppressed without a degree of coercion that an increasingly large and influential number of citizens regarded as intolerable, they were often able to exist as more or less clandestine associations until they emerged from the shadows into
91
ANNUAL EDITIONS
by men of rank, was the first to proclaim universal suffrage," like almost all other men (and many women) of his time he tacitly assumed that "universal" did not include women.4 Nor, indeed, some men. Maryland's "universal suffrage," it so hap~ pened, also excluded most African Americans. Elsewhere, in
Consider a democratically governed committee, or a club, or a very small town. Although equality in voting would seem to be necessary, small units like these might manage without many elected officials: perhaps a moderator to preside over meetings, a secretary-treasurer to keep minutes and accounts. The participants themselves could decide just about everything directly during their meetings, leaving details to the secretary-treasurer. Governments of small organizations would not have to be full-fledged representative governments in which citizens elect representatives charged with enacting laws and policies. Yet these governments could be democratic, perhaps highly democratic. So, too, even though they lacked political parties or other independent political associations, they might be highly democratic. In fact, we might concur with the classical democratic and republican view that in small associations, organized "factions" are not only unnecessary but downright harmful. Instead of conflicts exacerbated by factionalism, caucuses, political parties, and so on, we might prefer unity, consensus, agreement achieved by discussion and mutual respect. The political institutions strictly required for democratic government depend, then, on the size of the unit. The six institutions listed above developed because they are necessary for governing countries, not smaller units. Polyarchal democracy is democratic government on the large scale of the nation-state or country. To return to our questions: Are the political institutions of polyarchal democracy actually necessary for democracy on the large scale of a country? If so, why? To answer these twin questions, let us recall what a democratic process requires (Figure 2).
countries that were otherwise more or less democratic, as in America, a full half of all adults were completely excluded from national political life simply because they were women; in addition, large numbers of men were denied suffrage because they could not meet literacy or property requirements, an exclusion supported by many people who considered themselves advocates of democratic or republican government. Although New Zealand extended suffrage to women in national elections in 1893 and Australia in 1902, in countries otherwise democratic, women did not gain suffrage in national elections until about 1920; in Belgium, France, and Switzerland, countries that most people would have called highly democratic, women could not vote until after World War II. Because it is difficult for many today to grasp what "democracy" meant to our predecessors, let me reemphasize the difference: in all democracies and republics throughout twenty-five centuries, the rights to engage fully in political life were restricted to a minority of adults. "Democratic" government was government by males only-and not all of them. It was not until the twentieth century that in both theory and practice democracy came to require that the rights to engage fully in political life must be extended, with very few if any exceptions, to the entire population of adults permanently residing in a country. Taken in their entirety, then, these six political institutions constitute not only a new type of political system but a new kind of popular government, a type of "democracy" that had never existed throughout the twenty-five centuries of experience since the inauguration of "democracy" in Athens and a "republic" in Rome. Because the institutions of modern representative democratic government, taken in their entirety, are historically unique, it is convenient to give them their own name. This modem type of large-scale democratic government is sometimes called polyarchal democracy. Although other factors were often at work, the six political institutions of polyarcbal democracy came about, in part at least, in response to demands for inclusion and participation in political life. In countries that are widely referred to as democracies today, all six exist. Yet you might well ask: Are some of these institutions no more than past products of historical struggles? Are they no longer necessary for democratic government? And if they are still necessary today, why?'
Why (and When) Does Democracy Require Elected Representatives? As the focus of democratic government shifted to large-scale units like nations or countries, the question arose: How can citizens participate effectively when the number of citizens becomes too numerous or too widely dispersed geographically (or both, as in the case of a country) for them to participate conveniently in making laws by assembling in one place? And how can they make sure that matters with which they are most concerned are adequately considered by officials-that is, how can citizens control the agenda of government decisions? How best to meet these democratic requirements in a political unit as large as a country is, of course, enonnously difficult, indeed to some extent unachievable. Yet just as with the other highly demanding democratic criteria, this, too, can serve as a standard for evaluating alternative possibilities and solutions. Clearly the requirements could not be met if the top officials of the government could set the agenda and adopt policies independently of the wishes of citizens. The only feasible solution, though it is highly imperfect, is for citizens to
The Factor of Size Before answering these questions, I need to call attention to an important qualification. We are considering institutions necessary for the government of a democratic country. Why "country"? Because all the institutions necessary for a democratic country would not always be required for a unit much smaller than a country.
92
Article 16. What Political Institutions Does Large-Scale Democracy Require? I;" ••n".·"
2
Why the Institutions Are Necessary In a unit as large as a country, these political institutions of polyarchal democracy, . ,
are necessary to satisfy the following
democratic criteria:
1. Elected representatives ...
Effective partici pation Control of the agenda Voting equality
2. Free, fair and frequent elections ...
Control of the agenda 3. Freedom of expression, ..
Effective participation Enlightened understanding Control of the agenda
4. Alternative information...
Effective participation Enlightened understanding Control of the agenda
5. Associational autonomy ...
Effective participation Enlightened understanding Control of the agenda
6. Inclusive citizenship. , .
Full inclusion
elect their top officials and hold them more or less accountable through elections by dismissing them, so to speak, in subsequent elections. To us that solution seems obvious. But what may appear selfevident to us was not at all obvious to our predecessors. Until fairly recently the possibility that citizens could, by means of elections, choose and reject representatives with the authority to make laws remained largely foreign to both the theory and practice of democracy. The election of representatives mainly developed during the Middle Ages, when monarchs realized that in order to impose taxes. raise armies, and make laws, they needed to win the consent of the nobility, the higher clergy, and a few not-so-common commoners in the larger towns and cities. Until the eighteenth century, then, the standard view was that democratic or republican government meant rule by the people, and if the people were to rule, they had to assemble in one place and vote on decrees, laws, or policies. Democracy would have to be town meeting democracy; representative democracy was a contradiction in tenns. By implication, whether explicit or implicit, a republic or a democracy could actually exist only in a small unit, like a town or city, Writers who held this view, such as Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were perfectly aware of the disadvantages of a small state, particularly when it confronted the military superiority of a much larger state, and were therefore extremely pessimistic about the future prospects for genuine democracy. Yet the standard view was swiftly overpowered and swept aside by the onrushing force of the national state. Rousseau
himself clearly understood that for a government of a country as large as Poland (for which he proposed a constitution), representation would be necessary, And shortly thereafter, the standard view was driven off the stage of history by the arrival of democracy in America. As late as 1787, when the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia to design a constitution appropriate for a large country with an ever-increasing population, the delegates were acutely aware of the historical tradition. Could a republic possibly exist on the huge scale the United States had already attained, not to mention the even grander scale the delegates foresaw?6 Yet no one questioned that if a republic were to exist in America, it would have to take the form of a representative republic, Because of the lengthy experience with representation in colonial and state legislatures and in the Continental Congress, the feasibility of representative government was practically beyond debate. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the traditional view was ignored, forgotten, or, ifremembered at all, treated as irrelevant. "It is evident," John Stuart Mill wrote in 1861 that the only government which can fully satisfy all the exigencies of the social state is one in which the whole people participate; that any participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful; that the participation should everywhere be as great as the general degree of improvement of the community will allow; and that nothing less can be ultimately desirable than the admission of all to share in the sovereign power of the state. But
93
ANNUAL EDITIONS
To acquire an enlightened understanding of possible government actions and policies also requires freedom of expression. To acquire civic competence, citizens need opportunities to express their own views; learn from one another; engage in discussion and deliberation; read, hear, and question experts, political candidates, and persons whose judgments they trust; and learn in other ways that depend on freedom of expression. Finally, without freedom of expression, citizens would soon lose their capacity to influence the agenda of government decisions. Silent citizens may be perfect subjects for an authoritarian ruler; they would be a disaster for a democracy.
since all cannot, in a community exceeding a single small town, participate personally in any but some very minor portions of the public business, it follows that the ideal type of a perfect government must be representative,7
Why Does Democracy Require Free, Fair, and Frequent Elections? As we have seen, if we accept the desirability of political equality, then every citizen must have an equal and effective opportunity to vote, and all votes must be counted as equal. If equality in voting is to be implemented, then clearly, elections
Why Does Democracy Require the Availability of Alternative and Independent Sources of Information?
must be free and fair. To be free means that citizens can go to the polls without fear of reprisal; and if they are to be fair, then all votes must be counted as equal. Yet free and fair elections are not enough. Imagine electing representatives for a term of, say, twenty years! If citizens are to retain final control over the agenda, then elections must also be frequent. How best to implement free and fair elections is not obvious. In the late nineteenth century, the secret ballot began to replace a public show of hands. Although open voting still has a few defenders, secrecy has become the general standard; a country in which it is widely violated would be judged as lacking free and fair elections. But debate continues as to the kind of voting system that best meets standards of fairness. Is a system of proportional representation (PR), like that employed in most democratic countries, fairer than the first-past-the-post system used in Great Britain and the United States? Reasonable arguments can be made for both. In discussions about different voting systems, however, the need for a fair system is assumed; how best to achieve fairness and other reasonable objectives is simply a technical question. How frequent should elections be? Judging from twentiethcentury practices in democratic countries, a rough answer might be that annual elections for legislative representatives would be a bit too frequent and anything more than five years would be too long. Obviously, however, democrats can reasonably disagree about the specific interval and how it might vary with different offices and different traditional practices. The point is that without frequent elections, citizens would lose a substantial degree of control over their elected officials.
Like freedom of expression, the availability of alternative and relatively independent sources of information is required by several of the basic democratic criteria. Consider the need for enlightened understanding. How can citizens acquire the information they need in order to understand the issue if the government controls all the important sources of infonnation? Or, for that malter, if any single group enjoys a monopoly in providing information? Citizens must have access, then, to alternative sources of information that are not under the control of the government or dominated by any other group or point of view. Or think about effective participation and influencing the public agenda. How could citizens participate effectively in political life if all the information they could acquire were provided by a single source, say the government, or, for that matter, a single party, faction, or interest?
Why Does Democracy Require Independent Associations? It took a radical turnabout in ways of thinking to accept the need for political associations-interest groups, lobbying organizations, political parties. Yet if a large republic requires that
representatives be elected, then how are elections to be contested? Forming an organization, such as a political party, gives a group an obvious electoral advantage. And if one group seeks to gain that advantage, will not others who disagree with their policies? And why should political activity cease between eJections? Legislators can be influenced; causes can be advanced, policies promoted, appointments sought. So, unlike a small city or town, the large scale of democracy in a country makes political associations both necessary and desirable. In any case, how can they be prevented without impairing the fundamental right of citizens to participate effectively in governing? In a large republic, then, they are not only necessary and desirable but inevitable. Independent associations are also a source of civic education and enlightenment. They provide citizens not only with information but also with opportunities for discussion, deliberation, and the acquisition of political skills.
Why Does Democracy Require Free Expression? To begin with, freedom of expression is required in order for citizens to participate effectively in political life. How can citizens make their views known and persuade their fellow citizens and representatives to adopt them unless they can express themselves freely about all matters bearing on the conduct of the government? And if they are to take the views of others into account, they must be able to hear what others have to say. Free expression means not just that you have a right to be heard. It also means that you have a right to hear what others have to say. 94
Article 16. What Politicallnstitulions Does Large-Scale Democracy Require?
Why Does Democracy Require Inclusive Citizenship?
as more habitual and therefore more durable. We usually think of institutions as having settled in for the long haul, passed on from one generation to the next. As a country moves from a nondemocratic to a democratic government, the early democratic arrangements gradually become practices, which in due time turn into settled institutions. Helpful though these distinction may be, however, for our purposes it will be more convenient if we put them aside and settle for institutions. 2. ''The Hats assumed their name for being like the dashing fellows in the tricome of the day.. , . The Caps were nicknamed because of the charge that they were like timid old ladies in nightcaps." Franklin D. Scott, Sweden: The Nation's History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977),243.
We can view the political institutions summarized in Figure 1 in several ways. For a country that lacks one or more of the institutions. and is to that extent not yet sufficiently democratized, knowledge of the basic political institutions can help us to design a strategy for making a full transition to mod-
ern representative democracy. For a country that has only recently made the transition, that knowledge can help inform us about the crucial institutions that need to be strengthened, deepened, and consolidated. Because they are all necessary for modern representative democracy (polyarchal democracy), we can also view them as establishing a minimum level for democratization. Those of us who live in the older democracies, where the transition to democracy occurred some generations ago and the political institutions listed in Figure I are by now solidly established, face a different and equally difficult challenge. For even if the institutions are necessary to democratization, they are definitely not sufficient for achieving fully the democratic criteria listed in Figure 1. Are we not then at liberty, and indeed obligated, to appraise our democratic institutions against these criteria? It seems obvious to me, as to many others, that judged against democratic criteria, our existing political institutions display many shortcomings. Consequently, just as we need strategies for bringing about a transition to democracy in nondemocratic countries and for consolidating democratic institutions in newly democratized countries, so in the older democratic countries, we need to consider whether and how to move beyond our existing level of democracy. Let me put it this way. In many countries, the task is to achieve democratization up to the level of polyarchal democracy. But the challenge to citizens in the older democracies is to discover how they might achieve a level of democratization beyond polyarchal democracy.
3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, voL 1 (New York:
Schocken Books, 1961), 51. 4. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 50. 5. Polyarchy is derived from Greek words meaning "many" and "rule," thus "rule by the manYt" as distinguished from rule by the one, or monarchy, and rule by the few, oligarchy or aristocracy. Although the tenn had been rarely used, a colleague and I introduced it in 1953 as a handy way of referring to a modern representative democracy with universal suffrage. Hereafter I shall use it in that sense. More precisely, a polyarchal democracy is a political system with the six democratic institutions listed above. Polyarchal democracy, then, is different from representative democracy with restricted suffrage, as in the nineteenth century. It is also different from older democracies and republics that not only had a restricted suffrage but lacked many of the other crucial characteristics of polyarchal democracy, such as political parties, rights to form political organizations to influence or oppose the existing government, organized interest groups, and so on. It is different, too, from the democratic practices in units so small that members can assemble directly and make (or recommend) policies or laws. 6. A few delegates daringly forecast that the United States might ultimately have as many as one hundred million inhabitants. This number was reached in .1915. 7. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government
[1861J (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958).55. A. DAHL is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Yale University. He has published many books on democratic theory and practice, including A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956) and Democracy and Its Critics (1989). This article was adapted from his recent book, On Democracy, Yale University Press.
ROBERT
Notes 1. Political arrangements sound as if they might be rather provisional, which they could well be in a country that has just moved away from nondemocratic rule. We tend to think of practices
Prom ON DEMOCRACY by Robert A. Dahl (As seen in Political Science Quarterly, vol. 120, no. 2, pp. 187-197). Copyright © 2005 by Yale University Press. Reprinted by permission.
95
Article 17
What Democracy Is ... and Is Not PHILIPPE
F
C.
SCHMITTER
&
TERRY LYNN KARL
or some time, the word democracy has been circulat~ ing as a debased currency in the political marketplace.
Modern political democracy is a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives. 3 A regime or system of governance is an ensemble of patterns that determines the methods of access to the principal public offices; the characteristics of the actors admitted to or
Politicians with a wide range of convictions and practices strove to appropriate the label and attach it to their actions. Scholars. conversely, hesitated to lise it-without adding qualifying adjectives-because of the ambiguity that surrounds it. The distinguished American political theorist Robert Dahl even tried to introduce a new term, "polyarchy," in its stead in the (vain) hope of gaining a greater measure of conceptual precision. But for better or worse, we are "stuck" with democracy as the catchword of contemporary political discourse. It is the word that resonates in people's minds and springs from their lips as they struggle for freedom and a better way of life; it is the word whose meaning we must discern if it is to be of any use in guiding political analysis and practice. The wave of transitions away from autocratic rule that began with Portugal's "Revolution of the Carnations" in 1974 and seems to have crested with the collapse of communist regimes across Eastern Europe in 1989 has produced a welcome convergence toward [al common definition of democracy.' Everywhere there has been a silent abandonment of dubious adjectives like "popular," "guided," "bourgeois," and "fannal" to modify "democracy." At the same time, a remarkable consensus has emerged concerning the minimal conditions that polities must meet in order to merit the prestigious appellation of "democratic." Moreover, a number of international organizations now monitor how well these standards are met; indeed. some countries even consider them when formulating foreign policy.'
excluded from such access; the strategies that actors may use to gain access; and the rules that are followed in the making of publicly binding decisions. To work properly, the ensemble must be institutionalized-that is to say, the various patterns must be habitually known, practiced, and accepted by most, if not all, actors. Increasingly, the preferred mechanism of institutionalization is a written body of laws undergirded by a written constitution, though many enduring political norms can have an informal, prudential, or traditional basis.' For the sake of economy and comparison, these forms, characteristics, and rules are usually bundled together and given a generic label. Democratic is one; others are autocratic, authoritarian, despotic, dictatorial, tyrannical, totalitarian, absolutist, traditional, monarchic. obligarchic. plutocratic, aristocratic, and sultanistic.' Each of these regime forms may in turu be broken down into subtypes. Like all regimes, democracies depend upon the presence of rulers, persons who occupy specialized authority roles and can give legitimate commands to others. What distinguishes democratic rulers from nondemocratic ones are the norms that condition how the former come to power and the practices that hold them accountable for their actions.
What Democracy Is Let us begin by broadly defining democracy and the generic concepts that distinguish it as a unique system for organizing relations between rulers and the ruled. We will then briefly review procedures. the rules and arrangements that are needed if democracy is to endure. Finally, we will discuss two operative principles that make democracy work. They are not expressly included among the generic concepts or fonnal procedures. but the prospect for democracy is grim if their underlying conditioning effects are not present. One of the major themes of this essay is that democracy does not consist of a single unique set of institutions. There are many types of democracy, and their diverse practices produce a similarly varied set of effects. The specific form democracy takes is contingent upon a country's socioeconomic conditions as well as its entrenched state structures and policy practices.
"However central to democracy, elections occur intermittently and only allow citizens to choose between the highly aggregated alternatives offered by political parties . .. " ., 'J", ":'·<;~·'·:~';":;'Y, .'i'~::,:,":',':'"
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"'i'.·:" :-;',! :,,' )"!.•~, ;,:'::':i:'i,' .,,""":':'.,;,:,:,"!.;;:':' ,:.;,,, ,'0;-i:,::i!,:',W,\~','l:;,,\0,'"
The public realm encompasses the making of collective norms and choices that are binding on the society and backed by state coercion. Its content can vary a great deal across democracies, depending upon preexisting distinctions between the public and the private, state and society, legitimate coercion and voluntary exchange, and collective needs and individual preferences. The liberal conception of democracy advocates circumscribing the public realm as narrowly as possible, while 96
Article 17, What Democracy Is ••• and Is Not the socialist or social~democratic approach would extend that realm through regulation, subsidization, and, in some cases, collective ownership of property. Neither is intrinsically more democratic than the other-just differently democratic. This implies that measures aimed at "developing the private sector" are no more democratic than those aimed at "developing the public sector." Both, if carried to extremes, could undermine the practice of democracy, the former by destroying the basis for satisfying collective needs and exercising legitimate authority; the latter by destroying the basis for satisfying individual preferences and controlling illegitimate government actions. Differences of opinion over the optimal mix of the two provide much of the substantive content of political conflict within established democracies. Citizens are the most distinctive element in democracies. All regimes have rulers and a public realm, but only to the extent that they are democratic do they have citizens. Historically, severe restrictions on citizenship were imposed in most emerging or partial democracies according to criteria of age, gender, class, race, literacy, property ownership, tax-paying status, and so on. Only a small part of the total population was eligible to vote or run for office. Only restricted social categories were allowed to form, join, or support political associations. After protracted struggle-in some cases involving violent domestic upheaval or international war-most of these restrictions were lifted. Today, the criteria for inclusion are fairly standard. All native-born adults are eligible, although somewhat higher age limits may still be imposed upon candidates for certain offices. Unlike the early American and European democracies of the nineteenth century, none of the recent democracies in southern Europe, Latin America, Asia, or Eastern Europe has even attempted to impose formal restrictions on the franchise or eligibility to office. When it comes to informal restrictions on the effective exercise of citizenship rights, however, the story can be quite different. This explains the central importance (discussed below) of procedures. Competition has not always been considered an essential defining condition of democracy. "Classic" democracies presumed decision making based on direct participation leading to consensus. The assembled citizenry was expected to agree on a common course of action after listening to the alternatives and weighing their respective merits and demerits. A tradition of hostility to "faction," and "particular interests" persists in democratic thought, but at least since The Federalist Papers it has become widely accepted that competition among factions is a necessary evil in democracies that operate on a more-thanlocal scale. Since, as James Madison argued, "the latent causes of faction are sown into the nature of man," and the possible remedies for "the mischief of faction" are worse than the disease, the best course is to recognize them and to attempt to control their effects.' Yet while democrats may agree on the inevitability of factions, they tend to disagree about the best forms and rules for governing factional competition. Indeed, differences over the preferred modes and boundaries of competition contribute most to distinguishing one subtype of democracy from another.
The most popular definition of democracy equates it with regular elections, fairly conducted and honestly counted. Some even consider the mere fact of elections-even ones from which specific parties or candidates are excluded, or in which substantial portions of the population cannot freely participate-as a sufficient condition for the existence of democracy. This fallacy has been called "electoralism" or "the faith that merely holding elections will channel political action into peaceful contests among elites and accord public legitimacy to the winners"-no matter how they are conducted or what else constrains those who win them. 7 However central to democracy, elections occur intermittently and only allow citizens to choose between the highly aggregated alternatives offered by political parties, which can, especially in the early stages of a democratic transition, proliferate in a bewildering variety. During the intervals between elections, citizens can seek to influence public policy through a wide variety of other intermediaries: interest associations, social movements, locality groupings, clientelistic arrangements, and so forth. Modem democracy, in other words, offers a variety of competitive processes and channels for the expression of interests and values-associational as well as partisan, functional as well as territorial, collective as well as individual. All are integral to its practice. Another commonly accepted image of democracy identifies it with majority rule. Any governing body that makes decisions by combining the votes of more than half of those eligible and present is said to be democratic, whether that majority emerges within an electorate, a parliament, a committee, a city council, or a party caucus. For exceptional purposes (e.g., amending the constitution or expelling a member), "qualified majorities" of more than 50 percent may be required, but few would deny that democracy must involve some means of aggregating the equal preferences of individuals. A problem arises, however, when numbers meet intensities. What happens when a properly assembled majority (especially a stable, self-perpetuating one) regularly makes decisions that harm some minority (especially a threatened cultural or ethnic group)? In these circumstances, successful democracies tend to qualify the central principle of majority rule in order to protect minority rights. Such qualifications can take the form of constitutional provisions that place certain matters beyond the reach of majorities (bills of rights); requirements for concurrent majorities in several different constituencies (confederalism); guarantees securing the autonomy of local or regional governments against the demands of the central authority (federalism); grand coalition governments that incorporate all parties (consociationalism); or the negotiation of social pacts between major social groups like business and labor (neocorporatism). The most common and effective way of protecting minorities, however, lies in the everyday operation of interest associations and social movements. These reflect (some would say, amplify) the different intensities of preference that exist in the population and bring them to bear on democratically elected decision makers. Another way of putting this intrinsic tension between numbers and intensities would be to say that "in modem democracies, votes may be counted, but influences alone are weighted."
97
ANNUAL EDITIONS Cooperation has always been a central feature of democ~ racy. Actors must voluntarily make collective decisions bind~
representation based largely on functional interests, not territorial constituencies. These interest associations. and not political parties, have become the primary expression of civil society in most stable democracies, supplemented by the more sporadic interventions of social movements. The new and fragile democracies that have sprung up since 1974 must live in "compressed time." They will not resemble the European democracies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they cannot expect to acquire the multiple channels of representation in gradual historical progression as did most of their predecessors. A bewildering array of parties, interests, and movements will all simultaneously seek political influence in them, creating challenges to the polity that did not exist in earlier processes of democratization.
ing on the polity as a whole. They must cooperate in order to compete. They must be capable of acting collectively through parties, associations, and movements in order to select can-
didates, articulate preferences, petition authorities, and influence policies. But democracy's freedoms should also encourage citizens to deliberate among themselves. to discover their common needs, and to resolve their differences without relying on
some supreme central authority. Classical democracy emphasized these qualities, and they are by no means extinct, despite repeated efforts by contemporary theorists to stress the analogy with behavior in the economic marketplace and to reduce all of democracy's operations to competitive interest maximization. Alexis de Tocqueville best described the importance of independent groups for democracy in his Democracy in America, a work which remains a major source of inspiration for all those who persist in viewing democracy as something more than a struggle for election and re-election among competing candidates. s
Procedures that Make Democracy Possible The defining components of democracy are necessarily abstract, and may give rise to a considerable variety of institutions and SUbtypes of democracy. For democracy to thrive, however, specific procedural norms must be followed and civic rights must be respected. Any polity that fails to impose such restrictions upon itself, that fails to follow the "rule of law" with regard to its own procedures, should not be considered democratic. These procedures alone do not define democracy, but their presence is indispensable to its persistence. In essence, they are necessary but not sufficient conditions for its existence. Robert Dahl has offered the most generally accepted listing of what he terms the "procedural minimal" conditions that must be present for modem political democracy (or as he puts it, "polyarchy") to exist:
In contemporary political discourse, this phenomenon of cooperation and deliberation via autonomous group activity goes under the rubric of "civil society." The diverse units of social identity and interest, by remaining independent of the state (and perhaps even of parties), not only can restrain the arbitrary actions of rulers, but can also contribute to forming better citizens who are more aware of the preferences of others, more self-confident in their actions, and more civic-minded in their willingness to sacrifice for the common good. At its best, civil society provides an intermediate layer of governance between the individual and the state that is capable of resolving conflicts and controlling the behavior of members without public coercion. Rather than overloading decision makers with increased demands and making the system ungoveruable,' a viable civil society can mitigate conflicts and improve the quality of citizenship-without relying exclusively on the privatism of the marketplace. Representatives-whether directly or indirectly electeddo most of the real work in modern democracies. Most are profes'sional politicians who orient their careers around the desire to fill key offices. It is doubtful that any democracy could survive without such people. The central question, therefore, is not whether or not there will be a political elite or even a professional political class, but how these representatives are chosen and then held accountable for their actions. As noted above, there are many channels of representation in modern democracy. The electoral one, based on territorial constituencies, is the most visible and public. It culminates in a parliament or a presidency that is periodically accountable to the citizenry as a whole. Yet the sheer growth of government (in large part as a byproduct of popular demand) has increased the number, variety, and power of agencies charged with making public decisions and not subject to elections. Around these agencies there has developed a vast apparatus of specialized
L Control over government decisions about policy is constitutionally vested in elected officials. 2. Elected officials are chosen in frequent and fairly conducted elections in which coercion is comparatively uncommon. 3. Practically all adults have the right to vote in the election of officials. 4. Practically all adults have the right to run for elective offices. 5. Citizens have a right to express themselves without the danger of severe punishment on political matters broadly defined .... 6. Citizens have a right to seek out alternative sources of information. Moreover, alternative sources of information exist and are protected by law. 7. . .. Citizens also have the right to form relatively independent associations or organizations, including independent political parties and interest groups.IO These seven conditions seem to capture the essence of procedural democracy for many theorists, but we propose to add two others. The first might be thought of as a further refinement
98
Article 17. What Democracy Is ." and Is Not of item (I), while the second might be called an implicit prior condition to all seven of the above.
The challenge is not so much to find a set of goals that command widespread consensus as to find a set of rules that embody contingent consent. The precise shape of this "democratic bargain," to use Dahl's expression. ll can vary a good deal from society to society. It depends on social cleavages and such subjective factors as mutual trust, the standard of fairness, and the willingness to compromise. It may even be compatible with a great deal of dissensus on substantive policy issues, All democracies involve a degree of uncertainty about who will be elected and what policies they will pursue. Even in those polities where one party persists in winning elections or one policy is consistently implemented, the possibility of change through independent collective action still exists, as in Italy, Japan, and the Scandinavian social democracies, If it does not, the system is not democratic, as in Mexico, Senegal, or Indonesia. But the uncertainty embedded in the core of all democracies is bounded, Not just any actor can get into the competition and raise any issue he or she pleases-there are previously established rules that must be respected. Not just any policy can be adopted-there are conditions that must be met. Democracy institutionalizes "normal," limited political uncertainty. These boundaries vary from country to country. Constitutional guarantees of property, privacy, expression, and other rights are a part of this, but the most effecti ve boundaries are generated by competition among interest groups and cooperation within civil society. Whatever the rhetoric (and some polities appear to offer their citizens more dramatic alternatives than others), once the rules of contingent consent have been agreed upon, the actual variation is likely to stay within a predictable and generally accepted range. This emphasis on operative guidelines contrasts with a highly persistent, but misleading theme in recent literature on democracy-namely, the emphasis upon "civic culture." The principles we have suggested here rest on rules of prudence, not on deeply ingrained habits of tolerance, moderation, mutual respect, fair play, readiness to compromise, or trust in public authorities. Waiting for such habits to sink deep and lasting roots implies a very slow process of regime consolidation-one that takes generations-and it would probably condemn most contemporary experiences ex hypothesi to failure. Our assertion is that contingent consent and bounded uncertainty can emerge from the interaction between antagonistic and mutually suspicious actors and that the far more benevolent and ingrained norms of a civic culture are better thought of as a product and not a producer of democracy.
1. Popularly elected officials must be able to exercise their constitutional powers without being subjected to overriding (albeit informal) opposition from unelected officials. Democracy is in jeopardy if military officers, entrenched civil servants, or state managers retain the capacity to act independently of elected civilians or even veto decisions made by the people's representatives. Without this additional caveat, the militarized polities of contemporary Central America, where civilian control over the military does not exist, might be classified by many scholars as democracies, just as they have been (with the exception of Sandinista Nicaragua) by U.S. policy makers. The caveat thus guards against what we earlier called Helectoralism"-the tendency to focus on the holding of elections while ignoring other political realities. 2. The polity must be self-governing; it must be able to act independently of constraints imposed by some other overarching political system. Dahl and other contemporary democratic theorists probably took this condition for granted since they referred to formally sovereign nation-states. However, with the development of blocs, alliances, spheres of influence, and a variety of HneocoIonia}" arrangements, the question of autonomy has been a salient one. Is a system really democratic if its elected officials are unable to make binding decisions without the approval of actors outside their territorial domain? This is significant even if the outsiders are relatively free to alter or even end the encompassing arrangement (as in Puerto Rico), but it becomes especially critical if neither condition obtains (as in the Baltic states).
Principles that Make Democracy Feasible Lists of component processes and procedural nOImS help us to specify what democracy is, but they do not tell us much about how it actually functions. The simplest answer is "by the consent of the people": the more complex one is "by the contingent consent of politicians acting under conditions of bounded uncertainty." In a democracy, representatives must at least informally agree that those who win greater electoral support or influence over policy will not use their temporary superiority to bar the losers from taking office or exerting influence in the future, and that in exchange for this opportunity to keep competing for power and place, momentary losers will respect the winners' right to make binding decisions. Citizens are expected to obey the decisions ensuing from such a process of competition, provided its outcome remains contingent upon their collective preferences as expressed through fair and regular elections or open and repeated negotiations.
How Democracies Differ Several concepts have been deliberateJy excluded from our generic definition of democracy, despite the fact that they have been frequently associated with it in both everyday practice and scholarly work. They are, nevertheless, especially important when it comes to distinguishing subtypes of democracy. Since no single set of actual institutions, practices. or values embodies
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
of authority is present in all democracies, even if it is exercised collectively and only held indirectly accountable to the electorate. I L Checks and Balances: It is not necessary that the different branches of government be systematically pitted against one another, although governments by assembly, by executive concentrations, by judicial command, or even by dictatorial fiat (as in time of war) must be ultimately accountable to the citizenry as a whole.
democracy, polities moving away from authoritarian rule can mix different components to produce different democracies. It is important to recognize that these do not define points along a single continuum of improving performance, but a matrix of potential combinations that are differently democratic. 1. Consensus: All citizens may not agree on the substan-
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
ti ve goals of political action or on the role of the state (although if they did, it would certainly make governing democracies much easier). Participation: All citizens may not take an active and equal part in politics, although it must be legally possible for them to do so. Access: Rulers may not weigh equally the preferences of all who come before them, although citizenship implies that individuals and groups should have an equal opportunity to express their preferences if they choose to do so. Responsiveness: Rulers may not always follow the course of action preferred by the citizenry. But when they deviate from such a policy, say on grounds of "reason of state" or "overriding national interest," they must ultimately be held accountable for their actions through regular and fair processes. Majority rule: Positions may not be allocated or rules may not be decided solely on the basis of assembling the most votes, although deviations from this principle usually must be explicitly defended and previously approved. Parliamentary sovereignty: The legislature may not be the only body that can make rules or even the one with final authority in deciding which laws are binding, although where executive, judicial, or other public bodies make that ultimate choice, they too must be accountable for their actions. Party government: Rulers may not be nominated, promoted, and disciplined in their activities by wellorganized and programmatically coherent political parties. although where they are not, it may prove more difficult to form an effective government. Pluralism: The political process may not be based on a multiplicity of overlapping, voluntaristic, and autonomous private groups. However. where there are monopolies of representation, hierarchies of association. and obligatory memberships, it is likely that the interests involved will be more closely linked to the state and the separation between the public and private spheres of action will be much less distinct. Federalism: The territorial division of authority may not involve multiple levels and local autonomies, least of all ones enshrined in a constitutional document, although some dispersal of power across territorial andlor functional units is characteristic of all democracies. Presidentialism: The chief executive officer may not be a single person and he or she may not be directly elected by the citizenry as a whole, although some concentration
While each of the above has been named as an essential component of democracy, they should instead be seen either as indicators of this or that type of democracy, or else as useful standards for evaluating the performance of particular regimes. To include them as part of the generic definition of democracy itself would be to mistake the American polity for the universal model of democratic governance. Indeed, the parliamentary, consociational, unitary, corporatist, and concentrated arrangements of continental Europe may have some unique virtues for guiding polities through the uncertain transition from autocratic to democratic rule. 12
What Democracy is Not We have attempted to convey the general meaning of modern democracy without identifying it with some particular set of rules and institutions or restricting it to some specific culture or level of development. We have also argued that it cannot be reduced to the regular holding of elections or equated with a particular notion of the role of the state, but we have not said much more about what democracy is not or about what democracy may not be capable of producing. There is an understandable temptation to load too many expectations on this concept and to imagine that by attaining democracy, a society will have resolved all of its political, social, economic, administrative, and cultural problems. Unfortunately, "all good things do not necessarily go together." First, democracies are not necessarily more efficient economically than other forms of government. Their rates of aggregate growth, savings. and investment may be no better than those of nondemocracies. This is especially likely during the transition, when propertied groups and administrative elites may respond to real or imagined threats to the "rights" they enjoyed under authoritarian rule by initiating capital flight, disinvestment, or sabotage. In time, depending upon the type of democracy, benevolent long-term effects upon income distribution, aggregate demand, education, productivity, and creativity may eventually combine to improve economic and social performance, but it is certainly too much to expect that these improvements will occur immediately-much less that they will be defining characteristics of democratization. Second, democracies are not necessarily more efficient administratively. Their capacity to make decisions may even be slower than that of the regimes they replace, if only because more actors must be consulted. The costs of getting things done may be higher, if only because "payoffs" have to be made to a wider and more resourceful set of clients (although one should
100
Article 17. What Democracy Is ••. and Is Not never underestimate the degree of corruption to be found within autocracies), Popular satisfaction with the new democratic government's performance may not even seem greater, if only because necessary compromises often please no one completely, and because the losers are free to complain. Third, democracies are not likely to appear more orderly, consensual, stable, or governable than the autocracies they replace. This is partly a byproduct of democratic freedom of expression, but it is also a reflection of the likelihood of continuing disagreement over new rules and institutions, These products of imposition or compromise are often initially quite ambiguous in nature and uncertain in effect until actors have learned how to use them. What is more, they come in the aftermath of serious struggles motivated by high ideals. Groups and individuals with recently acquired autonomy will test certain rules, protest against the actions of certain institutions, and insist on renegotiating !heir part of the bargain. Thus the presence of antisystern parties should be neither surprising nor seen as a failure of democratic consolidation. What counts is whether such parties are willing, however reluctantly, to play by the general rules of bounded uncertainty and contingent consent. Governability is a challenge for all regimes, not just democratic ones. Given the political exhaustion and loss of legitimacy that have befallen autocracies from sultanistic Paraguay to totalitarian Albania, it may seem that only democracies can now be expected to govern effectively and legitimately. Experience has shown, however, that democracies too can lose the ability to govern. Mass publics can become disenchanted with their performance, Even more threatening is the temptation for leaders to fiddle with procedures and ultimately undermine the principles of contingent consent and bounded uncertainty. Perhaps the most critical moment comes once the politicians begin to settle into the more predictable roles and relations of a consolidated democracy. Many will find their expectations frustrated; some will discover that the new rules of competition put them at a disadvantage; a few may even feel that their vital interests are threatened by popular majorities. Finally, democracies will have more open societies and polities than the autocracies they replace, but not necessarily more open economies. Many of today's most successful and well-established democracies have historically resorted to protectionism and closed borders, and have relied extensively upon public institutions to promote economic development. While the long-term compatibility between democracy and capitalism does not seem to be in doubt, despite their continuous tension, it is not clear whether the promotion of such liberal economic goals as the right of individuals to own property and retain profits, the clearing function of markets, the private settlement of disputes, the freedom to produce without government regulation, or the privatization of state-owned enterprises necessarily furthers the consolidation of democracy. After all, democracies do need to levy taxes and regulate certain transactions, especially where private monopolies and oligopolies exist. Citizens or their representatives may decide that it is desirable to protect the rights of collectivities from encroachment by individuals, especially propertied ones, and they may choose to set aside certain forms of property for
public or cooperative ownership. In short, notions of economic liberty that are currently put forward in neoliberal economic models are not synonymous with political freedom-and may even impede it. Democratization will not necessarily bring in its wake economic growth, social peace, administrative efficiency, political harmony, free markets. or "the end of ideology." Least of all will it bring about "the end of history." No doubt some of these qualities could make the consolidation of democracy easier, but they are neither prerequisites for it nor immediate products of it. Instead, what we should be hoping for is the emergence of political institutions that can peacefully compete to form governments and influence public policy, that can channel social and economic conflicts through regular procedures, and that have sufficient linkages to civil society to represent their constituencies and commit them to collective courses of action, Some types of democracies, especially in developing countries, have been unable to fulfill this promise, perhaps due to !he circumstances of their transition from authoritarian rule.13 The democratic wager is that such a regime, once established, will not only persist by reproducing itself within its initial confining conditions, but will eventually expand beyond them.!4 Unlike authoritarian regimes, democracies have the capacity to modify their rules and institutions consensually in response to changing circumstances. They may not immediately produce all the goods mentioned above, but they stand a better chance of eventually doing so than do autocracies.
Notes 1. For a comparative analysis of the recent regime changes in southern Europe and Latin America, see Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C, Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds" Transi~ tions from Authoritarian Rule, 4 vols, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). For another compilation that adopts a more structural approach see Larry Diamond, Juan Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Democra,cy in Developing Countries, vols. 2, 3, and 4 (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner,
1989). 2. Numerous attempts have been made to codify and quantify the existence of democracy across politicaJ systems. The best known is probably Freedom House's Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Uberties, published since 1973 by Greenwood Press and since 1988 by University Press of America, Also see Charles Humana, World Human Rights Guide (New York: Facts
on File, 1986). 3. The definition most commonly used by American social scientists is that of Joseph Schumpeter: "that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote." Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1943), 269. We accept certain aspects of the classical procedural approach to modem democracy, but differ primarily in our emphasis on the account~ ability of rulers to citizens and the relevance of mechanisms of competition other than elections. 4. Not only do some countries practice a stable form of democ racy without a formal constitution (e.g" Great Britain and Israel), but even more countries have constitutions and legal w
101 L
ANNUAL EDITIONS codes that offer no guarantee of reliable practice. On paper, Stalin's 1936 constitution for the USSR was a virtual model of democratic rights and entitlements.
For Huntington's (revised) thoughts about the prospects for democracy, see his "Will More Countries Become Democratic?," Political Science Quarterly 99 (Summer 1984): 193-218.
5. For the most valiant attempt to make some sense out of this thicket of distinctions. see Juan Linz, "Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes" in Handbook oj Political Science, eds. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading Mass.:
10. Robert Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 11. 11. Robert Dahl, After the Revolution: Authority in a Good Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
Addison Wesley, 1975), 175-411. 6. "Publius" (Alexander Hamilton. John Jay, and James Madison), The Federalist Papers (New York: Anchor Books, 1961). The quote is from Number 10.
12. See Juan Linz, "The Perils of Presidentialism," Journal of Democracy 1 (Winter 1990): 51-69, and the ensuing discussion by Donald Horowitz, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Juan Linz in Journal oj Democracy 1 (Fall 1990): 73-91.
7. See Terry Karl, "Imposing Consent? Electoralism versus De~ mocratization in El Salvador," in Elections and Democratiza*
13. Teny Lynn Karl, "Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America" Comparative Politics 23 (October 1990): 1-23.
tion in Latin America, 1980-1985. eds, Paul Drake and Eduardo
14. Otto Kirchheimer, "Confining Conditions and Revolutionary Breakthroughs," American Political Science Review 59 (1965): 964-974.
Silva (San Diego: Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, Center for USlMexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1986), 9-36. 8. Alexis de TocquevilIe, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1945).
C. SCHMITIER is professor of political science and director of the Center for European Studies at Stanford University. TERRY LYNN KARL is associate professor of political science and director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the same institution. The original, longer version of this essay was written at the request of the United States Agency for International Development, which is not responsible for its content.
PlULlPPE
9. This fear of overloaded government and the imminent collapse of democracy is well reflected in the work of Samuel P. Huntington during the 1970s. See especially Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: -New York University Press, 1975).
From Journal a/Democracy, Summer 1991. Copyright © 1991 by National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Article 18
Judicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe Established and emerging democracies display a puzzling taste in common: both have handed increasing amounts of power to unelected judges. Th[is] article examines the remarkable growth and many different forms of judicial review.
T
o some they are unaccountable elitists, old men (and the rare women) in robes who meddle in politics where they do not belong, thwarting the will of the people. To others they are bulwarks of liberty, champions of the individual against abuses of power by scheming politicians, arrogant bureaucrats and the emotional excesses of transient majorities. Judges who sit on supreme courts must get used to the vilification as well as the praise. They often deal with the most contentious cases, involving issues which divide the electorate or concern the very rules by which their countries are governed. With so much at stake, losers are bound to question not only judges' particular decisions, but their right to decide at all. This is especially true when judges knock down as unconstitutional a law passed by a democratically elected legislature. How dare they? Despite continued attacks on the legitimacy of judicial review, it has flourished in the past 50 years. All established democracies now have it in some form, and the standing of constitutional courts has grown almost everywhere. In an age when all political authority is supposed to derive from voters, and every passing mood of the electorate is measured by pollsters, the growing power of judges is a startling development. The trend in western democracies has been followed by the new democracies of Eastern Europe with enthusiasm. Hungary's constitutional court may be the most active and powerful in the world. There have been failures. After a promising start, Russia's constitutional court was crushed in the conflict between Boris Yeltsin and his parliament. But in some countries where governments have long been riven by ideological divisions or crippled by corruption, such as Israel and India, constitutional courts have filled a political vacuum, coming to embody the legitimacy of the state. In western democracies the growing role of constitutional review, in which judges rule on the constitutionality of laws and regulations, has been accompanied by a similar growth in what is known as administrative review, in which judges rule on the legality of government actions, usually those of the executive
branch. This second type of review has also dragged judges into the political arena, frequently pitting them against elected politicians in controversial cases. But it is less problematic for democratic theorists than constitutional review for a number of reasons.
Democracy's Referees The expansion of the modern state has seemed to make administrative review inevitable. The reach of government, for good or ill, now extends into every nook and cranny of life. As a result, individuals, groups and businesses all have more reason than ever before to challenge the legality of government decisions or the interpretation of laws. Such challenges naturally end up before the courts. In France, Germany, Italy and most other European countries, special administrative tribunals, with their own hierarchies of appeal courts, have been established to handle such cases. In the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia, the ordinary courts, which handle criminal cases and private lawsuits, also deal with administrative law cases. The growth of administrative review can be explained as a reaction to the growth of state power. But the parallel expansion of constitutional review is all the more remarkable in a democratic age because it was resisted for so long in the very name of democracy. The idea was pioneered by the United States, the first modern democracy with a written constitution. In fact, the American constitution nowhere explicitly gives the Supreme Court the power to rule laws invalid because of their unconstitutionality. The court's right to do this was first asserted in Marbury v Madison, an 1803 case, and then quickJy became accepted as proper. One reason for such ready acceptance may have been that a Supreme Court veto fitted so well with the whole design and spirit of the constitution itself, whose purpose was as much to control the excesses of popular majorities as to give the people a voice in government decision-making.
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
In Europe this was the reason why the American precedent was not followed. As the voting franchise was expanded, the will
of the voting majority became ever more sacrosanct, at least in theory. Parliamentary sovereignty reigned supreme. European
democrats viewed the American experiment with constitutionalism as an unwarranted restraint on the popular will. Even in the United States, judicial review was of little importance until the late 19th century, when the Supreme Court became more active, first nullifying laws passed after the civil war to give former slaves equal rights and then overturning
Half of the 16 members of Germany's Federal Constitutional Tribunal are chosen by the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, and half by the Bundesrat, the upper house. Appointments are usually brokered between the two major parties. The procedUre is similar in Italy, where one-third of the 15-strong Constitutional Court is chosen by the head of state, one-third by the two houses of parliament and one-third by the professional judiciary. Senior politicians-both before and after serving in other
government posts-have sat on all three constitutional courts,
laws regulating economic activity in the name of contractual
sometimes with unhappy results. In March Roland Dumas, the president of France's Constitutional Council, was forced to step down temporarily because of allegations of corruption during
and property rights. After a showdown with Franklin Roosevelt over the New Deal, which the court lost, it abandoned its defence of laissezfaire economics. In the 1950s under Chief Justice Earl Warren it embarked on the active protection and expansion of civil rights. Controversially, this plunged the court into the mainstream of American politics, a position it retains today despite a retreat from Warren-style activism over the past two decades. Attitudes towards judicial review also changed in Europe. The rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, and then the destruction wrought by the second world war, made many European democrats reconsider the usefulness of judges. Elections alone no longer seemed a reliable obstacle to the rise of dangerously authoritarian governments. Fascist dictators had seized power by manipulating representative institutions. The violence and oppression of the pre-war and war years also convinced many that individual rights and civil liberties needed special protection. The tyranny of the executive branch of government, acting in the name of the majority, became a real
his earlier tenure as foreign minister. The trend in all three countries is towards the appointment of professional judges and legal scholars rather than politicians. $
Powers. Most constitutional courts have the power to nul-
lify laws as unconstitutional, but how they do this, and receive
cases, varies. Once again, the most anomalous is France's Constitutional Council which rules on the constitutionality of laws only before they go into effect and not, like all other courts, after. The 1958 constitution of France's Fifth Republic allowed only four authorities to refer cases to the council: the president, the prime minister, and the heads of the two houses of parliament. In 1974, a constitutional amendment authorised 60 deputies or senators to lodge appeals with the council as well. Since then, the council has become more active, and most appeals now come from groups of legislators. Individuals have no right to appeal to the council. French jurists argue that judicial review before a law goes
concern. (Britain remained an exception to this trend, sticking exclusively to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. It is
into effect is simpler and faster than review after a law's prom-
only now taking its first tentative steps towards establishing a constitutional court.) While the goals of constitutional judicial review are simi-
ulgation. But it is also more explicitly political, and leaves no room for making a judgment in the light of a law's sometimes unanticipated effect. No other major country has adopted prior review exclusively, but it is an option in Germany and Italy as well, usually at the request of the national or one of the regional govern-
lar almost everywhere. its form varies from country to country, reflecting national traditions. Some of the key differences: • Appointments. The most famous method of appointment is that of the United States, largely because of a handful of tele-
ments. However. most of the work of the constitutional courts
vised and acrimonious confirmation hearings. The president
in both countries comes from genuine legal disputes, which are referred to them by other courts when a constitutional question
appoints a Supreme Court judge, subject to Senate approval, whenever one of the court's nine seats falls vacant. Political horsetrading, and conflict, are part of the system. Judges are appointed for life, though very few cling to office to the end. Other countries may appoint their constitutional judges with more decorum, but politics always plays some part in the process. France is the most explicitly political. The directly elected president and the heads of the Senate and the National Assembly each appoint three ofthe judges of the Constitutional
is raised. The Supreme Courts of the United States, Canada and Australia, by contrast, are the final courts of appeal for all cases, not just those dealing with constitutional issues. The United States Supreme Court does not give advisory or abstract opinions about the constitutionality of laws, but only deals with
cases involving specific disputes. Moreover, lower courts in the United States can also rule on constitutional issues, although most important cases are appealed eventually to the Supreme Court. Canada's Supreme Court can be batred from ruling a law unconstitutional if either the national or a provincial legislature
Council, who serve non-renewable nine-year terms, one-third of them retiring every three years. Former presidents are awarded life membership on the council, although none has yet chosen to take his seat.
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Article 18. JUdicial Review: The Gavel and the Robe
constitution, its decisions are political by definition-though they should not be party political. Supreme courts also are not unaccountable, as some of their critics claim. Judges can be overruled by constitutional amendment, although this is rare. They must also justify their rulings to the public in written opinions. These are pored over by the media, lawyers, legal scholars and other judges. If unpersuasive, judgments are sometimes evaded by lower courts or legislatures, and the issue eventually returns to the constitutional court to be considered again. Moreover, the appointment of judges is a political process, and the complexions of courts change as their membership changes, although appointees are sometimes unpredictable once on the bench. Nevertheless, new appointments can result in the reversal of earlier decisions which failed to win public support. Constitutional courts have no direct power of their own. This is why Alexander Hamilton, who helped write America's constitution, called the judiciary "the least dangerous branch of government." Courts have no vast bureaucracy, revenue-raising ability, army or police force at their command-no way, in fact, to enforce their rulings. If other branches of government ignore them, they can do nothing. Their power and legitimacy, especially when they oppose the executive or legislature, depend largely on their moral authority and credibility. Senior judges are acutely aware of their courts' limitations. Most tread warily, preferring to mould the law through interpretation of statutes rather than employing the crude instrument of complete nullification. Even the American Supreme Court, among the world's most activist, has ruled only sections of some 135 federal laws unconstitutional in 210 years, although it has struck down many more state laws. Finally, it is worth remembering that judges are not the only public officials who exercise large amounts of power but do not answer directly to voters. Full-time officials and appointees actually perform most government business, and many of them have enormous discretion about how they do this. Even elected legislators and prime ministers are not perfect transmitters of the popular will, but enjoy great latitude when making decisions on any particular issue. Constitutional courts exist to ensure that everyone stays within the rules. Judges have the delicate, sometimes impossible, task of checking others' power without seeming to claim too much for themselves.
has passed it with a special clause declaring that it should survive jUdicial review "notwithstanding" any breach of the country's Charter of Rights. If passed in this way, the law must be renewed every five years. In practice, this device has rarely been used. • Judgments. The French and Italian constitutional courts delivertheir judgments unanimously, without dissents. Germany abandoned this method in 1971, adopting the more transparent approach of the common-law supreme courts, which allow a tally of votes cast and dissenting opinions to be published alongside the court's judgment. Advocates of unanimity argue that it reinforces the court's authority and gives finality to the law. Opponents deride it as artificial, and claim that publishing dissents improves the technical quality of judgments, keeps the
public better informed, and makes it easier for the law to evolve in the light of changing circumstances. Also noteworthy is the growth in Europe of supra-national judicial review. The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg is the ultimate legal authority for the European Union. The
court's primary task is to interpret the treaties upon which the EU is founded. Because EU law now takes precedence over national law in the 15 member states, the court's influence has grown considerably in recent years. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the judicial arm of the 4 I-member Council of Europe, has, in effect, become the final court of appeal on human-rights issues for most of Europe. The judgments of both European courts carry great weight and have forced many countries to change their laws. Despite the rapid growth of judicial review in recent decades, it still has plenty of critics. Like all institutions, supreme courts make mistakes, and their decisions are a proper topic of political debate. But some criticisms aimed at them are misconcei ved.
Unelected legislators? To criticise constitutional courts as political meddlers is to misunderstand their role, which is both judicial and political. If constitutions are to play any part in limiting government, then someone must decide when they have been breached and how they should be applied, especially when the relative powers of various branches or levels of government-a frequent issue
in federal systems-are in question. When a court interprets a
From The Economist, August 7,1999, pp.43-44. Copyright© 1999 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economist.com
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Article 19
Referendums: The People's Voice Is the growing use of referendums a threat to democracy or its salvation? The fifth article in our series on changes in mature democracies examines the experience so far, and the arguments for and against letting voters decide political questions directly. hen Winston Churchill proposed a referendum to Clement Attlee in 1945 on whether Britain's wartime coalition should be extended, Attlee growled that the idea was an "instrument of Nazism and fascism". The use by Hitler and Mussolini of bogus referendums to consolidate their power had confirmed the worst fears of sceptics. The
implement in any case. This is how they are currently being used in Britain by Tony Blair's government. But voters do not always behave as predicted, and they have delivered some notable rebuffs. Charles de Gaulle skillfully used referendums to establish the legitimacy of France's Fifth Republic and to expand his own powers as president, but then felt compelled to resign in 1969 after an unexpected referendum defeat.
W
most democratic of devices seemed also to be the most dangerous to democracy itself. Dictators of all stripes have continued to use phony referendums to justify their hold on power. And yet this fact has not stopped a steady growth in the use of genuine referendums, held under free and fair conditions, by both established and aspir-
Francois Mitterrand' s decision to call a referendum on the Maastricht treaty in 1992 brought the European Union to the brink of breakdown when only 51 % of those voting backed the treaty. Denmark's voters rejected the same treaty, despite the fact that it was supported by four out of five members of the Danish parliament. The Danish government was able to sign the treaty only after renegotiating its terms and narrowly winning a second referendum. That same year. Canada's government was not so lucky. Canadian voters unexpectedly rejected a painstakingly negotiated constitutional accord designed to placate Quebec. Referendums come in many different forms. Advisory refer-
ing democracies. Referendums have been instrumental in the dismantling of communism and the transition to democracy in countries throughout the former soviet empire. They have
also successfully eased democratic transitions in Spain, Greece, South Africa, Brazil and Chile, among other countries. In most established democracies, direct appeals to voters are now part of the machinery for constitutional change. Their
use to resolve the most intractable or divisive public issues has
endums test public opinion on an important issue. Governments
also grown. In the 17 major democracies of Western Europe, only three-Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway-make no
or legislators then translate their results into new laws or policies as they see fit. Although advisory referendums can carry great weight in the right circumstances, they are sometimes ignored by politicians. In a 1955 Swedish referendum, 85% of those voting said they wanted to continue driving on the left side of the road. Only 12 years laterthe government went ahead and made the switch to driving on the right without a second
provision for referendums in their constitution. Only six major democracies-the Netherlands, the United States, Japan, India, Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany-have never held
a nationwide referendum.
The Volatile Voter
referendum. or much protest. By contrast, mandatory referendums are part of a law-making process or, more commonly. one of the procedures for constitu-
Frustrated voters in Italy and New Zealand have in recent years
used referendums to force radical changes to voting systems and other political institutions on a reluctant political elite. Referendums have also been used regularly in Australia, where voters go to the polls this November to decide whether to cut their country's formal link with the British crown. In Switzerland
tional amendment. Both advisory and mandatory referendums can usually be called only by those in office-sometimes by the president, sometimes by parliamentarians, most often by the government of the day. But in a few countries, petitions by voters themselves can put a referendum on the ballot. These are known as initiatives. Sometimes these can only repeal an already existing law-so-called "abrogative" initiatives such as those in Italy.
and several American states, referendums are a central feature of the political system, rivalling legislatures in significance. Outside the United States and Switzerland, referendums are most often called by governments only when they are certain of victory, and to win endorsement of a policy they intend to
Elsewhere. initiatives can also be used to propose and pass new 106
Article 19. Referendums: The People's Voice
legislation, as in Switzerland and many American states. In this form they can be powerful and unpredictable political tools. The 'rules for conducting and winning referendums also vary greatly from country to country. Regulations on the drafting of ballot papers and the financing of Yes and No campaigns are different everywhere, and these exert a great influence over how referendums are used, and how often. The hurdle required for victory can be a critical feature. A simple majority of those voting is the usual rule. But a low turuout can make such victories seem illegitimate. So a percentage of eligible voters, as well as a majority of those voting, is sometimes required to approve a proposal. Such hurdles, of course, also make failure more likely. In 1978 Britain's government was forced to abandon plans to set up a Scottish parliament when a referendum victory in Scotland failed to clear a 40% hurdle of eligible voters. Referendums have also failed in Denmark and Italy (most recently in April) because of similar voter-turnout requirements. To ensure a wide geographic consensus, Switzerland and Australia require a "double majority", of individual voters and of cantons or states, for constitutional amendments. The use of referendums reflects the history and traditions of individual countries. Thus generalising about them is difficult. In some countries referendums have played a central, though peripatetic, role. In others they have been marginal or even irrelevant, despite provisions for their use.
fail. In Australia, 34 of 42 proposals to amend the constitution have been rejected by voters. According to an analysis by David Magleby, a professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, 62% of the 1,732 initiatives which reached the ballot in American states between 1898 and 1992 were rejected. Arguments for and against referendums go to the heart of what is meant by democracy, Proponents of referendums maintain that consulting citizens directly is the only truly democratic way to determine policy. If popular sovereignty is really to mean anything, voters must have the right to set the agenda, discuss the issues and then themselves directly make the final decisions. Delegating these tasks to elected politicians, who have interests of their own, inevitably distorts the wishes of voters. Referendums, their advocates say, can discipline representatives, and put the stamp of legitimacy on the most important political questions of the day. They also encourage participation by citizens in the governing of their own societies, and political participation is the source of most other civic virtues.
The Case Against Those sceptical of referendums agree that popular sovereignty, majority rule and consulting voters are the basic building blocks of democracy, but believe that representative democracy achieves these goals much better than referendums. Genuine direct democracy, they say, is feasible only for political groups so small that all citizens can meet face-to-face-a small town perhaps. In large, modem societies, the full participation of every citizen is impossible. Referendum opponents maintain that representatives, as full-time decision-makers, can weigh conflicting priorities, negotiate compromises among different groups and make wellinformed decisions. Citizens voting in single-issue referendums have difficulty in doing any of these things. And as the bluntest of majoritarian devices, referendums encourage voters to brush aside the concerns of minority groups. Finally, the frequent use of referendums can actually undermine democracy by encouraging elected legislators to sidestep difficult issues, thus damaging the prestige and authority of representative institutions, which must continue to perform most of the business of government even if referendums are used frequently. Testing any of these claims or counter-claims is difficult. Most countries do not, in fact, use referendums regularly enough to bear out either the hopes of proponents or the fears of opponents. The two exceptions are Switzerland and some American states, where citizen initiatives are frequent enough to draw tentative conclusions on some of these points, although both examples fall far short of full-fledged direct democracy. Voters in both countries seem .to believe that referendums do, in fact, lend legitimacy to important decisions. The Swiss are unlikely now to make a big national decision without a referendum. Swiss voters have rejected both UN membership and links with the EU in referendums, against the advice of their political leaders. Similarly, American polls show healthy majorities favouring referendums and believing that they are more likely to produce policies that most people want. Polls
Hot Potatoes Although referendums (outside Switzerland and the United States) have been most often used to legitimise constitutional change or the redrawing of boundaries, elected politicians have also found them useful for referring to voters those issues they find too hot to handle or which cut across party lines. Often these concern moral or lifestyle choices, such as alcohol prohibition, divorce or abortion. The outcome on such emotive topics can be difficult to predict. In divorce and abortion referendums, for example, Italians have shown themselves more liberal, and the Irish more conservative, than expected. One of the best single books on referendums-"Referendums Around the World" edited by David Butler and Austin Ranney, published by Macmillan-argues that many assumptions about them are mistaken. They are not usually habit-forming, as those opposed to them claim. Many countries have used them to settle a specific issue, or even engaged in a series of them, and then turned away from referendums for long periods. But this is mostly because politicians decide whether referendums will be held. Where groups of voters can also put initiatives on the ballot, as in Switzerland and the United States, they have become addictive and their use has grown in recent years. Messrs Butler and Ranney also point out that referendums are not usually vehicles for radical change, as is widely believed. Although they were used in this way in Italy and New Zealand, referendums have more often been used to support the status quo or to endorse changes already agreed by political parties. Most referendums, even those initiated by voters,
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also show support for the introduction of referendums on the nationalleve!. The claim that referendums increase citizen participation is more problematic. Some referendum campaigns ignite enormous public interest and media attention. Initiatives also give political outsiders a way to influence the public agenda. But in the United States, much ofthe activity involved in getting initia-
tives on the ballot, such as collecting signatures, has been taken over by professional finns, and many referendum campaigns have become slick, expensive affairs far removed from the grassroots (so far, this is much less true in Switzerland). Even
more surprising, voter participation in American referendums is well below that of candidate elections, even when these are held at the same time. The average turnout for Swiss referendums has fallen by a third in the past 50 years to about 40%. On big issues, however, turnout can still soar. Many of the fears of those opposed to referendums have not been realised in either country. Initiatives have not usually been used to oppress minorities. A proposal to limit the number of foreigners allowed to live in Switzerland was rejected by two-thirds of voters in 1988. In 1992 Colorado's voters did approve an initiative overturning local ordinances protecting gays from discrimination, but more extreme anti-gay initiatives in Colorado and California have been defeated by large majorities. Since 1990 voters have consistently upheld certain abortion rights in initiative ballots. Minorities and immigrants have been the targets of initiatives in some states, but voters have generally rejected extreme measures and have often proven themselves no more illiberal than legislators. Most initiatives are, in fact, about tax and economic questions, not civil liberties or social issues, although the latter often gain more attention. While the frequent use of initiatives has not destroyed representative government, as some feared, it has changed it. Party loyalty among Swiss voters is strong at general elections, but evaporates when it comes to referendum voting. Initiatives, and the threat of mounting one, have become an integral part of the legislative process in Switzerland, as they have in California, Oregon and the other American states where they are most used. Referendums now often set the political agenda
in both countries. In the United States they are frequently seen, rightly or wrongly, as a barometer of the national mood. And they can occasionally spark a political revolution. California's Proposition 13, for example, a 1978 initiative lowering local property taxes, set off a tax revolt across America. Elected officials themselves are often active in launching initiatives, and relatively successful in getting their proposals approved, which hardly indicates that voters have lost all faith in their politicians. Initiatives have made legislating more complicated, but also more responSive to the public's concerns. There is some evidence that American voters, at least, are sometimes overwhelmed by the volume of information coming their way, and cast their vote in ignorance, as critics contend. Mr Magleby cites studies showing that on several ballots, 1020% of the electorate mistakenly cast their vote the wrong way. Ballot material dropping through the letterboxes of residents in California is now often more than 200 pages long. According to one poll, only one in five Californians believes that the average voter understands most of the propositions put before him. Quite rationally, this has also bred caution. Californians approve only one-third of initiatives.
Hybrid Democracy? The Swiss and American experience suggests that in the future there is unlikely to be a headlong rush away from representative to direct democracy anYWhere, but that, even so, the use of referendums is likely to grow. The Internet and other technological advances have not yet had much impact on referendums, but they should eventually make it easier to hold them, and to inform voters of the issues they are being asked to decide upon. Representative institutions are likely to survive because of the sheer volume of legislation in modern societies, and the need for full-time officials to run the extensive machinery of government. Nevertheless in an age of mass communication and information, confining the powers of citizens to voting in elections every few years seems a crude approach, a throwback to an earlier era. In a political system based on popular sovereignty, it will become increasingly difficult to justify a failure to consult the voters directly on a wider range of issues.
From The EcOllomist, August 14, 1999, pp. 45-46. Copyright © 1999 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economist.com
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Article 20
The Great Divide Robert Kagan's celebrated analysis of the widening Atlantic-in which he claims that Europe favours peace and negotiation simply out of weaknessis half right. But, as the split over Iraq shows, Europe is a diverse place and wields power in other ways. Vulgar Kaganism is exacerbating division TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
nti-Americanism has reached a fevered intensity," Robert Kagan reported from Europe recently in the Washington Post. "In London ... one finds Britain's finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the 'neoconservative' (read: Jewish) hijacking of US foreign policy. Britain's most gifted scholars sift through American writings about Europe searching for signs of derogatory 'sexual imagery: " The last sentence must be a reference to a recent essay I wrote in the New York Review Books. Well, thanks for the compliment but no thanks for the implication. If I'm anti-American, then Robert Kagan is a Belgian. Since he and I have never met or conversed in accents melodious or otherwise, I take it that the earlier sentence cannot refer to me; but whoever it does refer to, its innuendo is even more disturbing. That two-word parenthesis "'neoconservative' (read: Jewish)" can only be taken to imply that this criticism of "neoconservative" views has~ at the least, antisemitic overtones. That is a serious charge, which should be substantiated or withdrawn. It illustrates once again how American reports of European anti-Americanism get mixed up with claims, impossible to prove or refute, of antisemitic motivation. I am disturbed to find a writer as sophisticated and knowledgeable as Robert Kagan using such innuendo. So far as "sexual imagery" is concerned, Kagan seems to have taken offence at a passage in which, discussing the mutual stereotypes of America vs Europe (bullying cowboys vs limpwristed pansies) I refer to his now famous sentence "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus," as in "men are from Mars and women are from Venus." Or perhaps he was irked to find his work discussed under the headline "AntiEuropeanism in America." So let us start with a necessary clarification: Robert Kagan is no more anti-European than I am anti-American. In his brilliant Policy Review article (reprinted in last August's Prospect), now expanded into a small book, Paradise and Power (Atlantic Books), he gives one of the most penetrating and influential accounts of European-American relations in recent years. It is
not yet quite in the Fukuyama End of History and Huntington Clash of Civilisations class for impact-both of them journal articles later turned into books-but it is heading that way. One reason it has had such an impact is his talent for bold generalisation and provocative overstatement. "It is time to stop pretending;' both article and book begin, "that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world" (my italics). He goes on to draw what he admits is a "dual caricature" of Europeans-Venusian, believing in a Kantian "self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation"-and Americans-Martian and martial, knowing that decisive national use of military power is needed in the Hobbesian world beyond Europe's cute little US-protected postmodern paradise. "The reasons for the transatlantic divide," he writes, "are deep, long in development, and likely to endure." The cun-ent transatlantic controversy over Iraq. to which more reference is now made in the book, is seen to be representative, even archetypicaL Kagan gives three reasons for this divergence. The main one, to which he returns repeatedly, is European weakness and American power. (The original article was called "Power and Weakness.") By this he means military weakness and military power. Pointing to the growing gulf between US and European military spending and capacity, he argues that when you are weak you tend to favour law, peace, negotiation, and not to see the need for the use of force: "when you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a naiL" Not even Saddam's Iraq. In a vivid simile, he writes that a man walking through a forest armed just with a knife will have a different response to a prowling bear than a man armed with a rifle. His second reason is that history has led Europeans to a different ideology. Humbled and shocked by our bloody past, we place a higher premium on peace as a value in itself. We aspire, with Immanuel Kant, to a world of perpetual peace. We would like others to imitate our European model of integration. We would rather not hear the growls from the jungle outside. There is a certain tension between these two explanations: do Europeans
A
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dislike war because they do not have enough guns, or do they not have enough guns because they dislike war? Kagan favours the former, philosophically materialist view: being determines consciousness. But he also allows for an influence the other way round. Finally, he attributes some of these differences to the fact that, since the end of the cold war, Europeans have sought to define HEurope" as something apart from America, rather than seeking a common definition of "the west." This is a clever, knowledgeable argument, and there is quite a lot in it. Kagan is right to pour scorn on European pretensions to be a world power, without the military clout or-he might have emphasised this more-the foreign policy unity to deliver. He quotes the Belgian foreign minister saying in December 2001 that the ED military force "should declare itself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability." I would like to know where this quotation came from-unlike most of the direct quotations in the book version, it is not sourced-but if true, it is classic. We have not advanced very far in the ten years since the Luxembourger Jacques Poas pronounced, over disintegrating Bosnia, his equally ridiculous "the hour of Europe has come." Kagan is also right to remind us how far the "European miracle" that began with Franco-German reconciliation actually depended on the external American pacifier. Even today, he suggests, the US is "manning the walls of Europe's postmodern order." So Europeans are, in Kipling's famous phrase, making mock of uniforms that guard us while we sleep. His remedy, so far as he has one, is twofold. First, Europe should stop being a "military pygmy"-in the phrase of George Robertson, Nato secretary-generaL This means all of us, and Germany in particular, spending more on defence and getting OUf militaries together. Second, we should follow Robert Cooper's advice and recognise that, beyond our postmodern world of the EU, there is a modern and a pre-modern world outside. We may be Kantian in our village, but we must be Hobbesian in the jungle around. Saddam Hussein lives by the law of the jungle, so we must threaten him with spears. The two parts of the remedy are connected. Like the man in the forest, once you have a rifle you may start hunting the bear-and if you want to hunt the bear, you will go get a rifle. There are, however, major problems with the Kagan thesis. One is this: if Europe does not exist as a single, foreign policy actor, then how can you generalise about it? Belgium and Luxembourg are certainly not Martian or martial in Kagan's terms, but Britain and France are. As he acknowledges in two slightly embarrassed asides, it was Blair's Britain that pushed, against the resistance of Clinton's America, for ground troops in Kosovo. This at a time when the martial Americans were still bombing from 15,000 feet in case one of their warrior pilots got his little finger burnt. For three decades, from the end of the Vietnam war to 11th September, Britain and France were more ready to take military casualties abroad than the US was. Moreover, the controversy over the Iraq war has shown that there is no simple divide between "Europe" and "America." American public opinion is tom and Europeans are divided. Kagan's commentary in the Washington Post was occasioned
by the publication of an article by a European "gang of eight" reaffirming transatlantic solidarity against Saddam, as a rebuke to the Franco-German axis. The "gang of eight" included the prime ministers of Britain, Spain, Italy and Poland-that is, Europe's four most important countries after France and Germany-as well as Vaelav Havel, then still president of the Czech Republic and one of Europe's greatest moral authorities, and the leaders of Portugal, Denmark and Hungary. (Slovakia subsequently joined, to make it nine.) In his commentary, Kagan welcomed the "political and moral courage" of these leaders of what Donald Rumsfeld called "new Europe" as they paid tribute to "American bravery and farsightedness," against the fevered trend of European anti-Americanism. But he might also have written: "whoops, how does this fit my thesis? If Europe's so thoroughly Venusian, as I argue, how come so much of it is cheering for Mars?" If I wished to be polemical, I would say: where has Kagan been living all these years? The answer, as I understand it, is Brussels-or between Brussels and Washington. And that may be part of the problem. Sitting in Brussels, listening to so much lofty Eurorhetoric matched by so few effective military or diplomatic deeds, one could easily feel as he does. But in the larger EU of 25 member states from 2004-an enlargement that scarcely features in his account the balance of attitudes will be different. Yes, there is a lot of anti-Americanism about, especially in France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium. There is also a lot of reasonable, measured scepticism about Bush's policy on Iraq. And then there is a large constituency of the Americanised and the Atlanticist, especially in the new democracies of central and eastern Europe. In short, Europe's true hallmark is not weakness but diversity. It is the sheer diversity of states, nations and views, as much as the popular reluctance to spend on defence, and more than any programmatic Kantianism, that is the main reason for Europe's feebleness in foreign and security policy. If we could just pool and redirect what we already spend on defence, we'd have a formidable European expeditionary force to send to Iraq, or wherever. But we won't, because the French will be French, the British will be British and Belgians will be Belgian.
Kagan stresses military power where Europe is weak and ignores economic and cultural power where it is l'ltr'nn,n Another problem with Kagan's book is his emphasis on military power, to the neglect of the two other main dimensions of power: economic and cultural social ('"'soft power"). He is right to remind Europeans that old-fashioned military power still counts-the postmodem continent is not living in a postmodern world. But he discounts Europe's other forms of power. On a recent trip to the US, I found that what most people are most worried about is not the war on Iraq-it is the state of the US economy. To be sure, there is a two-way
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Article 20. The Great Divide interdependence here-Europe cannot be economically strong while America is economically weak, and vice versa-while in the military dimension there is a one-way dependence of Europe on the US. And yes. welfarist complacency, national differences, over-regulation, corporatism, ageing populations and our moral incompetence over immigration are all potential sources of European economic weakness. But the advent of the "Slavonic tigers" will give Europe a shot in the arm. The European economy is already roughly the same size as that of the US. Europe is also growing in a way that America cannot. Its "soft power" is demonstrated by the fact that not only millions of individuals but also whole states want to enter it. Turkey, for example. Mention of Turkey raises a further difficulty with the Kagan argument: where does the Kantian world end and the Hobbesian begin? Turkey shares a border with Iraq. The frontier runs through the lands of the Kurds, the would-be Kurdistan. Turkey and Iraq have both been hammering their Kurds, on and off, for some time. But the US is urging the EU to take in Turkey, to encourage its adherence to the west by the European process of Hconditionality leading finally to accession," while at the same time urging us to join in a war against Saddam. We are being asked to be Kantian-European-postmodern here, but HobbesianAmerican-pre-modern just a hundred yards across the border. In truth, we need to be both-especially if the democratic reconstruction of postwar Iraq is to succeed. In a now familiar quip: America does the cooking, Europe does the washing-up. Kagan himself concludes in conciliatory fashion. Unlike his compatriot, Charles A Kupchan, he insists that there is no "clash of civilisations" between Europe and America. Europe should beef up its military and use it a bit more roughly in the jungle, and America, he avers on his last page, should manifest
a bit more of what the founding fathers called "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind." America needs Europe, Europe needs America, we both share common western values. I agree. His book is a challenge to make it so, to Europeans especially. But this is not what he said on his first page, which is that Europeans and Americans do not even occupy the same world. And that, not his conciliatory conclusion, is what he is being so much quoted for. That, in wider circulation, is "the Kagan thesis." Of course this is what tends to happen with these "big issue" think pieces turned into books. As once upon a time we had vulgar Marxism, so we now have vulgar Fukuyamaism, vulgar Huntingtonism, and will soon have vulgar Kaganism. Francis Fukuyama can go on insisting until he is purple in the face that what he meant was History not history; people will still snort "well, the end of history, my foot!" Yet usually the author is to some degree complicit, abetted by editors and publishers, in making a bold overstatement to grab attention for his thesisand to sell. The Hobbesian law of the intellectual jungle leads you, perhaps against your better judgement, to become one of what Jacob Burckhardt called the terribles simplijicateurs. The real danger now is that vulgar Kaganism will become popular on both sides of the Atlantic because people either believe Kagan's "dual caricature" or-and I think this is happening-are looking for ways to emphasive the gulf. In short, Kagan could have the opposite effect to the one he intends. His conclusion will only be proved right if Americans and Europeans agree that his starting point is wrong.
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is director of the European Studies Centre at St
Antony's College, Oxford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
From Prospecl Magazine, March 2003, pp. 24-26. Copyright © 2003 by Prospect Publishing. Reprinted by permission via The New York Times Syndicate.
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Article 21
Living With a Superpower Some values are held in common by America and its allies. As three studies show, many others are not European countries rated America at 64 (more than France), while Americans gave Europeans between 55 (for France) and 75 (for Britain). Feelings towards Israel diverge sharply: it is rated at only 38 in Europe, against 55 in America. But despite that divide, and whatever the elites may say, the ordinary folk on either side of the Atlantic continue to like one another. The two sides also share a number of more specific similarities. The Pew study found that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Europeans support "the US-led war on terror". Between two-thirds and four-fifths called Iraq a serious threat. Everyone admires American science, technology and popular culture. In both the Marshall Fund and Pew studies, there were surprisingly few significant differences in public attitudes towards the armed forces (around three-quarters think their role in their
" w e share common values-the common values of freedom, human rights and democracy." Thus George Bush in the Czech Republic on November 21st; but it could have been him, his national security adviser or his secretary of state at almost any time. Now consider this: "It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world ... Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus:' Thus the Carnegie Endowment's Robert Kagan; but it could have been any number of transatlantic pessimists at any point in the past two years. The question of "values" is one of the more contentious and frustrating parts of the foreign-policy debate. Obviously, values matter in themselves and in their influence on the conduct of a nation's affairs. Equally obviously, Europeans and Americans both share and dispute "basic" values. But a concept that can support flatly contradictory views of the world and transatlantic relations evidently stands in need of refinement. Three new reports attempt to do that job. One cannot say they resolve the question of whether shared values are more important than contested ones. But at least they provide a way of thinking about and judging the so-called "values debate". Last month, the Pew Research Centre published the broadest single opinion poll so far taken of national attitudes in 44 countries. In general, the findings bear out the president's view, rather than Mr Kagan's: more seems to unite America and its allies than divide them. In 2002, 61 % of Germans, 63% of the French and 75% of Britons said they had a favourable view of the United States. M'\iorities ofthe populations liked America in 35 of the 42 countries where this question was asked (it was banned in China). It is true that America's image has slipped a bit. The proAmerican share of the population has fallen since 2000 by between four and 17 points in every west European country bar one (France, where opinion was least favourable to begin with). All the same, the reservoir of goodwill remains fairly deep and reports of sharply rising anti-Americanism in Europe seem to be exaggerated. This finding is at odds with the reams of editorialising about growing hostility between America and the rest of the world. But it is consistent with another recent survey by the German Marshall Fund and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Asked to rate other countries on a scale of one to 100, the six
countries is positive), nor was there much difference in public readiness to use force abroad. The Marshall study found that support for multilateral institutions like the United Nations or NATO is every bit as strong in America as Europe. In the Pew study, majorities in nearly every country said the world would be less safe if there were a rival superpower. This was true even
in Russia. Strikingly, over 80% of Americans say they want strong international leadership from the European Union, while over 60% of Europeans say they want the sarne thing from America. And' when asked whether differences between their countries and America were the result of conflicting values or conflicting policies, most respondents in west European, Latin American
and Muslim countries chose policies.
Divisions of the Ways All this sounds like music to the ears of the Bush administration. It argues that the way to win hearts and minds is to empha-
sise universal values: explain your policies, of course, but stress that America strives for values which everyone shares. Unfortunately, there is also much in the Pew study which casts doubt on that idea. For one thing, the reservoir of goodwill seems to run dry in the Muslim world. The Pew study found that large majorities in four of America's main Muslim allies-Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan and Turkey-dislike America. There are obviously dif-
ficulties in measuring opinion in some of these places, but the
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Article 21. Living With a Superpower children should be taught to obey and that the first duty of a child is to make his or her parents proud. They say abortion,
euthanasia, divorce and suicide are never justifiable. At the other end of this spectrum are "secular-rational" values: they emphasise the opposite qualities. The other category looks at "quality of life" attributes. At one end of this spectrum are the values people hold when the struggle for survival is uppermost: they say that economic and
physical security are more important than self-expression. People who cannot take food or safety for granted tend to dislike foreigners, ·homosexuals and people with AIDS. They are wary of any form of political activity, even signing a petition. And they think men make better political leaders than women. "Self-expression" values are the opposite. Obviously, these ideas overlap. The difference between the two is actually rooted in an academic theory of development (not that it matters). The notion is that industrialisation turns
traditional societies into secular-rational ones, while postindustrial development brings about a shift towards values of self-expression. The usefulness of dividing the broad subject of "values" in this way can be seen by plotting countries on a chart whose axes are the two spectrums. The figure alongside (click to enlarge it) shows how the countries group: as you would expect, poor countries, with low self-expression and high levels of traditionalism, are at the bottom left, richer Europeans to the top right. But America's position is odd. On the quality-of-life axis, it is like Europe: a little more "self-expressive" than Catholic countries, such as France and Italy, a little less so than Protestant ones such as Holland or Sweden. This is more than a matter of individual preference. The "quality of life" axis is the one most closely associated with political and economic freedoms. So Mr Bush is right when he claims that Americans and Europeans share common values of democracy and freedom and that these have broad implications because, at root, alliances are built on such common interests. But now look at America's position on the traditional-secular axis. It is far more traditional than any west European country except Ireland. It is more traditional than any place at all in central or Eastern Europe. America is near the bottom-right corner of the figure, a strange mix of tradition and self-expression. Americans are the most patriotic people in the survey: 72% say they are very proud of their country (and this bit of the poll was taken before September 2001). That puts America in the same category as India and Turkey. The survey reckons religious attitudes are the single most important component of traditionalism. On that score, Americans are closer to Nigerians and Turks than Germans or Swedes. Of course, America is hardly monolithic. It is strikingly traditional on average. But, to generalise wildly, that average is made up of two Americas: one that is almost as secular as Europe (and tends to vote Democratic), and one that is more traditionalist than the average (and tends to vote Republican). But even this makes America more distinctive. Partly because America is divided in this way, its domestic political debate revolves around values to a much greater extent than in Europe. Political affiliation there is based less on income than
Figure 1 America's Strange Place. Source: From Ronald Inglehart and Christian Wetzel.
Moderniza~
tion, Cu!tural Change, and Democracy (Cambridge University Press. 2005).
results are still striking: in Egypt, 6% were favourable, 69% unfavourable; in Jordan, 25% and 75%. Even where opinion overall is more flattering, as in Europe,
there are signs of cultural clashes. If policies were the main problem, rather than values, you would expect people to have a higher opinion of Americans than of America. But the distinction is fading. West Europeans have a slightly more positive view of the people than the country, but they are exceptions: only 14 of 43 countries expressed more positive views about Americans than of America. And even though most Europeans say they like America, between half (in Britain) and threequarters (in France) also say the spread of American ideas and customs is bad. As many Europeans say they dislike American ideas about democracy as like them. And this is from the part of the world that knows and claims to like America best. In other words, people outside Muslim countries like America but not some of the most important things it stands for. What is one to make of that conflicting evidence? The short answer is that Europeans and Americans dispute some values and share others. But one can do better than that. Consider the third recent report, the world values survey run by the University of Michigan. Unlike the other two polls, this survey goes back a long way. The university has been sending out hundreds of questions for the past 25 years (it now covers 78 countries with 85% of the world's population). Its distinctive feature is the way it organises the replies. It arranges them in two broad categories. The first it calls traditional values; the second, values of self-expression. The survey defines "traditional values" as those of religion, family and country. Traditionalists say religion is important in
their lives. They have a strong sense of national pride, think 113
ANNUAL EDITIONS
on church-going, attitudes to abortion and attitudes to race. In America, even technical matters become moral questions. It is almost impossible to have a debate aboui gun registration without it becoming an argument about the right to self-defence. In Europe, even moral questions are sometimes treated as technical ones, as happened with stem-cell research. The difference between the two appears to be widening. Since the first world values survey in 1981, every western country has shifted mrukedly along the spectrum towards greater selfexpression. America is no exception. But on the other spectrum America seems to have become more traditional, rather than less. The change is only a half-step. And Italy, Spain and France have taken the same half-step. But if you look at Europe as a whole, the small movement back towards old-fashioned virtues in big Catholic countries is far outweighed by the stride the other way in post-Protestant countries such as Germany and Sweden. On average, then, the values gap between America and European countries seems to be widening.
Where Evil Is Real What is the significance of this? If "quality-of-life" values have political implications, helping to underpin democracy, might traditional values help explain differing attitudes to, say, the projection of power? In principle, two things suggest they might. Patriotism is one of the core traditional values and there is an obvious link between it, military might and popular willingness to sustain large defence budgets. There may also be a link between America's religiosity and its tendency to see foreign policy in moral terms. To Americans, evil exists and can be fought in their lives and in the world. Compared with Europe, this is a different world-view in both senses: different prevailing attitudes, different ways of looking at the world. If you go back to the Pew and Marshall Fund studies, you can see hard evidence for this difference-and it goes beyond immediate policy concerns. In the Pew study, three-quarters of west Europeans and an even higher share of east Europeans support the American-led war on terrorism-but more than half
in both places say America does not take other countries into account (whereas three-quarters of Americans think their government does). ' In both studies, Americans and Europeans put the same issues at the top of their concerns-religious and ethnic hatred, international terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons. In that respect, America and Europe have more in common with each other than with African, Asian and Latin American countries, for whom the spread of AIDS and the gap between rich and poor are at least as important. But both studies show differences in the balance of European and American anxieties. In the Pew poll, 59% of Americans think the spread of nuclear weapons is the greatest danger to the world. Between 60% and 70% of Europeans put religious and ethnic hatred first. In the Marshall Fund study, around 90% of Americans say international terrorism and Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction are "critical". The comparable figures for Europe are around 60%. In short, even if Americans and Europeans see one another in similar terms, they see the world differently. One might object that such values-based judgments are still not everything. The two sides of the Atlantic have long lived with a related problem: the cultural split between "vigorous, naive" America and "refined, unprincipled" Europe. They have successfully managed that, just as they have coped with the political awkwardness that America's centre of gravity is further to the right than Europe's. What is differeht now? Two things. The first is that the values gap may be widening a little, and starting to affect perceptions of foreign-policy interest on which the transatlantic alliance is based. The second is that, in the past, cultural differences have been suppressed by the shared values of American and European elites-and elite opinion is now even more sharply divided than popular opinion. It is the combination of factors that makes the current transatlantic divisions disturbing. And it is little consolation that, in the face of some mutual hostility, the Bush administration is insisting it is all just a matter of politics, and not of something deeper.
From The Economist, January 2, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economist.com
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Article 22
The Case for a Multi .. Party U"S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective This is a "mental experiment" that illuminates the role of institutions in shaping the political process. It is best viewed as part of the long history of American fascination with the parliamentary system and even multiparty politics. The larger hope is to initiate serious dialogue on the respective strengths and weaknesses of majoritarian and consensus systems with scholars of American politics and include American politics in an explicitly comparative perspective. CHRISTOPHER
S. ALLEN
Introduction
that had its origins with the breakdown of the party
Americans revere the constitution but at the same time also
caucus system and the growth of primary elections in
sharply and frequently criticize the government. (Dionne, 1991) Yet since the constitution is responsible for the current form of
the 1960s; and The world's lowest voter turnout among all of the leading OECD countries, a phenomenon that began in the 1960s and has steadily intensified.
the American government. why not change the constitution to produce better government? After all, the founders of the United States did create the amendment process and we have seen 27 of them in over 200 years. Several recent events prompt a critical look at this reverence
When various American scholars acknowledge these shortcomings, however, there is the occasional, offhand comparison to parliamentary systems which have avoided some of these pathologies. The unstated message is that we don't-or perhaps
for the constitution: unusual presidential developments, including the Clinton impeachment spectacle of 1998-1999; the historic and bizarre 2000 Presidential election; and the apparent mandate for fundamental change that President Bush inferred from this exceedingly narrow election. In the early 21st century, American politics confronted at least three other seemingly
should never, ever want to--have that here. Why not? What exactly is the problem with a parliamentary system? Durable trust in government, sense of efficacy, and approval ratings for branches in government have all declined
in recent decades. Such phenomena contribute to declining
intractable problems: a significant erosion in political account~
voter turnout and highlight what is arguably a more significant
ability; out of control costs of running for public office; and shamefully low voter turnout. More seriously, none of these four problems is of recent origin, as all four have eroded the functioning of the American government for a period of between 25 and 50 years! The core features of these four problems are:
trend toward a crisis in confidence among Americans concerning their governing institutions. So why is institutional redesign off the table? This article examines these 4 institutional blockages of the
American majoritarianIPresidential system and suggests certain features of parliamentary or consensus systems might overcome these persistent shortcomings of American politics.
• Confusion of the roles of head of state and head of
government, of which the impeachment issue-from Watergate through Clinton's impeachment-is merely symptomatic of a much larger problem. • Eroding political accountability, taking the form of either long periods of divided government, dating back to the "do nothing" 80th congress elected in 1946, to the
Less normatively, the article is framed by three concepts central to understanding and shaping public policy in advanced
recent "gerrymandering industry" producing a dearth of competitive elections. The result is millions of "wasted votes" and an inability for voters to assign credit or
long-delayed dialogue on comparative constitutional structures
industrialized states with democratic constitutional structures. First, is the issue of comparability and 'American Exceptionalism'. (Lipset, 1996) The article's goal is to initiate a with scholars of American politics. Second, the article hopes
to participate in the active discussion among comparativists on the respective strengths and weaknesses of majoritarian and
blame for legislative action. Costly and perennial campaigns for all offices producing "the best politicians that money can buy." This problem
consensus systems. (Birchfield and Crepaz, 1998) Third, scan-
dals surrounding money and politics in a number of democratic 115
ANNUAL EDITIONS states (Barker, 1994) should prompt a comparison of parties and party systems and the context within which they function. This article does not underestimate the quite significant problems associated with "institutional transplantation" (Jacoby, 2000) from one country to another. The more modest and realistic goal is to engage American and Comparative scholars in a fruitful debate about political institutions and constitutional design that (finally) includes American politics in a Comparative orbit. This article is organized in 5 sections that address: I) the cumbersome tool of impeachment; 2) eroding political accountability due to divided government and safe seats; 3) the costly, never~ending campaign process; 4) the continued deterioration of voter turnout, and finally, pragmatically; 5) offers a critical analysis of the quite formidable obstacles that initiating a parliamentary remedy to these problems would clearly face.
1. Impeachment: Head of State vs Head of Government The tool of impeachment is merely a symptom of a larger problem. Its more fundamental flaw is that it highlights the constitutional confusion between the two functions of the US presidency: head of state and head of government. Americanists have delved deeply into the minutiae of the impeachment process during the past thirty years but comparativists would ask a different question. How would other democracies handle similar crises affecting their political leaders? More than two years transpired from the Watergate break-in to Nixon's resignation (1972-74), the Iran-Contra scandal (1986-87) produced no impeachment hearings; and an entire year (1998-99) transpired from the onset of the ClintonLewinsky saga to the completion of the impeachment process. Comparativists and citizens of other democratic polities find this astounding, since in a parliamentary system a fundamental challenge to the executive would take the form of a vote of no confidence, (Lijphart, 1994) and the issue would be politically resolved within weeks. The executive would either survive and continue or resign. The portrayal of the Clinton impeachment and trial is characterized as historic. For only the second time in American politics, an American president has been impeached in the HOllse and put on trial in the Senate. Yet, the idea of using impeachment has been much less rare, having been raised three times in the past thirty years. Yet impeachment hasn't "worked" at all. It is either not brought to fruition (Watergate), not used when it should have been (Iran-Contra), or completely trivialized (Clinton-Lewinsky) when another path was clearly needed. But impeachment itself isn't the real problem; a larger constitutional design flaw is. The United States has a constitutional structure based on a separation of powers, while most parliamentary systems have a "fusion" of powers in that the Prime Minister is also the leader of the major party in parliament. However, within the American executive itself, there is a "fusion" of functions, which is the exact opposite of Parliamentary regimes. The US is the only developed democracy where head of state and head of government are fused in one person. The President
is the Head of State and, effectively, the Head of Government. In Parliamentary systems these two functions are performed by two different people. (Linz, 1993) Thus impeachment of one person removes two functions in one and likely explained the dichotomy of popular desire for Clinton's retention on the one hand, but also for some form of political censure on the other. Beyond the impeachment issue, when American presidents undertake some action as head of government for which they are critidzed, they then become invariably more remote and inaccessible. For example, Presidents Johnson (Vietnam), Nixon (Watergate), Reagan (Iran/Contra), Clinton (the Lewinsky Affair) and G.W. Bush (Iraq) all reduced their appearances at press conferences as criticism of their policies mounted. In short, when criticized for actions taken in their head of government capacity, they all retreated to the Rose Garden and sometimes created the impression that criticizing the President-now wearing the head of state hat (or perhaps, crown)-was somehow unpatriotic. This was especially the case with George W. Bush, who in the post 9111 and Iraq war periods, has tried to emphasize the commander in chief aspect of the presidency rather than his role as steward of the economy and domestic politics.
Toward a Politically Accountable Prime Minister and a Ceremonial President A parliamentary system with a separate head of state and head of government would produce two "executive" offices instead of just one. It's odd that the US is so fearful of centralized power yet allows the executive to perform functions that no other leader of an OECD country (France excepted) performs alone. The US Vice President serves many of the functions of heads of state in other countries. But the United States has a comparatively odd way of dividing executive constitutional functions. One office, the Presidency, does everything while the other, the Vice Presidency, does virtually nothing and simply waits until the president can no longer serve. An American parliamentary system would redefine these 2 offices so that one person (the head of state) would serve as a national symbol and preside over ceremonial functions. The second person (the head of government) would function much like a prime minister does in a parliamentary system, namely as the head of government who could be criticized, censured and held accountable for specific political actions without creating a constitutional crisis. Thus were it necessary to censure or otherwise take action against the head of government (Le. prime minister), the solution would be a relatively quick vote of no confidence that would solve the problem and move on and let the country address its political business. (Huber, 1996) And unlike impeachment which is the political equivalent of the death penalty, a vote of no confidence does not preclude a politician's making a comeback and returning to lead a party or coalition. Impeachment and removal from office, on the other hand, is much more final. PrIme Ministers, unlike US presidents, are seen much more as active politicians not remote inaccessible figures. In a parliament, the prime minister as the head of government is required to engage-and be criticized-in the rough-and-tumble world of daily politics. In short, the head of government must be accountable. The British prime minister, for example, is required
116
Article 22. The Case for a Multi-Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective to participate in a weekly "question time"' in which often blunt and direct interrogatories are pressed by the opposition. (Rundquist, 1991) There is no equivalent forum for the American president to be formally questioned as a normal part of the political process. But could such a power be used in a cavalier fashion, perhaps removing the head of government easily after a debilitating scandal? This is unlikely in a well-designed parlianaentary system because such cynicism would likely produce a backlash that would constrain partisanship. In fact, the Germans have institutionalized such constraints in the "constructive vote of no confidence" requiring any removal of the head of govern-
States has experienced divided government for more than two-thirds of this period. In only ten of those thirty Congresses has the president's party enjoyed majorities in both houses of Congress. (Fiorina, 1992) Some might observe this divided government phenomenon and praise the bipartisan nature of the American system. (Mayhew, 1991) But to justify such a conclusion, defenders of bipartisanship would have to demonstrate high public approval of governmental performance, particularly when government was divided. Based on over four decades of declining trust in government, such an argument is increasingly hard to justify. One explanation for the American preference for divided government is the fear of concentrated political power. (Jacobson, 1990) Yet in a search for passivity, the result often turns out to be simply inefficiency. While the fear of concentrated government power is understandable for historical and ideological reasons, many of the same people who praise divided government also express concern regarding government efficiency. (Thurber, 1991) Yet divided government quite likely contributes to the very inefficiencies that voters rightfully lament. Under divided government, when all is well, each of the two parties claims responsibility for the outcome; when economic or political policies turn sour, however, each party blames the other. This condition leads to a fundamental lack of political accountability and the self-fulfilling prophesy that government is inherently inefficient. Rather than being an accidental occurrence, divided government is much more likely to result due to the American constitutional design. For it is constitutional provisions that are at the heart of divided government; 2 year terms for Congress, 4 year terms for the Presidency, and 6 year terms for the Senate invariably produce divided government. Were it only for these "accidental" outcomes of divided government, political accountability might be less deleterious. Exacerbating the problem, however, is the decline of parties as institutions. This has caused individuals to have weaker partisan attachments-despite the increased partisan rhetoric of many elected officials since the 1980s-and has thereby intensified the fragmentation of government. (Franklin and Hirczy de Mino, 1998) Clearly, divided government is more problematic when partisan conflict between the two parties is greater as the sharper ideological conflict and the increased party line congressional voting since the 1990s would suggest. Under these circumstances, divided government seems to be more problematic, since two highly partisan parties within the American political system seems potentially dangerous. Persistent divided government over time will likely produce a fundamental change in the relationship between Presidents and the Congress. Presidents are unable to bargain effectively with a hostile congresswitness the 1995 government shutdown-leading the former to make appeals over the heads of Congress directly and, hence undermine the legitimacy of the legislative branch. (Kernell, 1997) This argument parallels the one made in recent comparative scholarship (Linz, 1993) regarding the serious problem of dual legitimacy in presidential systems.
ment to be a simultaneous election of a new one. The context of such a parliamentary system lowers the incentives to engage in the politics of destruction. The political impact of destroying any particular individual in a collective body such as a cabinet or governing party or coalition is much less significant than removing a directly elected president. A parliamentary head of state is above the kind of criticism
generated in no confidence votes and simply serves as an apolitical symbol of national pride. In nation states that have disposed of their monarchies, ceremonial presidents perform many of the
same roles as constitutional monarchs such as Queen Elizabeth do, but much more inexpensively. In fact, many of these ceremonial roles are performed by the American vice president (attending state dinners/funerals, cutting ribbons, presiding over the Senate, etc.). The problem is that the Vice President is often a political afterthought, chosen more for ticket-balancing functions and/or for inoffensive characteristics than for any expected major political contributions. On the other hand, the type of individual usually chosen as a ceremonial president in a parlianaentary system is a retired politician from the moderate wing of one of the major parties who has a high degree of stature and can serve as a figure of national unity. In effect, the office of ceremonial president is often a reward or honor for decades of distinguished national service, hardly the characteristics of an American vice president. In retrospect, one might say that President Clinton was impeached not for abusing head of government functions, but for undennining the decorum and respect associated with heads of state. The separation of head of state and head of government would have a salutary effect on this specific point. Scandals destroying heads of state would have little real political significance since the head of state would not wield real political power. Similarly, scandals destroying heads of government would have significantly less impact than the current American system. The head of government role, once separated from the head of state role, would no longer attract monolithic press and public attention or be subject to extraordinarily unrealistic behavioral expectations.
2. Political Accountability: Divided Government & "Safe Seats" From the "do nothing" 80th Congress elected in 1946 to the I08th elected in 2004, a total of thirty congresses, the United
117
ANNUAL EDITIONS
Table 1 Trust in the Federal Government 1964-2002
1964 1966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002
Table 2 The Persistence of Divided Government Year
None of Some of Most of Just about Don't the Time the Time the Time Always Know o 22 14 1 62 4 2 28 17 48 o 36 7 2 54 47 2 o 44 6 2 44 5 48 2 61 34 2 62 30 13 3 27 4 64 2 3 4 69 23 2 2 3 62 2 3 31 4 53 40 2 2 57 35 3 2 36 4 1 2 56 2 69 25 3 3 2 68 26 74 19 2 1 66 30 3 o 1 36 4 58 40 4 1 55 o 44 5 o 51
1946 1948 1950 1952 1954 1956 1958 1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004
PERCENTAGE WITHIN STUDY YEAR
Source: The National Election Studies
QUESTION TEXT: "How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right-just about always, most of the lime or only some of the tlme?~ Source: The National Election Studies, University of Michigan, 2003
A second component of the political accountability prob-
lem is the increasing uncompetitiveness of American elections. Accounts of the 2000 Presidential election stressed its historic closeness, settled by only 540,000 popular votes (notwithstanding the electoral college anomaly). And the narrow Republican majorities in the House and Senate apparently indicated that
President
o Truman o Truman o Truman R Eisenhower R Eisenhower R Eisenhower R Eisenhower o Kennedy o Kennedy 0 Johnson o Johnson R Nixon R Nixon R Nixon R Ford o Carter o Carter R Reagan R Reagan R Reagan R Reagan R Bush R Bush o Clinton o Clinton o Clinton o Clinton R Bush R Bush R Bush
House
Senate
Divided/Unified Government
Rep Oem Rep Rep Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Rep Rep Rep Rep Rep Rep
Rep Rep Rep Rep Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Dem Dem Oem Oem Oem Oem Oem Rep Rep Rep Oem Oem Oem Oem Rep Rep Rep Dem Rep Rep
o o o u
o o
o u u u u
o o o o u u
o o o
o o
o u
o o o o u u
* After a 50-50 spHt (with Vice President Cheney as the tiebreaker), Senator Jeffords (J-VT) switched from the Republican party shortly after the 2000 election, thereby swinging the Senate to the Democrats.
every congressional or senate seat could be up for grabs each election. The reality is something different. (Center for Voting, 2003) Out of 435 House seats, only 10% or fewer are competitive, the outcome of most Senate races is known well in advance, and the Presidential race was only competitive in 15 of 50 states. In the remaining 35, the state winners (Gore or Bush) were confident enough of the outcome to forgo television advertising in many of tHem. In essence, voters for candidates who did not win these hundreds of "safe seats" were effectively disenfranchised and unable to hold their representatives politically accountable. Similar uncompetitiveness plagued the 2004 Presidential and Congressional elections. For those who lament the irresponsibility-or perhaps irrelevance-of the two major parties, an institutional design that would force responsibility should be praised. Quite simply,
those who praise divided government because it "'limits the damage" or see nothing amiss when there are hundreds of safe seats are faced with a dilemma. They can not simultaneously complain about the resulting governmental inefficiency and political cynicism that ultimately follows when accountability is regularly clouded.
Political Accountability and the Fusion of Government A number of scholars have addressed the deficiencies of divided government, but they suggest that the problem is that the electoral cycle, with its "off year" elections, intensifies the likelihood of divided government in non-presidential election
118
Article 22. The Case for a Multi-Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective years. Such advocates propose as a solution the alteration of the
officials, the latter need time to succeed or fail, and then the voters can make a judgment on their tenure. The most likely outcome would be a governing party or coalition of parties that would have to stay together to accomplish anything, thereby increasing party salience. (Richter, 2002) Phrased differently, such an arrangement would likely lead to an increase in responsible government. Many Americans might react unfavorably at the mention of the word coalition due to its supposed instability. Here we need to make the distinction between transparent and opaque coalitions. Some argue that coalition government in parliamentary systems have the reputation of increased instability. That, of course, depends on the substance of the coalition agreement and the Willingness of parties to produce a stable majority. (Strom, Budge, and Laver 1994) But in most parliamentary systems, these party coalitions are fonned transparently before an election so the voters can evaluate and then pass judgment on the possible coalition prior to election day. It's not as if there are no coalitions in the US Congress. There they take the opaque form of ad-hoc groups of individual members of Congress on an issue-by-issue basis. The high information costs to American voters in understanding the substance of such layered bargains hardly is an example of political transparency. Finally, for those concerned that the "fusion" of the executive and legislative branches-on the British majoritarian modelwould upset the concept of checks and balances, a multiparty consensus parliamentary system produces them slightly differently. (Lijphart, 1984) Majoritarianism concentrates power and makes "checking" difficult, while consensus democracies institutionalize the process in a different, and more accountable form. A mUlti-party parliamentary system would also provide greater minority representation and protection by reducing majoritarianism's excessive concentration of power. A consensus parliamentary system would also address the "tyranny of the majority" problem and allow checking and balancing by the voters in the ballot box since the multiple parties would not likely allow a single party to dominate. Consensus systems thus represent a compromise between the current U.S. system and the sharp concentration of British Westminster systems. Americans who simultaneously favor checks and balances but decry inefficient government need to clarify what they actually want their government to do.
electoral cycle so that all congressional elections are on four year terms, concurrent with presidential terms, likely producing a clear majority. (Cutler, 1989) Yet this contains a fatal flaw. Because there is no guarantee that this proposal would allevi-
ate the residual tension between competing branches of government, it merely sidesteps the accountability factor strongly discouraging party unity across the executive and legislative branches of government. This suggestion could also produce the opposite effect from divided government, namely exaggerated majorities common to parliamentary regimes with majoritarian electoral systems such as the UK. The "safe seats" phenomenon would be the culprit just as in the UK. The most familiar examples of this phenomenon were the "stop-go" policies of post-World War II British governments, as each succeeding government tried
to overturn the previous election. While creating governing majorities is important for political accountability, the absence of proportional representation creates a different set of problems. Under a fusion of power system, in which the current presidency would be redefined, the resulting parliamentary system would make the head of the legislative branch the executive, thus eliminating the current separation of powers. Yet if a government should lose its majority between scheduled elections due to defection of its party members or coalition partners, the head of state then would ask the opposition to form a new government and, failing that, call for new elections. This avoids the constitutional crises that the clamor for impeachment seem to engender in the American system. But what if coalition members try to spread the blame for poor performance to their partners? In theory, the greater the flexibility available to in-shifting from one governing coalition to another (with a different composition), the greater potential for this kind of musical cabinet chairs. The potential for such an outcome is far less than in the American system, however. A century of experience in other parliamentary regimes (Laver and Shepsle, 1995) shows that members of such a party capriciously playing games with governing are usually brought to heel at the subsequent election. In other words, the major advantage to such a parliamentary system is that it heightens the capacity for voters and citizens to evaluate government performance. Of course, many individuals might object to the resulting concentration of power. However, if voters are to judge the accomplishments of elected
Table 3
n::. Ir::.tii\lA
3. Permanent and Expensive Campaigns The cost to run for political office in the United States dwarfs that spent in any other advanced industrialized democracy. The twin problems are time and money; more specifically a neverending campaign "season" and the structure of political advertising that depends so heavily on TV money. (Gans, 1993) In listening to the debates about "reforming" the American campaign finance system, students of other democratic electoral systems find these discussions bizarre. More than $2 billion was raised and spent (Corrado 1997) by parties, candidates and interest groups in the 1996 campaign, and for 2000 it went up to $3 billion. And the Center for Responsive Politics estimated the total cost for 2004 Presidential and congressional elections was $3.9 billion. (Weiss 2004)
Coalitions
American
Parliamentary
Opaque Issue-by-Issue Back Room Unaccountable
Transparent Programmatic Open Discussion Election Ratifies
Unstable
Generally Stable
119
ANNUAL EDITIONS The two year congressional cycle forces members of the House of Representatives to literally campaign permanently. The amount of money required to run for a Congressional seat has quadrupled since 1990. Presidential campaigns are several orders of magnitude beyond the House of Representatives or the Senate. By themselves they are more than two years long, frequently longer. Unless a presidential candidate is independently wealthy or willing and able to raise upfront $30-$50 million it is simply impossible to run seriously for this office. Many of the problems stem from the post-Watergate "reforms" that tried to limit the amount of spending on campaigns which then produced a backlash in the form of a 1976 Supreme Court decision (Buckley vs Valeo) that undermined this reform attempt. In essence, Buckley vs Valeo held that "paid speech" (i.e. campaign spending) has an equivalent legal status as "free speech". (Grant, 1998) Consequently, since then all "reform" efforts have been tepid measures that have not been able to get at the root of the problem. As long as "paid speech" retains its protected status, any changes are dead in the water. At its essence this issue is a fissure between "citizens" and "consumers". What Buckley vs Valea has done is to equate the
citizenship function (campaigning, voting. civic education) with a market-based consumer function (buying and selling consumer goods as commodities). (Brubaker, 1998) Unlike the United States, most other OECD democracies consider citizenship a public good and provide funding for parties, candidates and the electoral process as a matter of course. The Buckley
Table 4 Voter Turnout and Type of Electoral System Major Developed Democracies-1945-2000 country
% Voter Turnout
PR PR
Canada USA-Presidential
91.9 84.9 84.8 84.4 83.6 83.3 80.0 80.0 79.2 79.0 76.4 74.9 73.0 68.3 67.3 66.9 55.1
USA-Congress (Midterm)
40.7
SMD
Italy Belgium Netherlands Australia Denmark Sweden Germany Israel Norway Finland Spain Ireland UK Japan
France
vs Valea decision conflates the concepts of citizen and con-
Type of Electoral System
PR Mixed Member PR PR Mixed-PR PR PR PR PR SMD SMD SMD/Mixed SMD + runoff SMD SMD
Source: Voter Turnout: A Global Survey (Stockholm: International IDEA, 2005)
sumer, the logical extension of which is there are weak limits on campaign funding and no limits on the use of a candidate's own money. We are all equal citizens, yet we are not all equal consumers, Bringing consumer metaphors into the electoral process debases the very concept of citizenship and guarantees that the American political system produces the best politicians money can buy.
place to the last two months before a general election would thus address the time dimension as well. Such practices are standard procedure in all developed parliamentary systems. Very simply, as long as "reform" efforts try to regulate the supply of campaign finance, it will fail. A much more achievable target would be the regulation of demand. The United States could solve another money problem by borrowing a page from parliamentary systems: changing the political party contribution structure from individual voluntary contributions (almost always from the upper middle class and the wealthy) to a more broad-based dues structure common to parties in other developed democracies. This more egalitarian party dues structure would perform the additional salutary task of rebuilding parties as functioning institutions. (Allen, 1999) Rather than continuing in their current status as empty shells for independently wealthy candidates, American political parties could become the kind of dynamic membership organizations they were at the turn of the 20th century when they did have a dues structure.
Free Television Time and the Return of Political Party Dues Any broadcaster wishing to transmit to the public is required to obtain a broadcast license because the airways have the legal status of public property. To have access to such property, the government licenses these networks, cable channels, and stations to serve the public interest. In return, broadcasters are able to sell airtime to sponsors of various programs. Unfortunately for campaign costs, candidates for public office fall into the same category as conSumer goods in the eyes of the broadcasters. (Weinberg, 1993) What has always seemed odd to observers of other democratic states is that there is no Quid Pro Quo requiring the provision of free public airtime for candidates when running for election. Any serious reform of campaign finance would require a concession from all broadcasters to provide free time for all representative candidates and parties as a cost of using the public airways. Since the largest share of campaign money is TV money, this reform would solve the problem at its source. Restricting the "window" when these free debates would take
4. Low Voter Turnout? The leading OECD countries have voter turnout ranging from 70% to 90% of their adult population while the US lags woefully behind. Among the most commonly raised explanations for the US deficiency are: registration requirements, the role of television, voter discouragement, and voter contentment
120
Article 22. The Case for a Multi-Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective (although the latter two are clearly mutually exclusive). None are particularly convincing nor do they offer concrete suggestions as to how it might be overcome. The two party system and the electoral method that produces it: the single member district, first past the post, or winner take all system with its attendant "safe seats" often escapes criticism. The rise of such new organizations as the Reform, Libertarian, and Green parties potentially could threaten the hegemony of the Democrats and Republicans. Yet the problem of a third (or fourth) party gaining a sufficient number of votes to actually win seats and challenge the two party system is formidable. The eleetoral arithmetic would require any third party to win some 25% of the vote on a nationwide basis-or develop a highlyconcentrated regional presence-before it would actually gain more than a token number of seats. And failing to actually win seats produces a "wasted vote" syndrome among party supporters which is devastating for such a party. (Rosenstone, Behr, and Lazarus 1996) Most voters who become disillusioned with the electoral process refer to the "lesser of two evils" choices they face. In such a circumstance, declining voter turnout is not surprising. The US is a diverse country with many regional, religious, racial, and class divisions. So why should we expect that two "catch all" parties will do a particularly good job in appealing to the interests of diverse constituencies? The solution to lower voter turnout is a greater number of choices for voters and a different electoral system.
Table 5 The Advantages of Proportional Representation '~~
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?'::>{;::'~:'<'X~T:>\::~::::~-::~~?. -:v:::~:::::,:
Higher Voter Turnout No "Wasted" Votes Few Safe, Uncontested Seats More Parties Greater Minority Representation Greater Gender Diversity in Congress Greater Ideological Clarity Parties Rebuilt as Institutions 6% Threshold Assumed No More Gerrymandered Redistricting
The first of these, coalitional instability, was addressed briefly above, but it needs to be restated here. The US has unstable coalitions in the Congress right now, namely issue-by-issue ones, usually formed in the House cloakroom with the "assistance" of lobbyists. Few average voters know with certainty how "their" member of Congress will vote on a given issue. (Gibson, 1995) With ideologically coherent parties, they would. An American parliament with several parties could produce self-discipline very effectively. Clearly there would have to be a coalition government since it is unlikely that anyone party would capture 50% of the seats. The practice in almost all other coalition governments in parliamentary systems is that voters prefer a predictable set of political outcomes. Such an arrangement forces parties to both define their programs clearly and transparently, once entering into a coalition, and to do every~ thing possible to keep the coalition together during the course of the legislative term. The second standard objection to PR is the "too many parties" issue. PR voting has been practiced in parliaments for almost 100 years in many different democratic regimes. There is a long history of practices that work well and practices that don't. (Norris, 1997) Two countries are invariably chosen as bad examples of PR, namely Israel and Italy. There is an easy solution to this problem of an unwieldy number of parties, namely an electoral threshold requiring any party to receive a certain minimal percentage to gain seats in the parliament. The significant question is what should this minimal threshold be? The Swedes have a 4% threshold and have 6 parties in their parliament, the Germans have a 5% threshold and have 5 parties represented in the Bundestag. The third standard objection to PR voting is "who's my representative?" In a society so attuned to individualism, most Americans want a representative from their district. This argument presumes that all Americans have a member of Congress that represents their views. However, a liberal democrat who lived in House Speaker Tom Delay's district in Texas might genuinely wonder in what way he represented that liberal's interests. By the same token, conservative Republicans living in Vennont have the independent socialist, Bernard Sanders, as the state's lone member of Congress representing "their" interests.
Proportional Representation Under electoral systems using proportional representation, the percentage of a party's vote is equivalent to the percentage of seats allocated to the party in parliament. Comparative analysis shows that those countries with proportional representationand the mUltiple parties that PR systems produce-invariably have higher voter turnout. (Grofman and Lijphart, 1986) In other words, PR voting systems provide a wider variety of political choices and a wider variety of political representation. Eliminating majoritarian single member districts (SMDs) in favor of PR voting would have several immediate effects. First, it would increase the range of choices for voters, since parties would have to develop ideological and programmatic distinctions to make themselves attractive to voters. As examples in other countries have shown, it would lead to formation of several new parties representing long underserved interests. Such a change would force rebuilding of parties as institutions, since candidates would have to run as members of parties and not as independent entrepreneurs. The so-called Progressive "reforms" at the tum of the 20th century and the 1960s introduction of primaries-plus TV advertising-plus the widespread use of referenda have all had powerful effects in undermining patties as coherent political organizations. (Dwyre, 1994) In trying to force market-based individual "consumer choice" in the form of high-priced candidates, the collective institutions that are political parties have been hollowed out and undermined. There are, of course, a wide range of standard objections to PR voting systems by those favoring retention of majoritarian SMD systems.
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
Yet if Americans reformers are still insistent on having individual representatives (Guinier, 1994) the phenomenon of "Instant Runoff Voting (Hill, 2003) where voters rank order their preferences could produce proportionality among parties yet retain individual single member districts. It also could be used in Presidential elections and avoid accusations of "spoiler" candidates such as Ralph Nader in 2000. If there were PR voting in an American parliament, what would the threshold be? The US threshold should be at least 6% and possibly as high as 7%. The goal is to devise a figure that represents all significant interests yet does not produce instability. The "shake out" of parties would likely produce some strategic "mergers" of weak parties which, as single parties, might not attain the threshold. For example, a separate Latino party and an African-American party might insure always attaining a 6% threshold by forming a so-called "rainbow" party. Similarly the Reform Party and the Libertarian Party might find it safer electorally to merge into one free market party.
namely the percentage of voters supporting the majority party or coalition. The fourth advantage to a PR system in the US is that it would eliminate the redistricting circus. Until recently, the decennial census occasioned the excruciating task of micro-managing the drawing of congressional districts. Yet, since the 2002 elections, Republicans in Texas and Georgia have redistricted a second time, creating even "safer" seats by manipulating district lines to their advantage. (Veith, Veith, and Fuery 2003) Under PR however, districts would be eliminated. Candidate lists would be organized statewide, in highly populated states, or regionally in the case of smaller states like New England. To insure geographical representation, all parties would find it in their own self-interest that the candidate list included geographical diversity starting at the top of the list.
Getting from Here to There: From Academic Debates to Constitutional Reform? Clearly, none of these four structural reforms will take place soon. But if they were, what would be the initial steps? Of the four proposals, two of them could be accomplished by simple statute: campaign reform and the voting system. The other two would require constitutional change: head of state/government and divided government. Given the above caveats, it would be easiest to effect campaign reform (the Supreme Court willing) and to alter the voting system. The largest obstacles to such a radical change in the American constitutional system are cultural and structuraL Culturally, the ethos of American individualism would have difficulty giving up features such as a single all-powerful executive and one's own individual member of congress, no matter how powerful the arguments raised in support of alternatives. Ideology and cultural practice change very slowly. A more serious obstacle would be the existing interests privileged by the current system. All would fight tenaciously to oppose this suggested change. Finally, specialists in American politics may dismiss this argument as the farfetched upoaching" of a comparativist on a terrain that only Americanists can write about with knowledge and expertise. However, the durability of all four of the abovementioned problems, stretching back anywhere from 25 to 50 years, suggests that Americanists have no monopoly of wisdom on overcoming these pathologies. More seriously, what this comparativist perceives is a fundamental failure of imagination based largely on the "N of I" problem that all comparativists struggle to avoid. If a single observed phenomenon-in this case, the American political system-is not examined comparatively, one never knows whether prevailing practice is optimal or suboptimaL In essence, those who do not look at these issues comparatively suffer a failure of imagination because they are unable to examine the full range of electoral and constitutional options.
There are four primary arguments in favor of PR, The
first is Simplicity; the percentage of the votes equals the percentage of the seats. To accomplish this, the individualistic US could borrow the German hybrid system of "personalized" proportional representation. This system requires citizens to cast two votes on each ballot: the first for an individual candidate; and the second for a list of national/regional candidates grouped by party affiliation. (Allen, 2001) This system has the effect of personalizing list voting because voters have their own representative but also can choose among several parties. Yet allocation of seats by party in the Bundestag corresponds strongly with the party's percentage of the popular vote. The second advantage to PR is diversity. The experience of PR voting in other countries is that it changes the makeup of the legislature by increasing both gender and racial diversity. Obviously, parties representing minority interests who find it difficult to win representation in 2 person races, will more easily be able to win seats under PR (Rule and Zimmerman, 1992) Since candidates would not have to run as individuals-or raise millions of dollars-the parties would be more easily able to include individuals on the party's list of candidates who more accurately represent the demographics of average Americans. What a mUlti-party list system would do would provide a greater range of interests being represented and broaden the concept of "representation" to go beyond narrow geography to include representation of such things as ideas and positions on policy issues that would be understandable to voters. Moreover, as for geographic representation on a list system, it would be in the self interest of the parties to insure that there was not only gender balance-if this is what the party wanted-on their list, but also other forms of balance including geography, ideology, and ethnicity, among others. The third advantage is government representativeness. Not only is a consensus-based parliamentary system based on proportional representation more representative of the voting public, it also produces more representative governments. (Birchfield and Crepaz, 1998) This study finds that consensus-based, PR systems also produce a high degree of "popular cabinet support,"
References Allen, Christopher S. 1999. Transformation of the German Political Party System: Institutional Crisis or Democratic Renewal? Policies and institution; v. 2. New York: Berghahn Books.
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Article 22. The Case for a Multi-Party U.S. Parliament? American Politics in Comparative Perspective Kernen, Samuel. 1997. Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press. Laver, Michael, and Kenneth A. Shepsle. 1995. Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lijphart, Arend. 1984. Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty~One Countries. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lijphart, Arend. 1994. Democracies: Fonns, Performance, and Constitutional Engineering. European Journal of Political Research 25:1-17. Linz, Juan. 1993. The Perils of Presidentialism. In The Global Resurgence oj Democracy, edited by L. Diamond and M. Plattner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1996. American Exceptionalism: A DoubleEdged Sword. New York: Norton. Mayhew, David. 1991. Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigations, 1946-1990. New Haven: Yale University Press. Norris, Pippa. 1997. Choosing Electoral Systems: Proportional, Majoritarian and Mixed Systems, International Political Science Review, 18 (3):297-312. Richter, Michaela. 2002. Continuity or Politikwechsel? The First Federal Red-Green Coalition. German Politics & Society 20 (1):1-48. Rosenstone, Steven 1., Roy L. Behr, and Edward H. Lazarus. 1996. Third Parties in America: Citizen Response to Major Party Failure. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rule, Wilma, and Joseph F. Zimmerman, eds. 1992. United States Electoral Systems: Their 1mpact on Women and Minorities. New York: Praeger, Rundquist, Paul S, 1991. The House of Representatives and the House oj Commons: A Brief Comparison of American and British Parliamentary Practice. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress. Strom, Kaare, Ian Budge, and Michael J. Laver. 1994. Constraints on Cabinet FOlmation in Parliamentary Democracies, American Journal of Political Science 38 (2):303-335. Thurber, James A. 1991. Representation, Accountability, and Efficiency in Divided Party Control of Government. PS 24:653-657. Veith, Richard, Nonna Jean Veith, and Susan Fuery. 2003. Oral Argument. In U.S. Supreme Court, Washington, DC. Weinberg, Jonathan. 1993. Broadcasting and Speech. California Law Review 81 (5):1101-1206. Weiss, Stephen. 2004. '04 Elections Expected to Cost Nearly $4 Billion. In opensecrets.org-Center for Responsive Politics: http://www.opensecrets.org/pressreleases/2004/04spending.asp.
Allen, Christopher S. 2001. Proportional Representation. In Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, edited by J. Krieger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barker, A. 1994. The Upturned Stone: Political Scandals and their Investigation Processes in 20 Democracies. Crime lAw and Social Change 24 (1):337-373. Birchfield, Vicki, and Markus M. L. Crepaz. 1998, The Impact of Constitutional Structures and Collective and Competitive Veto Points on Income Inequality in Industrialized Democracies. European Journal of Political Research 34 (2): 175-200. Brubaker, Stanley C. 1998. The Limits of Campaign Spending Limits. Public Interest 133:33-54. Center for Voting and Democracy. Overview: Dubious Democracy 2003-2004 June 2003 [cited. Available from http://www. fairvote.org/dubdemloverview,htm. Corrado, Anthony. 1997. Campaign Finance Reform: A Sourcebook. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Cutler, Lloyd. 1989. Some Reflections About Divided Government. Presidential Studies Quarterly 17:485-492.
Dionne. E. J., Jr. 1991. Why Americans Hate Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster. Dwyre, D., M. O'Gorman, and J. Stonecash. 1994. Disorganized Politics and the Have~Nots: Politics and Taxes in New York and California. Polity 27 (1):25-47. Fiorina, Morris. 1992. Divided Government. New York: Macmillan. Franklin. Mark N., and Wolfgang P. Hirczy de Mino. 1998. Separated Powers, Divided Government, and Turnout in U.S. Presidential Elections. American Journal of Political Science 42 (1):316-326. Gans, Curtis. 1993. Television: Political Participation's Enemy #1. Spectrum: the Journal ojState Government 66 (2):26-31. Gibson, Martha L. 1995. Issues, Coalitions, and Divided Government. Congress & the Presidency 22 (2):155-166. Grant, Alan. 1998, The Politics of American Campaign Finance. Parliamentary Affairs 51 (2):223-240. Grofman, Bernard, and Arend Lijphart. 1986. Electoral Laws and Their Consequences, New York: Agathon Press. Guinier, Lani. 1994. The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. New York: The Free Press. Hill, Steven. 2003. Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics. New York: Routledge. Huber, John D. 1996. The Vote of Confidence in Parliamentary Democracies. American Political Science Review 90 (2):269-282. Jacobson, Gary C. 1990. The Electoral Origins oj Divided Government: Competition in U.S. House Elections, 1946-1988. Boulder, CO: Westview. Jacoby, Wade. 2000, Imitation and Politics: Redesigning Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
Copyright © 2006 by Christopher S, Allen. Reprinted by permission of the author,
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UNIT3
Europe in Transition: West, Center, and East Unit Selections 23,
24. 25. 26. 27, 28, 29,
A Too Perfect Union? Why Europe Said "No", Andrew Moravcsik Bored by 'Results', Europe Regains Its Taste for Grand Plans, George Parker A Venture at a Standstill, The Economist Shadows at Europe's Heart, The Economist Russia's Ersatz Democracy, Lilia Shevtsova What Does Putin Want?, Peter Lavelle The New American Cold War, Stephen F, Cohen
KeyPoints to Consider Why did a former President of the European Commission refer to the European Union as a "UPO" (Unidentified Political Object)? • What are the major obstacles to the emergence of a more unified Europe? How were they reflected in the Dutch and French referendums on the new constitution? • There seems to be a growing understanding that an enlarged EU may become a Europe 'a la carte, What does that mean-and why does it matter? • Why is the voter turnout in the elections for the European Parliament so low? • What is the evidence that the economic problems of Western Europe could be not just cyclical but also structural in origin? • How did Mikhail Gorbachev set out to modernize the Soviet Union and end up unleashing the forces that led to its collapse? How do you assess Yeltsin's political legacy in Russian politics? How has President Putin increasingly shown authoritarian tendencies?
Student Web Site
www,mhcls,comionline
Internet References
Further information regarding these Web sites may be found in this book's preface or online, Europa: European Union http://europa,eu.int NATO Integrated Data Service (NIDS) http://www.nato.int/structur/nidslnids.htm Research and Reference (Library of Congress) hffp.1llcweb,loc,govlrrl Russian and East European Network Information Center, University of Texas at Austin http://reenic.utexas.edu
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The articles in this unit deal with two major developments that have greatly altered the political map of contemporary Europe. One is the growth of the supranational project now known as the European Union (EU) and its impact on the European countries, both member and non~member states, and their citizens. The other development consists of the continuing challenges and responses that have resulted from decades of Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, followed by its sudden collapse. These two developments were symbolically linked in 2004, when the EU for the first time admitted to membership eight former Communist~ruled countries in the central and eastern part of the continent. While NATO had moved slightly ahead of the European Union in its own eastward expansion, the EU has very different goals and entry requirements than the defense alliance. They include a set of minimum democratic and economic cri~ teria that each new member must meet before being admitted. The prospect of gaining membership has thus become a kind of reward for good political and economic behavior in Europe. In recent years the EU has used this form of "soft power" to encourage several post-authoritarian systems not to backslide on the sometimes difficult road to pluralist democracy and a more open economy. The present time can be seen as an important turning point for the EU-and also as a crucial test of its viability.
Its institutional origins go back to 1951, when France, West Germany, Italy, and the three Benelux countries integrated their coal and steel industries. By 1957 the same six nations founded the European Economic Community (EEC) that later became the European Union. Britain "missed the bus" when it declined to join the founders and proceeded to organize a European Free Trade Area (EFTA) instead. The European Community quickly turned out to be a supranational framework that served to stimulate the economies of the member states. Britain sought to join by the early 1960s, but President de Gaulle of France's Fifth Republic opposed Britain's entry. The EU did not add new members until 1973, when Britain finally entered along with Ireland and Denmark. Thereafter the European Community continued to expand incrementally in sets of three newcomers per decade. The three former dictatorships, Greece, Portugal, and Spain, entered during the 1980s, after having established their credentials as well functioning new democracies and market economies. In 1995, soon after the end of the Cold War, three neutral countriesAustria, Finland, and Sweden-joined the EU and increased its total membership to fifteen. In 2004 the EU abandoned this incremental growth in favor of what has been called a great leap forward. In one swoop, the EU expanded its rnembership by two thirds, from fifteen to twenty-five countries. This greatly increased the EU's economic,
125
cultural, and political diversity, as its population rose from 375 million to some 450 million people. Eight of the ten newcomers lie in central or eastern Europe: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the three Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. They differ from most of the first fifteen members in two major respects. First, they all have had a relatively short recent experience with pluralist democracy. Second, their economies are far less pro~ ductive than those of the older EU members for reasons stretching back before the years of Communist mismanagement: even before World War II, most of these countries lagged behind the more developed parts of Western Europe. The remaining two in the group of ten newcomers are the small Mediterranean island nations of Malta and Cyprus. The EU enlargement proceeds, and it is not hard to imagine it as a political conglomerate of thirty or more members. With the admission of two more East European post~Communist states in January 2007, Romania and Bulgaria, the EU's population rose by another 30 million to between 480 and 490 million. The case of Turkey is special. This country is poorer and less modernized than its close and distant European neighbors, and it has a tainted record on human rights and democracy. Although the state is officially secular, the Turkish population is overwhelmingly Muslim. The EU members are divided, with some strongly resisting any plans for granting full membership. Opposition is often culturally based, but there are also voices of caution that point out that Turkey's entry would change the balance of power in the EU considerably. They underscore that Turkey now has some 70 million people and presumably will outnumber Germany's 80 million within a decade or two. They tend to portray Turkey as a potential economic dead weight in the EU and as a political, cultural, and demographic threat to the "acquis communautaire." It does not help matters thatTurkey has refused to recognize the government of Cyprus and keeps troops on the island to protect the Turkish minority living there. Supporters of Turkey's entry argue the real hope for a workable model of modernization and democratization in the Middle East may lie in Turkey. They also commend the Turkish government for a series of reforms, including the abolition of the death penalty and a relaxation of its policy toward the Kurdish minority. Given the deep division on this issue, it seems most likely that Turkey will be limited to a close association statusperhaps sweetened to read "privileged partnership" rather than full membership in the EU. That would resemble a status that would resemble in practice the one chosen voluntarily by Norway and Switzerland. Both of these countries presumably would have no difficulties in attaining full membership but have decided against it. The enlargement of the EU, with Or without Turkey, will in any case bring changes and challenges. It cannot be ruled out that the larger and more diverse EU will begin (or has already begun) to depart from the founders' idealistic vision of "an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe," as stated in the preamble to the EU's founding document, the Rome Treaty. Although this phrase echoes the preamble to the U.S. Constitution ("a more perfect union''), some observers think the EU will not become a loose-knit United States of Europe.
Within a few days of each other, and only a little more than a year after the latest and greatest expansion of the EU membership, French and Dutch voters rejected a proposed EU constitution. The negative vote, coming from two founding members of the EU, cancelled the plans for completing the constitutional process during 2006. One of the most balanced interpretations of Europe's "no" comes from Andrew Moravchik. Even without a constitution, the EU is an impressive political construct that has no close parallel anywhere. It has largely dismantled national barriers to the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital among the member nations. Above all, the EU and its institutions have supranational authority that goes far beyond anything envisaged by NAFTA or other regional free trade arrangements. The apPointed executive Commission initiates common policy decisions and oversees their implementation. The independent European Court of Justice makes binding decisions in its adjudication of EU-related disputes. The European Parliament has seen its authority grow over the years, even though it is not a full-blown legislature in the traditional sense. The powerful Council of Ministers remains an intergovernmental body, where the national government of every member nation is represented. For an American student of the EU, it is interesting that the organization has faced the same basic "big state-small state" problem that gave headaches to the Founders in Philadelphia. The Europeans have sought a solution in an intricate system of differently weighted votes for the member states, related to the size of each nation's population. It lacks some of the rough simplicity of the solution offered by the Connecticut Compromise, but both are attempts to recognize some equality of status among all members without completely ignoring their considerable differences in population. It remains to be seen whether a new system of qualified and double majorities will be more acceptable than weighted votes. It cannot be denied that there is a problem in an association where the population of the smallest member, Malta, is about 400,000, while the largest member, Germany, has more than 80 million people, a ratio of roughly 1:200. The political process continues unabated in the individual nation states of Western Europe, as they seek to define and implement their own public agendas. Their relative prosperity rests on a base that was built up during the very long postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, they chose to channel a considerable portion of their wealth toward the public sector and develop an array of public goods, social services, and social insurance. Since the early 1970s, however, many West European countries have been beset by economic disruptions or slowdowns offset by periods of cyclical economic upturns. The increase in energy prices Since the 1970s and the emergence of the new industrial countries (NICs) of East and South Asia, where labor costs remain much lower, are long-term structural contributors to this slower economic growth. In every country one encounters a debate over the most effective way to stimulate growth and reform the welfare state without introducing what has come to be called "American conditions:' Central and Eastern Europe still feel the aftershocks from the sudden collapse of Communist rule at the end of the 1980s, with its transition to pluralist democracy and a rudimentary
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market-based economy much rockier than most had anticipated. The prospect of membership in the EU became a major incentive to continue political and economic reforms. Though there are now ten of these countries that have recently gained entry to the club, it will be a long time before they can hope to catch up economically. Robert Cottrell reported from a study by The Economist Intelligence Unit that it will take the new entrants on average more than fifty years to draw level with the old members in average income per person. Communist-descended parties have responded to anxiety in these countries by abandoning most or all of their Leninist baggage and engaging in the competitive bidding for votes with promises of social fairness and security. When Centr~1 and East European countries began their postCommunist journey, there were no ready-made strategies of reform. Some economists familiar with Eastern Europe argued for a quick transition to a market economy: even with its shortterm disruptions, such a "shock therapy" would release human energies and bring economic growth more quickly and effiCiently. These supporters of a "tough love" strategy warned that compassionate halfway measures could end up worsening the economic plight of these countries. Yet, as David Ost has reported from Poland, these policies create their own problems and are likely to meet with rejection, especially when there is little evidence that neoliberal measures will deliver on their promises. Other strategists came out in favor of a more gradual approach, warning that the shock therapy approach not only ignored preconditions for market economics but also underestimated disruptiveness of such a transition. These gradualists recommended the adoption of pragmatic strategies of incremental change, accompanied by a rhetoric of lower expectations. Experience and the passage of a few more years would probably have given us better insights into the relative merits of each argument. But a pluralist society rarely permits itself to become a social laboratory for controlled experiments of this kind. Decision makers must often learn on the job. As a result, competitive politics has produced a "mix" of the two approaches as the most acceptable and practical policy outcome. But there is a danger that populist leaders will find a hearing for their simplistic solutions, as The Economistwarns. A similar debate has been carried out in the former Soviet Union. It could be argued that Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet head of government (1985 to 1991), failed to opt clearly for one or the other approach to economic reform in his program of perestroika, or restructuring. In the eyes of some born-again Soviet marketers, he remained far too socialist. But Communist hard-liners never forgave him for dismantling a system in which they had enjoyed security and privilege. Gorbachev appears to have regarded his own demands for glasnost, or openness and transparency, as well as democratization as essential counterparts of perestroika in his overall program of modernization. He seems to have understood (or become convinced) that a highly developed economy needs a freer flow of information along with a more decentralized system of decision making if its component parts are to be efficient, flexible, and capable of learning and self-correction. In that sense, a market economy has some integral feedback traits that make
it incompatible with the traditional Soviet models of a centrally directed "command economy" and repressive one-party rule. The Soviet leader had taken more than he (or anyone?) could handle. Rather than modernizing the Soviet system, Gorbachev's reforms contributed to its eventual collapse. One of the greatest vulnerabilities of the Soviet Union turned out to be its multiethnic character. Gorbachev was not alone in having underestimated the potential centrifugal tendencies of a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) erected on the territory of the old Russian Empire. Many non-Russian minorities retained a territorial identification with their homelands, where they often lived as ethnic majorities, making it easier for them to demand greater autonomy or national independence as the Soviet regime weakened. The first national assertions came from the Baltic peoples in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; soon, others, including the Georgians and Armenians, expressed similar demands through newly open political channels. The death knell sounded for the Soviet Union in 1991, when the Ukrainians, the second largest national group after the Russians, made similar demands for independence. In August 1991, Communist hard-liners failed in a coup attempt against Gorbachev. The coup was defeated by a popular resistance, led by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, an earlier and seemingly more committed convert to the reformist agenda. After his restoration to power, Gorbachev became politically dependent on Yeltsin and was increasingly seen as a transitional figure. Quickly and essentially without armed conflict, the Soviet state was dissolved a week before the end of 1991, to be replaced by the loose union of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Many accounts of post-Communist and post-Soviet Russia paint a gloomy picture of a politically exhausted society, with a turn to some form of authoritarian nationalist populism seeming more and more possible. A quick survey of recent parliamentary and presidential elections gives a picture of electoral volatility, growing voter apathy or disgruntlement, and widespread authoritarian leanings. It also illustrates how governmental leaders can favor, manipulate, or even help create "loyal" political parties. Duma elections 1993 and 1995. The first election of a new Russian Duma after the end of the Soviet Union came after a complete breakdown of relations between President Yeltsin and the parliamentary majority. A vote to impeach Yeltsin was followed by his armed expulsion of the parliamentarians and the banning of some political parties. The 1993 elections returned a fragmented Duma, in which nationalists and Communists occupied key positions and reformers suffered setbacks. A chastened Yeltsin seemed to playa more subdued role, and
the new government pursued far more cautious reform policies. Disunity in the reform camp was a large cause of further losses in 1995, though reform factions still held a larger total portion of the vote than either the Communists or nationalists. Presidential election 1996. Yeltsin still knew how to win elections, albeit in a run-off against the Communist presidential leader, Zyuganov. By this time, ill health and heavy drinking had reportedly exacerbated his governing problems. His frequent and seemingly erratic replacements of prime ministers did not
improve the situation.
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party since the end of one-party "elections" in Russia. Outside observers found evidence of fraud and cited media favors to United Russia, but it seems likely that this party, largely defined by its loyalty to the person of President Putin, would have done
Duma elections 1999. In the latter half of 1999. Yeltsin selected a stronger figure for what turned out to be his last prime minister. Vladimir V. Putin. then 47 years old, quickly turned his attention to a tough new military intervention in Chechnya. Within Russia, his strong determination to suppress the breakaway MUslim province generated widespread support, and probably helped reduce the Communist result to 113 seats, or a quarter of the Duma. Presidential election 2000. Without warning, but with impeccable timing, President Yellsin announced his resignation on December 31, 1999, just as the century and millennium came to an end. Putin became the new acting president and easily won the presidential election a few months later. Largely due to a favorable oil market for Soviet exports, the new president inherited a much better fiscal balance and continuing revenues than Yellsin or, especially, Gorbachev before him. In his first term as President of Russia, Putin aroused popular support with tough measures against organized crime and political terrorism. Also popular were his judicial actions against some of the super-rich "oligarchs;' who had made huge fortunes
weI! in any case. Presidential election 2004. Putin seemed a sure bet to win the presidential election in March 2004. In advance of the contest, he asserted his authority within the dual executive by dismissing the prime minister and appointing a new one. With the dependable backing of a parliamentary majority, supplied by United Russia and a few independents, the institutional and political basis for a strong presidency until 2008 seemed to have been secured. Some Russians wonder whether Putin will step aside, seek to determine his successor (as Yellsin did), or seek a third t~rm (a move that would require a change in the Russian Constitution). In conclusion, pluralist democracy and the open market
I
economy have once again been discredited for many Russians
!
after being tried out under highly imperfect circumstances. Lilla Shevtsova finds some method in the seemingly erratic political maneuverings of Russia's rulers, while Peter Lavelle looks more closely at what he calls Putin's long-term reform goal of an essentially authoritarian "managed democracy" and "managed capitalism:' Stephen F. Cohen has long argued in favor of a better understanding of RUssia by American political leaders. He explains why he thinks the United States has contributed to the problems besetting post-Soviet Russia.
when statewowned enterprises were privatized. Putin's maneuvers had strategic import beyond their populist appeal: some of the oligarchs had used their fortunes to oppose him politically. Duma election 2003. In an election marked by lower voter turnout, the Communists and liberal parties lost ground to a new party, called United Russia, which performed better than any
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I
f
Article 23
A Too Perfect Union? Why Europe Said "No" "Far from demonstrating that the European Union is in decline or disarray, the constitutional crisis demonstrates its essential stability and legitimacy." ANDREW MORAVCSIK
T
he people of France and the Netherlands have spoken. As a result of their referendums this spring, the European Union constitution is dead, as is Turkish member~
political institution building since World War II. Historians will see instead the last gasp of idealistic European federalism born in the mid-1940s, symbolized by the phrase "ever closer union" and aimed at establishing a United States of Europe. It is time to recognize that the EU can neither aspire to replace nation states nor seek democratic legitimacy in the same way nations do. The current EU constitutional settlement, which has defined a stable balance between Brussels and national capitals and democratic legitimacy through indirect accountability and extensive checks and balances, is here to stay. To see why this is so, we must understand the nature of the current constitutional compromise, the reasons European leaders called it into question, and the deeper lessons this teaches us about the limits of European integration.
ship in the EU, and progress in areas from services deregulation to Balkan enlargement will now be much more difficult. Yet for the chattering classes the outcome was an opportunity to repolish long-held positions. In the face of implacable opposition to Turkish membership, The Economist blithely interpreted the rejection of a proposed EU constitution as evidence that Europe has gone too far, too fast-except, of course, on enlargement. Oxford's Timothy Garton Ash, a perennial optimist about the
reconciliation of Britain's transatlantic and European vocations, espied another promising moment for Blairite diplomacy. The court philosopher of continental social democracy, Jiirgen Habermas, called on European leaders (read: his former student, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer) to recapture the "idealism of 1968" by leading a leftist movement against neoliberal US hegemony. With quintessentially French misanthropy, Serge July of Liberation accused French politicians of opportunism and French voters of racism. Across the Atlantic, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, undeterred by the massive protest vote against European economic reform, called for rejection of the welfare state, open borders to immigration, and an embrace of America. It is time to view Europe as it really is. Far from demonstrating that the European Union is in decline or disarray, the constitutional crisis demonstrates its essential stabiHty and legitimacy. The central error of the European constitutional framers was one of style and symbolism rather than substance. The constitution contained a set of modest reforms, very much in line with European popular preferences. Yet European leaders upset the emerging pragmatic settlement by dressing up the reforms as a grand scheme for constitutional revision and popular democratization of the EU. Looking back in 50 years, historians will not see this year's referendums as the end of the EU-or as the beginning of the end. The union remains the most successful experiment in
Just Say No Voting patterns in the referendums were a reflection of three related motivations that have dominated every EU election in history. First is ideological extremism. The center supported Europe while the extreme right and left, which now account for almost one-third of the French and Dutch electorates, voted "no."· Second is protest voting against unpopular governments. Third, and most important, is a reaction against the insecurity felt by poorer Europeans. Whereas business, the educated elite, and wealthier Europeans favored the constitution, those fearful of unemployment, labor market reform, globalization, privatization, and the consolidation of the welfare state opposed it. Today these concerns dovetail with the perceived economic and cultural threat posed by Muslim immigration. This type of disaffection is the primary political problem for European governments today, since it is directed both against poor economic performance and against reform measures designed to improve it. As Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria has observed, the tragedy is that "Europe needs more of what's producing populist paranoia: economic refonn to survive in an era of economic competition, young immigrants to sustain its
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ANNUAL EDITIONS There is no new grand projet, akin to the single market of the 1980s or the single currency of the 1990s, to justify change. In 18 months of deliberation, the constitutional convention devoted only two days to the expansion of EU competencies. European health, pension, fiscal, and education policies have little support, while a US-style military buildup exceeds Europe's means
social market, and a more strategic relationship with the Muslim world, which would be dramatically enhanced by Turkish membership in the EU." Forgotten in the electoral chaos this spring was the document itself. The constitution is, after all, a conservative text containing incremental improvements that consolidate EU developments of the past 20 years. The "no" campaigns conceded the desirability of the modest reforms from the start-including appointment of a foreign minister, formulation of a stronger anti-crime policy, and streamlining of voting procedures. Such changes are popular, not least in France, which proposed most of them. One is forced to conclude that the constitution became controver~ sial not because its content was objectionable, but because the content was so innocuous that citizens saw a chance to cast an inexpensive protest vote. What were they protesting against? Here, too, the referendums cannot be viewed as plebiscites directed at the EU's policies. Although the EU is associated, through its advisory "Lisbon process," with labor market and welfare reform, these matters remain firmly within the competence of the member states. The EU's activities as a whole, while they include oversight of state subsidies and trade policy, may just as reasonably be seen as part of a European effort to manage globalization rather than promote it. Opponents made occasional mention of EU policies not contained in the constitution, such as the recent enlargement to 25 members, the introduction of the euro, the deregulation of electricity, and Turkish accession. Yet only the last of these seems to have swayed many voters, and they seem to have been unaware that free migration has been ruled out even before negotiations begin. So what lesson should the EU take away? The relative lack of direct criticism of the constitution, the lack of fundamental objections to EU policies, and, above all, the stunning lack of positive proposals for reform are striking evidence of the underlying stability of the EU system. The 16 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall have been, after all, the most successful period in EU history. The single market, the euro, and a nascent European foreign and defense policy came into being. EU enlargement was carried out with surprisingly little disruption in existing member states, and proved the most costeffective Western instrument for advancing global democracy and security. In sum, notwithstanding the rejection of the proposed charter, the EU appears to have quietly reached a stable constitutional settlement.
and insults its "civilian power" ideals. There was always less to the constitution than both its proponents and its detractors proclaimed. Many believe that a European defense independent of the United States poses an imminent threat to US interests. Of
course, it is true that if the United States were again to attempt an operation on the scale of Iraq with so little substantive justification or multilateral legitimation, European nations would be uniformly opposed. (Even the British government has already declared that it does not see any useful military options for regime change in Iran.) But another Iraq is an unlikely possibility, given the evident costs of that imbroglio; the United States is militarily incapable of repeating this adventure at the current time. More important is the fact that the United States and the EU have agreed on every other major use of force since the 1989 Gulf War. More than 100,000 European troops are currently sta-
tioned out of their home countries, most involved in operations that involve the United States. The ambition to form a European Union military or diplomatic superpower with a principal mission of opposing American "hyperpower" is little more than-and always was little more than-idle talk. Only the combination of ignorance and bias regarding the EU that is so uniquely concentrated among self-reinforcing groups of US neoconservatives and British Euroskeptics could construe the EU as a military or geo-
political threat. As recently as a year ago, many conservatives pleaded with the Bush administration to oppose the ED consti-
tution, encourage British withdrawal, and insist on the uncondi-
What is this settlement? The EU is now preeminent in trade, agriculture, fishing, eurozone monetary policy, and some business regulation, and helps to coordinate cooperation in foreign policy.
tional predominance of NATO. With the recent European trips by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush, these demands for an aggressive policy toward Europe have been definitively rebuffed. Consider also European social policy, of which we heard so much in the referendum campaigns. What concrete EU policies should this imply? Blocking sensible efforts to reform the welfare state for long-term sustainability is shortsighted. While many studies show that a division oflabor between the new and old members of the EU will generate growth, there is little evidence of a regulatory or fiscal "race to the bottom" driven by the EU, and plenty of room remains for social policy at the national level. The neoliberal "Anglo-Saxon" threat is a myth. Britain is building up its welfare state faster than any of its partners, based partly on a Scandinavian model. Indeed, with continental liberalization and British social democratization, Europe's
Contrary to statistics one often reads, this amounts to only about 20 percent of European regulation and legislation. Most areas of
politics, not as the result of some EU social policy pipe dream.
Fixing the Unbroken
social systems are converging-through the pressure of national
greatest public concern-taxes, health, pensions, education, crime, infrastructure, defense, and immigration-remain fmnly national.
A similar constitutional compromise has emerged with regard to institutions. Although Anglo-American Euroskeptics have sought to resurrect the bogeyman of a Brnssels superstate headed by the European Commission, treaty changes since 1970 have consistently moved Europe in the opposite direction. They have increased the power of the council of ministers (favored by
With a tax base one-fiftieth the size of the member states', an administration smaller than that of a small city, no police force or army, and a narrow legal mandate, the EU will never encompass these fiscally and administratively demanding tasks.
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Article 23. A Too Perfect Union? Why Europe Said "No" France and Britain, particularly for matters outside the economic core) and the directly elected European parliament (favored by Germany) at the expense of the technocratic commission. The proposed constitution sought to marginally improve the EU's effIciency and transparency while retaining its basic structure. All of this is the sensible stuff policy wonks love and publics generally support. The constitution called for expanding the role of the directly elected European parliament in EU legislation (termed "co-decision" in Brussels-speak), giving national parliaments an advisory and gate-keeping role, abolishing the rotating presidency, adjusting voting weights to represent large countries more fairly, and centralizing foreign policy coordination in a foreign minister. The proposal was a multinational constitutional compromise that attended to the interests of large and small countries, left and right parties, and Europhile and Euroskeptic tendencies.
be done tbrough a constitutional convention. Enthused by the prospect of a reenactment of Philadelphia 1787, millions of web-savvy Europeans were supposed to deliberate the meaning of Europe. More pragmatic voices hoped to combat cynicism by simplifying the treaty and delineating EU prerogatives. To justify the need for change, reformers also seized on the perception that the EU would require a radical overhaul to avoid gridlock with 25 ratherthan 15 members-a fear that now seems unjustified, both because the new states are proving constructive and because the EU is not moving as far or fast as it once did. Of course, the constitutional deliberation did not mobilize Europeans. Few citizens were even aware of the 200 conventionnels' deliberations. When testimony from civil society was requested, professors turned up. When a youth conference was called, would-be Eurocrats attended. When those who did attend came to consider democracy, they found that the arrangement Europe currently has is appropriate to a diverse polity in which member states insist on checks and balances at every level. There was little popular or elite support for democratic reform beyond the modest increases in scrutiny by national and European parliaments the constitution contains. This is as it should be, for there is no "democratic deficit" in the EU-or not much of one. Once we set aside ideal notions of democracy and look to real-world standards, we see that the EU is as transparent, responsive, accountable, and honest as its member states. The relative lack of centralized financial or administrative discretion all but eliminates corruption. The EU's areas of autonomous authority-trade policy, constitutional adjudication, and central banking-are the same as those in most democracies, where these functions are politically insulated for sound reasons. The notion of imposing democratic control tbrough multiple checks and balances, rather than through elections to a single sovereign parliament, is more American than European-but it is no less legitimate for that. Everyone gets a say in a system in which a European directive needs approval from a technocratic commission, a supennajority of democratic national governments, and a directly elected parliament, and must then be implemented by national regulators. Studies show that EU legislation is both consensual and relatively responsive to shifts in partisan and popular opinion. Enthusiasts for democracy fail to grasp its limits. Engaging European citizens will not necessarily create rational (let alone supportive) debate, because those with intense preferences about the EU tend to be its opponents. Average citizens and political parties keep but a few issues-usually those involving heavy taxing and spending-in mind at anyone time, and thus respond only to highly salient ideals and issues. The pull of Europe remains weak, while the bread and butter policies citizens care about most, including the welfare and identity issues that dominated the referendum debates, remain almost exclusively in national hands. The failure of European elections to generate high turnouts or focus on EU issues over the years suggests that citizens fail to participate in EU politics not because they are blocked from doing so, but because they have insufficient incentive. Some democratic enthusiasts propose jump-starting EU democracy by incorporating hot-button issues like social policy and immigration, despite the lack of popular support for doing so. This is, in essence, Habermas's vision. Yet anyone except a
It is time to recognize that the EU can neither aspire to replace nation states nor seek democratic legitimacy in the same way nations do.
The reforms enjoyed broad support among member states, and none met a serious challenge in the referendum debates. The biggest change-creation of a European foreign minister empowered to recommend, though not impose, a more coordinated foreign policy-enjoys 70 percent approval across Europe. And recognizing the EU as it is, the constitution struck the classic idealist phrase "ever closer union" from the Treaty of Rome, and substituted the more balanced "unity in diversity."
Um:lone by Idealism So it was not the substance of the emerging constitutional settlement that triggered opposition. The objectionable aspect was its form: an idealistic constitution. Since the 1970s, lawyers have regarded the 1957 Treaty of Rome as a de facto constitution. The new document was an unnecessary public relations exercise based on the seemingly intuitive, but in fact peculiar, notion that democratization and the European ideal could legitimate the ED. In the wake of the Nice and Amsterdam treaties, which consolidated the union, Euro-enthusiast scholars, politicians, and commentators have argued that the EU is unpopular primarily because it is secretive, complex, unaccountable, and distant from the public-in sum, because it suffers from a "democratic deficit." Fischer, the German foreign minister, gave the idea of constitutional legitimation a big push with his celebrated lecture on the ultimate goal of integration at Humboldt University in 2000. But like the other European leaders who jumped on his bandwagon, Fischer, while ostensibly transcending a narrow, national discourse, was in fact framing the argument in a familiar domestic manner: in his case 1968-style German anti-nationalism. The idea was to legitimate the EU not through trade, economic growth, and useful regulation, as had been the case for 50 years, but by politicizing and democratizing it. This was to
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Article
Bored by 'Results', Europe Regains Its Taste for Grand Plans GEORGE PARKER
Union's next steps, That will include a I'renewal of vows" to the European project next March-a declaration to mark the 50th anniversary of the EU's founding Treaty of Rome. The vital ingredient of this multi-layered negotiation would be the EU's constitution. Ms Merkel wants to revive it-not least because it would virtually double Germany's voting strength in EU decision-making councils-although she accepts it cannot be the same document already rejected by France and the Netherlands. German diplomats believe that by next year 18 out of the EU's current 25 members will have ratified the constitutional treaty signed in Rome in 2004. They argue that pressure to revive most of the text will be irresistible, including innovations such as an EU foreign minister and diplomatic service, a full-time president representing member states and a new voting system, But Britain does not want a treaty that looks anything like what Margaret Beckett, foreign secretary, called the "grandiose" original constitution, nor do the French and Dutch political establishments. Gordon Brown, the UK chancellor of the exchequer widely expected to be prime minister by 2008, is only likely to accept a new treaty if it was so modest that he could argue it did not need approval in a referendum (which he would probably lose). This is where the second ingredient of the negotiation could come in. Mr Barroso said in London this month that updating the EU's institutions should be seen "in the same intellectual framework" as the planned mid-term review of Europe's budget, which he will launch in 2008. Aides to Mr Barroso, who met Mr Brown in London, admit the Scot Hdoesn't like the constitution much", but he does care passionately about reforming the EU budget and dismantling the Common Agricultural Policy, the farm subsidy regime he blames for distorting world trade and harming poor countries. When Mr Brown met Ms Merkel in Berlin earlier this year, her aides started speaking of a possible broader deal: in exchange for signing up to a revised constitution, Mr Brown could demand a modernisation of the EU budget, reform of farm support and regional aid for innovation and research. The third big element of this mooted deal is enlargement. Britain is the leading supporter of the EU's expansion to the east, but Mr Barroso and national leaders argue that no new members-including Croatia and Turkey-can enter the club
can tell people in Brussels are getting desperate when they wheel out the old bicycle metaphor. Franco Frattini, the European Union's justice commissioner, took a spin down cliche lane recently as he vainly pleaded with interior ministers to accept more decision-making in Brussels: "Europe is like a bicycle-either it goes ahead or it falls to the
Y
OU
ground."
It took Tonio Borg, the justice minister from Malta, one of the EU's newest members, to deflate this oldest of Brussels saws: "When my bicycle stops moving I put my feet on the ground and have a rest," he said. Europe is having a breather. After the traumas of 2005when French and Dutch voters rejected the EU's constitutional treaty and leaders haggled for months over a new seven-year budget for the club-the Union is settling down to a period of policy delivery in areas such as energy, postal services liberalisation, cutting carbon emissions and capping mobile phone "roaming" charges. It will not last. The continent's Euro-establishment-the politicians. academics and media-are accustomed to an era of "big projects" such as the creation of the single market, the euro and the constitution. The "Europe of results" pursued by Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, has failed to stir their blood. "The problem is that nobody cares about these projects ," sniffs one old-school insider at the Commission, the EU's executive branch. On all sides there is also a strong sense of unfinished business in Brussels, heightened by the uncertain fate of the EU constitution and last December's unloved compromise that left the 2007-13 budget largely unreformed. Around the chancelleries of Europe and the dining tables of Brussels' Euro-quarter, a plan is being mooted for a two-year burst of political activity intended to revitalise the EU and determine whether it can face the future. Under this scenario the Union's biggest political questions would be wrapped up into one mega-negotiation, possibly coming to a head in December 2008 at the end of the French presidency of the EU. It has been given credence by Mr Barroso and advisers close to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who will use her presidency of the EU in the first half of next year to chart the 133
ANNUAL EDITIONS
language of reform. In addition, change to the farm budget would be likely to come into effect only in 2013 (the end of the current seven-year budget) when French net receipts from the CAP would be dwindling. If the EU sticks to its timetable of sorting out its constitutional problem in 2008, it is hard to see how it could be kept entirely separate from other pending issues such as the budget review, enlargement and the future leadership of the Commission. Mr Barroso and Ms Merkel plainly think Mr Brown might accept a new treaty updating the EU's institutions if he could present it as part of a package embracing enlargement, a 21st-century budget and a new mandate for the free-market MrBarroso. While that scenario holds attractions for Europe's modernisers, the possibility that a mega-negotiation could all go horribly wrong also seems to appeal to some federalists. "Then there would be a really deep crisis," says one senior Brussels diplomat, predicting that a 2008 debacle could be the catalyst for a "core" group of countries to press ahead with their own deeper integration, leaving the UK and other sceptics on the margins. And one piece of conventional wisdom in Brussels is trotted out even more often than the "bicycle theory": the European Union takes big steps forward only when it is in a crisis.
until its creaking institutions and rules have been updated through a new treaty. The fourth element is the question of who runs the Commission, which initiates and polices EU law as well as being a civil service. Mr Barroso-a modernising anglophile whose policies mirror Mr Brown's priorities of open markets, economic reform and deregulation-is hoping for a second mandate in 2009. The idea of bringing all of these elements togetherinformally if not officially-into one negotiation divides European opinion. While one EU ambassador says it would be a "recipe for disaster", others say they think it is a good idea. But Michel Bamier, the former French foreign minister who hopes to regain his old job if Nicolas Sarkozy becomes his country's president next year, says it would "overload the boat". "Sorting out the constitution first is the priority," he says. He believes France, sitting in the EU presidency in 2008, would have enough on its hands sorting out the constitutional mess without holding simultaneous talks on cutting the subsidies that preserve the country's rich rural life. However, using farm reform as a bait to entice a Prime Minister Brown to sign up to the constitution might have Some tactical appeal to Mr Sarkozy or Segolime Royal-his likely Socialist rival for the presidency-both of whom speak the
From Financial Times, October 27, 2006. Copyright © 2006 by Financial Times Syndication. Reprinted by permission.
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Article 25
Europe's Future
A Venture at a Standstill Twelve months after the French and Dutch said no, the European Union has yet to rediscover its purpose
A
s Chou En-lai observed of the 1789 revolution in France, the full impact of events in that country can take centuries to discern. That may yet prove true of the French no to the European Union's draft constitution. expressed in a referendum on May 29th last year. But there was no doubting the shock, especially when it was amplified three days later by an even bigger no from the Dutch. For the first time since a European common market was set up in 1957, two of the six founders of the club had decisively rejected a step in the long march towards fuller integration.
Meanwhile France is going through the drawn-out denouement of Mr Chirac's ll-year-old presidency. He is now so feeble politically that little can be expected in the way of fresh EU initiatives until he leaves office next May. The second problem is that nobody agrees about the reasons the French and Dutch said no. Eurosceptics were swift to hail the votes as a rejection of the drive towards ever-closer union that had, they said, been foisted on reluctant voters by the European elite for 50 years. Euro-enthusiasts were just as quick with a very different interpretation: that the voters wanted more Europe, to increase social protection and to keep at bay the excesses of free markets. Still others thought the voters were merely taking the chance to bash unpopular national governments. What seems certain is that the naysayers were not rejecting the EU constitution as such: few could have mastered such a complex text, and fewer still could have grasped how it differed from existing European treaties. Rather they were showing dissatisfaction with the European project in a wider sense. The no campaigns played on fears of globalisation, on slow growth and on high unemployment. These feelings found expression in hostility to the expansion of the union to take in low-wage countries to the east, and to plans for more liberalisation of energy markets and trade in services. Yet none of these was directly liaked to the constitution. Unlike the first two problems, the third was self-inflicted. This was the refusal of many governments to draw the clearest conclusion from the two noes: that the constitutional treaty was dead. Countries that had already ratified it were understandably loth to give it up. Much stranger has been the spectacle of six more countries solemnly ratifying the text even after last May. Luxembourg did it by referendum in July. The others put it through their parliaments. Finland is expected soon to become the 16th of the EU's 25 members to give it final approval: Any EU treaty has to be ratified by all members before it can come into force. Yet those who still want to press ahead with the constitution point to two previous experiences. In 1992 Denmark's voters turned down the Maastricht treaty; and in 2001 the Irish threw out the Nice treaty. After each rejection the treaty was slightly titivated, with vatious declarations
Ever since, Europe's leaders have been unsure what to do next. The immediate gloom was deepened by one of the EU's periodic budget squabbles, prompting Jean-Claude Juncker to declare that "Europe is not in crisis: it is in a deep crisis." As Luxembourg's prime minister, he spoke with authority: his country was then president of the European Council, the group of national leaders who together are the ultimate decision-makers in the EU. Discombobulated summiteers hurriedly agreed to a "pause for reflection". A year on, what has the pondering brought forth? There have been speeches galore, by such luminaries as Britain's Tony Blair, France's Jacques Chirac and, most recently, Germany's Angela Merkel. The European Commission, the EU's policyproposing executive, has produced not a plan B but a plan D (for democracy). Its president, Jose Manuel Barroso, has issued many papers. Belgium's prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, has even written a book. And yet, as EU foreign ministers meet to discuss the constitution this weekend, before a summit under the Austrian presidency, the answer to the question is: precious little. The summit will simply extend the pause for reflection for another year. After such a shock, it was perhaps inevitable that a year would not be enough. But three other problems have increased the EU's paralysis since last May. The first is a familiar lack of leadership, exacerbated by the electoral cycle. After a tight election in September, Ms Merkel replaced Gerhard SchrOder as German chancellor only last November. After an almost equally narrow win in April, Romano Prodi has only just become Italy's prime minister in place of Silvio Berlusconi.
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
or opt-outs added, after which the voters were asked to pronounce again-and then they said yes. It was also noted that the constitution itself envisaged that ratification might be difficult in some countries. A declaration attached to the text provided that if, within two years of the treaty's signature, four-fifths of the members had ratified it but some had not, the European Council should meet to consider what to do.
Carryon Regardless The implication of this declaration, some have argued, was that a rejection by one or two of the EU's members should not deter the others from proceeding. Only after every country had had its say would it be right to discuss the next steps. The unspoken assumption was that, if only one or two had jibbed at the text, some way would be found of getting them to vote again and say yes. To make that look more plausible after the no votes, it was also noted that elections were due in 2007 in both France and the Netherlands. Yet a moment's consideration shows that dreams of proceeding with the constitution are utterly unrealistic. It contains nothing that could be adjusted to give France or the Netherlands opt-outs. And, anyway, there is something undemocratic about asking electorates to endorse a text and, when they deliver a resounding no, asking them again. No French or Dutch leaders, now or in prospect, have floated the idea of putting the constitution to a fresh vote (though France's Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who presided over the constitutional convention, has suggested
% responding "yes", February-March 2006: Is your country's membership of the European Union a good thing? 020406080 The Netherlands Germany European Union (25) Ita~
France Britain
Are things in the European Union going in the right direction? o 10 20 30 40 50 The Netherlands Germany Britain Italy
it). Besides, six countries-Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Poland and the Czech Republic-have made clear that, after the French and Dutch votes, they have no plans to ratify the constitution. Most of these had promised referendums. One sensible thing that next month's summit could do is to agree to forget the present text. That would enable the summiteers to move on to the more fundamental questions that the constitution was supposed, but failed. to answer: how to restore the EU's purpose (and, just as desirable, its popularity), and what institutional changes this might require. What is wrong with Europe? The main answer is, as it has been for some years, the economy. Especially but not only in the core euro countries of Germany, France and Italy, growth has been sluggish, at best. In many countries unemployment seems both high and stuck. The morosity that underlay the French and Dutch noes was primarily about growth and jobs. Not surprisingly, the constitution, which was meant to be about the efficiency and organisation of the EU, offered little on the economy. The prime responsibility for getting economies growing again remains national, not European-a point that is obvious when you contrast the performance of Britain and Spain (average growth of 2.6% in 2001-05) with that of France, Germany and Italy (average annual growth of 0.9% in the same period). Some have blamed tight monetary and fiscal policy in the euro zone for holding back growth, but such euro-members as Spain, Ireland and Finland have done well. As it happens, growth in Europe has picked up in recent months, though a rising euro may slow it down again. The most urgent measures now needed are the further deregulation of labour markets, services, energy and so on. The obstacles to this liberalisation lie largely at national level, although the EU's Lisbon Agenda-the self-imposed measures needed to make Europe "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world" by 201O--can help to chivvy governments along. So long as the Lisbon Agenda lacks carrots or sticks, it will be up to governments to decide how far to pursue it, and how far to push refonn over resistance by unions and other lobbies. The task of the Brussels commission is to sustain whatever it controls that contributes to Europe's economic growth. This means, above all, safeguarding the single market and its competition rules. A nasty outbreak of economic nationalism struck· earlier this year, when several countries started to talk of fostering national energy champions and of protecting their biggest companies from foreign takeover. This must be beaten back. Indeed, much work is needed to bolster all the EU's four freedoms-of goods, services, movement of labour and of capital-each of which has been under attack this year. Once again, the constitution has little directly to do with this. But its demise might be used as an excuse to roll back the single market.
A Pause for Digestion
France Figure 1
Similarly, some politicians are using the constitution's troubles to question the EU's expansion to take in new members. At least some of those who voted no may have done so in protest
European Blues.
Source: Eurobarometer
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Article 25, A Venture at
at the recent and future enlargement of their club. The threat of the mythical Polish plumber played strongly in France. The prospect of Turkey joining was a factor in both France and the Netherlands. Indeed, it was partly because of this that Mr Chirac changed the French constitution to provide that any new entrant after Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia must be approved by a referendum in France. Austria has similarly promised a vote on Turkey, and other countries may yet follow suit. The expansion of the European club is widely touted as its biggest single success. The lure of membership has helped to entrench stability and democracy, first in the southern Mediterranean and now in central Europe. A similar pull is at work in Turkey and the western Balkans, and even as far afield as Ukraine and the Caucasus. Moreover, the economics of enlargement looks good. An exhaustive commission analysis recently concluded that the entry of new countries from central Europe in 2004 had raised economic growth and created jobs
a Standstill
have to be called to consider treaty changes, perhaps in late 2007, after the French elections. This gives heart to those who still insist on pursuing the constitution and nothing but the constitution. Even though that looks unrealistic, several governments, including (at least formally) Germany's, stick to it. So does Italy, under Mr Prodi, Luxembourg, Belgium, Spain and some members in central Europe. . A wide variety of ideas lie between the two extremes of no action and the full constitution. Most involve picking the best bits of the constitutional treaty and producing a shorter version, which might even be brought into force without approval by referendum. The trouble with that idea is that few EU members agree on which parts of the document to keep. Typically, big countries want to slim the commission, change the voting system and install a permanent presidency in place of the present six-monthly one. But small countries see most of these changes as steps backward: if they are to accept them, they want something in exchange, such as more majority voting and a stronger European Parliament. It was the need to balance such widely differing desires that led to such a cumbersome constitutional treaty in the first place. Several leaders have duly given warning against attempts to unpick the compromises that went into the document. Indeed, some countries are no longer willing to honour the concessions they made in the constitution. Poland, for instance, which in 2003 was, with Spain, a fierce opponent of a proposed new "double-majority" voting system, only to give way in the summer of 2004, noW says that it wants to stick to the system agreed on in the Nice treaty in 2000. Besides the practical and political difficulty of resurrecting bits of the treaty, there are two other objections. The first is the democratic one: the people have voted no, which makes it unattractive to bring in any change by the back door, especially if an avowed goal is to avoid consulting the people again. The second is that if, despite that, any new treaty ends up being put to the vote, its odds of passing are smalL Around a dozen national referendums have now been held on such EU issues as new treaties and whether to join the euro. As many as six have been lost. In an EU of 25, soon to be 27, in which half the members now choose to put significant constitutional changes to the vote, there is a risk that no treaty will ever be passed. If cherry-picking does not work, that leaves two other options. One is to put into effect changes that do not require any treaty amendment at alL These could include more openness in the EU's legislative procedures and a bigger role for national parliaments. Such changes could be made at once. The other is to pursue closer European integration within a smaller group. This idea of a hard core that might proceed without the foot-draggers has always appealed to some of the original six. Mr Verhofstadt has proposed basing it on the 12-strong euro group. Mr Chirac has spoken repeatedly of pioneer groups. TheEU is, indeed, turning into a variegated organisation, with clubs such as the members of the euro, a defence grouping, the Schengen passport-free area and the seven-country Priim group that is pursuing police exchanges and border co-operation. The
not only in the new members but also in existing ones. The EU should continue to welcome aspirant countries~ for its own benefit as much as for theirs. The alternative is distinctly unappealing. Analysts of the western Balkans agree that, if Brussels were to slam the door, these countries could easily slip back into nationalism, drug- and people-smuggling, organised crime and even war-with lots of undesirable consequences for western Europe. Similarly, a Turkey spurned by Europe could soon regress into a sour and militant Islamist mood, right on Europe's front line. So the question left by the failed constitution should not be: how can we resurrect it? It should be: what changes are needed to ensure that the EU continues to benefit from its single market, to help promote economic reform and to keep the club open to new members?
Pick and Choose Many different answers have been proffered during the pause for reflection. In some ways, the argument has turned into a new round in the long debate between "institutionalists", who would like a new institutional framework that then produced closer integration; and "incrementalists", who would prefer the club to develop organically, with institutional change coming later. In this second camp stand, in particular, the British, supported here by Mr Barroso, who thinks further discussion of the EU's institutions should be put off for now. They admit that the current set-up has unsatisfactory features-the six-monthly rotating presidency, a bizarre system of voting. a commission that is too big, a continued muddle over who is in charge of foreign policy. Despite all this, though, the EU is able to function. Yet it is hardly tenable to suggest that the EU's treaties need no changes at all. Under the Nice treaty, new voting weights and seats in the European Parliament must be fixed for Croatia or any country that joins after it. At that point, too, Nice scraps the rule that gives each country one commissioner in Brussels, though it does not offer a replacement. So some treaty amendment will be needed by 2009 or 2010, when Croatia is likely to join. For that reason a new inter-governmental conference may
137
ANNUAL EDITIONS
existing treaties allow uenhanced co-operation" to form such clubs-within-clubs. Yet the notion of a hard core seems unlikely to work. Any such group would have to include France, yet this is now one of the countries most hostile to the European project. As for the euro group, it is destined to expand to take in most central European countries in the next few years. When it has, say, 20 members, it will surely be too big to be a core. In short, almost any big institutional change is now fraught with difficulty. It is true that some treaty amendments will be necessary when Croatia and, later, others join. Perhaps then, to please the growing band of small countries, a commissioner
could after all be retained for each; and the votes in the council might then be reallocated to give a bit more weight to big members. But any such changes will probably have to be kept to a minimum. If such minor amendments went into the accession trea-
ties rather than a new constitutional treaty, ratification should become easier in most countries. And in one way, such an outcome would be refreshing: it would mean that, instead of the past decade of endless tinkering with new treaties and constitutions, the European Union would have to concentrate on delivering benefits to its members. Now that's a prospect to reflect on.
From The Ecollomist, May 27, 2006, pp. 21-23. Copyright © 2006 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economist.com
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Article 26
Shadows at Europe's Heart The ex-communist countries have been an economic success-but risk becoming political failures any countries would love to have the problems of the ED-8, the eight once-captive nations that joined the European Dnion in 2004. Sheltered by NATO and locked into the legal architecture of civilised Europe, they are flourishing in a way that seemed hardly possible when they leapt to freedom in 1989. Their economic growth is enviable: Estonia's is a breakneck 12%. But a more disturbing picture, of livid discontent, declining competitiveness, sleaze and subversion, is lately more prominent. That overshadows not just the fate of the 73m-odd people in the ED-8, and the 30m in Romania and Bulgaria who will join the ED at the year's end. It could dash, disastrously, the ED's already flagging enthusiasm for expansion. It is tempting to ignore post-communist politics. The countries are mostly small, the names of the politicians as unfamiliar to the outside eye as the differences between their parties. Sides switch, and coats are tumed, with bewildering rapidity. Is the ruling People's Party, re-elected in October 8th's election in Latvia, rightwing or leftwing compared with the New Era, which may join it in coalition? Why is the party led by King Simeon of Bulgaria in coalition with the (not very) ex-communists, whose forebears exiled him and murdered his followers? Which Kaczynski twin is president of Poland? Is it the less batty one who is prime minister? Without a patient guide and a large glass of plum brandy, it all seems too intricate and unimportant. So here is one striking fact. Not a single country of the ED-8 has a strong refonnist government. Minority or caretaker govemments run the Czech Republic, Poland and Lithuania. Estonia and Slovenia have administrations that are stable but do little. In Slovakia, a new coalition government unites the sleaziest and nastiest parties in the country. Hungary's govemment is wobbling after the prime minister admitted systematic lying. In the past three months, the politics of central Europe have tumed turbulent. The biggest failure has been in Poland, the most important ex-communist country in the ED. The main governing party, Law and Justice, has ruled for 11 months in a series of shaky coalitions. It is quarrelsome at home and abroad. Its two leading figures, the twins Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, are respectively president and prime minister. They have repeatedly insulted Germany-which did more than any other country to get the ED to overlook Poland's manifest political and economic weaknesses in the run-up to membership. Now phone calls are not
M
returned, meetings cancelled, cheap historical jibes commonplace. On the flimsiest evidence, Poland's rulers seem determined to believe that Germany is revanchist and hostile. Sticking up for national self-interest is no crime. Like any other member state, Poland has every right to haggle with the ED. But the tone is amateurish and counterproductive. The fonner president, the ex-communist Alexander Kwasniewski, made Poland a trusted Western ally and sounding board, notably in Ukraine. The Kaczynskis sneered, with some justice, at his communist past, glitzy lifestyle and chummy ties with businessmen of all descriptions. But they have tumed the diplomatic powerhouse they inherited into a laughing-stock. There have been unnecessary fights at home too, chiefly with the central bank. Its governor, the peppery Leszek Balcerowicz, may be no loss to diplomacy, but he epitomises the radical economic reform and financial stringency that lies behind Poland's hearty economic growth. Law and Justice is also mystifyingly estranged from its potential coalition allies, the liberal-conservative Civic Platform. No political differences divide them, only a series of petty feuds that should have long ago been buried in pursuit of power. Dnsurprisingly, the government's record is rather thin. It has set up a large and perhaps overmighty anti-corruption unit. Much energy has gone on reform of the military-intelligence service, the WSI, which was certainly a rum outfit. But for many Poles, the issue pales in contrast to other problems. Signally, the government has failed in the fiddly but vital task of applying for and administering the €60 billion ($75 billion) that Poland is due to receive from the ED from 2007 to 2013. That money--
run countries, Estonia and Slovenia, have learned what to do. The Kaczynskis' one real advantage was a reputation for integrity. Like many ex-dissidents in power, they made up in honesty and patriotism what they lacked in political savvy or experience. But a new scandal has dented that. Covertly recorded videos showed their party's representatives trying to win over a deputy from the Self-Defence party. "You want a senior position? We've got lots/' says a prime ministerial envoy. He also offers to "sort out" the deputy's legal problems.
139
ANNUAL EDITIONS
Jaroslaw Kaczynski is again trying to put a new coalition together. Early elections are still possible. It is hard to see any strong and sensible goveroment emerging.
The Wages of Lies In Hungary, the government has also. seen its credibility collapsing-though it arguably had less to start with. Whereas Poland's politics are buffered by strong growth and fairly sound finances, Hungary's are aggravated by the consequences of five years of spendthrift rule. The prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, was caught on tape telling party colleagues that his government, re-elected in June this year, had lied, screwed up and done nothing. That led to an eruption of public anger, and big losses in local elections this month. Mr Gyurcsany hung on-but this weekend another tape leaked, on which his local government minister, Monika Lamperth, can be heard assuring party chieftains that planned spending cuts will spare Socialist-controlled regions. The opposition, led by the mercurial and opportunistic Viktor Orban, is little better. Its election campaign was as nonsensical and populist as the slippery ex-communists it affects to despise. Mr Orban and his colleagues seem to have a worryingly soft spot for the racists and ultra-nationalists who took part, sometimes violently. in last month's demonstrations. Yet Hungary is crying out for good government. Once the reform star of the post-communist world, it is awash with debt,
% _GDP growth'
0
_
Unemploymentt
5
10
Estonia
168.31
Latvia
mIl
Lithuania
156.71
Czech Republic
177.91
Slovakia
159.51
Poland
152.31
Slovenia
IS3.61
Hungary
I63.S I
EU25
l1QQJ
with a government deficit now revealed to be over 10% of GDP-by far the highest in Europe, and more than twice what the government was admitting at the time of the election. Amid the smell of cooked books, foreign investors' confidence has shrivelled. A run on the Hungarian currency, the forint, would mean default and devaluation: a national humiliation, and a disaster for the millions of Hungarians who have borrowed euros and Swiss francs to pay for houses and consumer durables. The story is little better in the Czech Republic, where an election in June produced a result tied between a conservativegreen coalition and the leftist opposition. That has brought four months of political deadlock. A right-of-centre caretaker government failed to gain a confidence vote last week, starting a new round of bickering and armtwisting. Tomas Lebeda, a political scientist in Prague, says this may go on for a year. Meanwhile no one is even thinking about refonns to the country's creaking pension system. Next year's budget may not be passed on time. The squabbling takes place against a background of worrying misuse of the security and intelligence services for political advantage. Just days before the general election in June, Colonel Jan Kubice, a senior crime-fighter, presented to a (supposedly) closed session of parliament a report claiming that members of the governing Social Democrat party had been interfering in investigations of organised crime. It also contained gossipy accounts of alleged sexual misdeeds. This leaked to the press, apparently thanks to conservative deputies. Wiretaps in a subsequent leak investigation have prompted even fiercer rows. All that seems benign compared with next-door Slovakia, where a majority government of racists, populists and authoritarians is beginning to undo the work of the past eight years. Under the rule of the authoritarian populist, Vladimir Meciar, Slovakia had become a playground for crooks and spooks. The government that ousted him in 1998 flattened tax rates, liberalised the labour market, and won billions of dollars of foreign investment. Elections in June produced an ambiguous result. A reformist coalition was possible, but instead the largest party, Smer, a populist outfit calling itself social democrat, teamed up with Mr Meciar's party and the outright racists of the Slovak National Party. On paper, the government seems committed to free-market policies. In practice, it sounds muddled-and clumsy. At a foreign investors' conference there last month, a senior government figure, Peter Ziga, addressed a roomful of bewildered foreign executives in Slovak, without translation. Worse, public institutions are again being politicised. There are some slivers of good news. Lithuania's minority government is proving tough-minded and competent. In the presidential election in Estonia, the electoral college, by a perilous single vote, chose Toomas Hendrik !lves, a brainy and eloquent American-educated emign" over a candidate backed by an unscrupulous populist party closely tied to Russia.
'2006 02, percentage change to same quarter of the previous year t August 2006 tEU25 ; 100
Voting with Their Feet
Source: EUrastat national sources
If post-communist countries cannot raise living standards to western levels, and improve radically the quality of their public
Figure 1 Eastern Tigers.
140
J
Article 26. Shadows at Europe's Heart
services, more people will vote with their feet. Since barriers to movement within Europe were largely lifted in 2004, more than 2m have headed west. Most don't want to emigrate permanently. But almost all complain that as workers and as citizens, they feel poorly treated at home, ill-paid, and frustrated by economies where connections matter more than talent. For all the strides made in past years, the sad truth is that no ex-communist country has fully reformed its public administration. Voters may be richer, but they also feel cheated and put upon by bossy bureaucrats and snooty politicians. The optimism of 1989 seems sadly distant. The danger now is that even the bravura economic performance of the past few years may fizzle. Russia and Ukraine offer great supplies of cheap labour, not much farther away. Romania and Bulgaria make the EU-8100k expensive. Emigration tightens the labour market still more. So brainpower in the service industries, rather than cheap, nimble fingers in manufacturing, should be the new wellspring of wealth-creation. But education systems are rigid and rife with cheating. Most universities are disgracefully old-fashioned and introverted, run by self-interested bureaucracies, mediocre to their roots. Research and development spending is under 1% of GDP-worse even than the puny 2% average of western Europe. If competitiveness is one worry, financial stability is another. The World Bank said recently that fragmented and populist governments were not only hampering reform but "complicating
fiscal and macroeconomic stabilisation". Bloated public administration makes most ex-communist governments chronically spendthrift. So far, booming tax revenues disguise the problem; that could change all too quickly. None of the seven ex-communist states outside the euro (Slovenia squeaked in and will adopt it on January 1st) is likely to join this decade. Yet small open economies cannot have an independent monetary policy (indeed, several have currency boards) and are vulnerable to external shocks and speculative attacks. Discontent and populism may now form a vicious circle, both causing economic failure and worsening it. Ivan Krastev, a Sofia-based political scientist, believes that a political model based on clear ideological differences, mass memberships and strong party loyalties may have once worked well in "old Europe" but has signally failed to transplant to "new Europe". The gulf between the political elites and the people is growing, and it is hard to see what will bridge it. If global financial markets tighten, the extraordinary willingness of foreign savers to finance the consumers and bureaucrats of post-communist Europe could shrivel almost overnight. That vulnerability is now matched, dangerously, by unlova~ility. Western countries might be prepared to bail out their eastern neighbours, financially or politically, when they are seen as valiant, fast-reforming success stories. When run by incompetent and prickly populists, it may prove to be another story altogether.
From The Economist, October 12,2006, pp. 56-58. Copyright © 2006 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economist.com
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Article 27
Russia's Ersatz Democracy "What will it take for Russia's political class and society to realize that the current paradigm of development leads to a dead end?" LILIA SHEVTSOVA
ussia's political evolution has entered a strange stage. The ruling elite is trying to use popular elections to legitimize a regime that is based on personified power and bureaucratic authority. It is trying to buttress the social order by restoring Russia's great power status while invoking nostalgia for a past that the elite itself rejects and fears. In all of these endeavors, Russia's leaders are experimenting with a model of national transformation that attempts a unique fusion of conflicting elements: of tradition and postmodernity; of autocracy and democracy; of the market and state control; of partnership with the West and a rejection of Western values. This experiment will not work. The hybrid is not sustainable. And yet, in part because high energy prices continue to prop up the regime, because an effective opposition has yet to emerge, and because the Kremlin seems determined to avoid a succession crisis, a kind of stagnant stability likely will persist beyond the 2008 presidential election. Apparently, Russia will have to pass through a period of disenchantment-and it must realize the impossibility of existing simultaneously in several different civilizational dimensions-before it can begin the search for a more effective system of social
reducing its risks to a minimum. In short, by abandoning certain aspects ofYeltsin's legacy, Putin was able to strengthen its core. Today, in the middle of Putin's second term, the system of governance has acquired a new logic. Its main operating principles are: the subjugation of all branches of government to the executive; the merger of political power and corporate ownership; the combination and incorporation of incompatible governing principles, thus preventing the formation of political alternatives to the regime; consensus among the political class and a portion of society on the need to maintain the status quo; political expediency as the driving force behind the regime's actions; and aspirations to great power status as a substitute for ideology. The Russian ruling elite has also managed to develop effective survival mechanisms. Unlike its predecessors, the present regime has avoided the widespread use of force, tending instead toward a patron-client relationship with society and a reliance on purchasing the loyalty of the political class with specific concessions and rewards. An example is the Public Chamber, which includes representatives of various social groups and wellknown personalities picked by the president and his administration. Touted as a kind of civil-society sounding board, it was in fact created to broaden support for the regime by cultivating a spirit of servility among the elite. It shows that the system of purchased loyalty is becoming institutionalized. Meanwhile, by co-opting advocates of great power statusliberals and populists alike-the regime has preempted a meaningful opposition from arising on either the left or the right. Thus, the Kremlin has deterred the formation of a robust liberalism by retaining liberal icons like Anatoly Chubais, German Gref, and Alexei Kudrin in positions of power. Yet the regime's appropriation of patriotic slogans neutralizes the conservative, nationalist opposition. Loyal youth organizations such as Nashi and Mestnye occupy a niche that might otherwise be filled by a grass-roots youth movement.
R
management.
The Hybrid Regime Russia's second president, Vladimir Putin, has finished construction of the postcommunist hybrid system begun by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. The regime that has taken shape in Russia, like most hybrid regimes, fits into the category of pseudodemocracy. The building blocks of Russia's system are a bureaucratic-authoritarian political regime, state capitalism, selective social paternalism, and a foreign policy aimed at restoring Russia's role as a world power. . In order to stabilize the situation and shore up the position of the ruling elite, Putin instituted several changes on entering office. He reformatted the political regime, weakening the influence of the oligarchs (the businessmen who amassed vast wealth from the privatization of state assets in the 1990s). He initiated a redistribution of assets to the bureaucracy. He increased the assertiveness of Russia's foreign policy. And he retained the electoral mechanism for legitimizing personified power while
The Bureaucrats in Charge One might conclude that the concentration of power in the hands of the president is movement in the direction of authoritarianism. In fact. we are witnessing the expansion of the state
142
Article 27. Russia's Ersatz Democracy
bureaucratic corporation, which has assumed certain powers
The Russian Backlash
that the president formally, but no longer really, controls. As
In its efforts to maintain control of society, Russia's elite until recently was torn between neo-imperialism (taking its cues
a result, the institution of personified power has become an ideal mechanism to realize the interests of the bureaucracy. In this context it makes no sense to ask who is in charge in the Kremlin or who is more influential-Putin or his inner circle.
from US hegemonism) and nationalism. Today a portion of the ruling class is turning increasingly to the so-called Russian national idea: adopting nationalist and populist slogans and an
While it is true that only the leader can legitimize government
anti-Western stance. Thus, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, one
decisions in a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime, the leader is
of the candidates for Putin's heir, has offered the formula of a
also dependent on the bureaucracy, and this dependence only
"triad of Russian national values," describing them as a "sover-
increases over time.
eign democracy, strong economy, and military might." Another portion of the elite advocates Russia's great power status to justify the country's role as an "energy superpower" and a fullfledged member of the club of developed industrial countries.
Conventional wisdom has it that Russia is ruled by the socalled siloviki-former officials of the intelligence and military agencies. In fact, Putin has prevented the siloviki from gaining
a monopoly on power or the reproduction of power. In so doing, the president has preserved a measure of pluralism within the
This mixture of great power ambitions (containing traces of
ruling elite. (Putin's efforts to maintain a balance among various
impulses, but these impulses have now ground to a halt. Today,
imperial nostalgia) with nationalism could imperil the mental health of a nation that has scarcely begun to recover from the shock caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Weimar Germany the attempt to boost the nation's self-esteem by reviving old superpower dreams ended with a worldwide catastrophe. The pragmatism of a major part of the Russian elite might allow Russia to escape a disastrous repetition of this history. But the conflict between artificially provoked aspirations and a lack of resources to achieve them could trigger new shocks for a nation that seeks its revival by turning to the past. It would be a mistake, nevertheless, to regard the restoration
the liberal-technocratic element in the bureaucracy strives no
of traditionalism as a return to the Soviet party-state. Russia
factions in the Kremlin help to explain the unexpected removal in June 2006 of Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, who represented a powerful group of siloviki.) Still, there is little reason to hope that this pluralism can stimulate a spirit of competition or expand mass participation like that seen in the 1960s and 1970s in other hybrid societies in Latin America and South Europe that chose a gradualist path to democracy. In the Yeltsin years and early in Putin's first term, the rul-
ing bureaucratic corporation showed clear signs of refonnist
today is a bureaucratic state, in which the dominant party, United
less than the siloviki to preserve the status quo.
Indeed, it comes as no surprise that those who have secured
Russia, is an appendage of the executive branch. Even when
a place in the halls of power should now concentrate on defending their position. This is a natural symptom of the postrevolutionary syndrome-one that also affects the opposition.
cannot compel the executive to honor his responsibility to the
the government and the president are drawn from it, the party
its continued presence stifles the emergence of fresh political
party; nor is the party compelled to honor its responsibility to its members. The regime is obliged to play at party politics for one reason only: to conceal the essence of bureaucratic authoritarianism. The regime is not prepared to emasculate itself by
alternatives. Any real opposition can form only as a challenge to the current political system. Such a challenge could easily
between itself and society.
attract support in a severe crisis, since bureaucratic authoritarianism is still in the process of consolidation. But the crisis has yet to occur.
that hews to no firm principles, taking instead a utilitarian approach to ideology. The Soviet state was a complex edifice
The current opposition is becoming a defensive, conservative force. It cannot move beyond its own stale political ideas, yet
allowing United Russia to assume the role of an intetmediary We are witnessing rather the formation of a pragmatic state
built on the ideas of communism and messianism. Today, the
Inevitably, the state's role in the economy expands as power is centralized. Under Putin, this principle has been proved by the emergence of a new layer of apparatchik oligarchs that controls assets without owning or bearing any responsibility for
state actually is less stable because it depends entirely on the leader and the ruling caste without any backup. The state and
the system itself are in essence intermediary. They are the means of survival for a regime and a society that do not want to return
them-in effect, a parasitic rentier class. A common thread running through recent mega-acquisitions by Russian energy companies has been the influence of officials who serve in
to the past, but are not prepared to break with it entirely. Was a Russian backlash-a slide toward traditionalisminevitable? And what role did Putin play in it? In my view, the present backsliding is a logical consequence of the country's evolution in the 1990s: the liquidation of the Soviet Union by nondemocratic means (essentially a conspiracy of three leaders-Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, and Stanislav Shushkevich) in 1991; the storming of parliament in 1993; and the rigging of the 1996 presidential election, when voters elected an ailing, incapacitated Yeltsin to a second term. The refusal of the political class, including the democrats, to play by the rules of democracy in the 1990s made the centralization of power
high positions in both the Kremlin and the energy firms. As demonstrated by Rosneft's takeover of Yuganskneftegaz and Gazprom's acquisition of Sibneft, the fusion of power and busi-
ness in Russia erases the line between nationalization and privatization: regardless of who happens to own a particular asset, the bureaucrat-oligarch controls it. Since the logic of national-
ization requires the redistribution of resources to the advantage of the ruling bureaucracy, we can expect the state in the future to
continue taking over private companies and re-privatizing them according to the whims of the next ruling team. 143
ANNUAL EDITIONS
undertaken by Putin practically inevitable. Putin merely set in motion the machinery that Yeltsin had created.
State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov; or some totally unknown or unexpected figure-is far less important than the question of whether or not the Kremlin will manage to reach a consensus on the choice, as well as on the succession procedure itself. There is reason to assume that a succession battle will be avoided, because ev.eryone understands the risks, and the political class has no tolerance for risks. Although the Russian people are disenchanted with politics, it is highly unlikely that voters will reject the Kremlin's appointee for fear of ending up with someone even worse.
Potemkin Politics There is hardly any doubt that the Russian system will survive the 2007-2008 election cycle, complete the current redistribution of resources to the bureaucracy, and keep society under control. The system is for now durable and could even expand. The Kremlin has no cause for concern about its position as long as two conditions remain in place: high oil prices and the lack of a political alternative to the ruling team. The regime can continue working to maintain the status quo, taking advantage not of society's hopefulness. as was the case early in Putin's first term, but of its hopelessness. To be sure, the pursuit of stability will require further adjustments in policy, but it likely will be enough to exploit the possibilities of Potemkin politics.
The Crisis Ahead Does all this mean that there is a future for the Russian hybrid system, and that it is capable of responding to the challenges facing the country? No. The political order contains four sources of structural conflict, all of which threaten to tear it apart from within. The first source is the tension between personified power and the need to hold elections. The regime attempts to eliminate this tension by manipulating the electoral process to guarantee election results. The techniques are various: electoral laws and official harassment that prevent real opposition from appearing on the ballot, intimidation of businesses to deter them from sponsoring opposition, state control of national television channels and their conversion into a propaganda machine for the regime's candidates. These techniques are working for now, but similar manipulations have led to revolutions in former Soviet republics. The second source of structural conflict is the regime's attempt to ensure stability while simultaneously redistributing resources-that is, expanding the state in the economic arena by squeezing out the 1990s oligarchs in favor of Kremlin loyalists and bureaucrat-oligarchs who are granted control over major corporations. However much loyalty this trend may build among the new ruling elite, it destabilizes markets, deters private initiative, and destroys the institution of ownership. The third source of tension in the system is the logic of political self-preservation. This demands regular "purges," whereby each successive leader is obliged to break abruptly with his predecessor to create his own political base and avoid responsibility for past failures. Even if the most loyal heir to the current ruling elite becomes president, at some point he will have to identify those responsible (guilty?) for failures to reform pensions, government administration, the military, housing and utilities, and local government-all reforms that Putin announced but then placed on the back burner. If a successor fails to change the furniture, he will be looked on as a weakling and a puppet. Either way, the risk of instability will increase. The fourth threat to the current order is the destruction of political pluralism. This creates the risk that society at some point will turn against the system or will try to circumvent it in pursuit of its own interests, leading to a radicalization of social protest. One should also keep in mind that the conditions that promote stability today could do the opposite in the future. Consider oil revenues. Russia has already endured two political upheavals as a result of declining oil prices on world markets. A price
Russia's system cannot adequately respond to the challenges the country faces in searching for a sustainable political order. A number of factors facilitate a stagnant type of stability in Russia. The price of oil provides the regime with a crucial safety net. The economy continues to grow, contributing to the positive mood of a portion of society. The people are disenchanted with the opposition on both the right and the left, and they will withhold their support until new opposition leaders begin to appear, but they are still too weary from previous upheavals to take to the streets. The current regime is busy appropriating the ideas of its various opponents, thereby discrediting them. The regime is also relatively humane, in that it allows those who disagree with it to survive. Finally, the Kremlin's political operatives have managed to manipulate public consciousness and the political scene, making it nearly impossible for a real political movement to emerge and creating the impression there is no alternative to the regime. The Russian hybrid system excludes competition and uncertainty in the formation and execution of power, and it attempts to imitate or control any remnants of spontaneity. The sort of power struggles we saw in Ukraine could only occur in Russia if four developments were to emerge: popular discontent, a rift in the political class, an active youth movement, and independent television stations. But the Kremlin has studied the crises in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan and taken measures to guard against the contagion of the "orange virus." One cannot entirely exclude the possibility of Putin's staying in office beyond his presidential term, perhaps in response to a national emergency. But both he and other pragmatists in the elite seem determined to avoid that prospect. The most likely succession scenario is a transfer of power to the Kremlin's designated heir. Who this will be in the end-presidential chief of staff and Gazprom chairman Dmitry Medvedev; Defense Minister Ivanov; someone promoted from the reserves, such as 144
Article 27. Russia's Ersatz Democracy collapse in 1986 helped trigger the disintegration of the Soviet Union five years later. An oil price collapse in 1998, together with a financial meltdown, caused a breakdown in the Russian economy. It would be na'ive to assume that China's and India's demand for energy, combined with conflict in Iraq and in the Middle East generalJy, will keep oil prices high and guarantee economic and social stability in Russia indefinitely.
and another infrastructure breakdown similar to the blackout in Moscow last year. Such an accumulation of events could spur even the most patient society to radical action. Indeed, how certain can we be of continued stability when just 34 percent of respondents in a recent polJ said that Russia was on the right track, while 47 percent held the opposite view? When half of all Russians describe the situation in the country as tense (another 9 percent say it is explosive), and just 28 percent describe it as calm? When, of the 76 percent of Russians who approve of Putin's job performance, 49 percent say that he has failed to establish order in the country, 57 percent say his economic policy has not been successful, and 50 percent believe that he has failed in the government's conflict with Chechen separatists? The tensions in Russian society that result from the lack of an influential liberal-democratic party, and the fact that liberal democracy itself is associated in Russia with a declining standard of living, could fuel the rise of nationalism. This fear plays into the hands of those in the Kremlin who warn that the current regime is a model of civilized governance compared to the sort of regime that might replace it. But it was the current regime that established the logic of returning to the past (traditionalism)-a past that the regime itself fears, and in the context of which Putin appears to be the only European in the ruling elite. The further this logic develops, the greater the threat that the next battle for power in Russia will be fought in the name of nationalism, isolationism, or popUlism, as the Kremlin itself has warned.
Conventional wisdom has it that Russia is ruled by the so-called siloviki-former officials of the intelligence and military agencies. In fact, Putin has prevented the siloviki from gaining a monopoly on power. ""',\i'<:r;.,..-c.<'.":,;(' ,;,';],~: ,-,'"":,;.,-,,
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One should be mindful, too, of the law of unintended consequences, evident for example in Russian-Ukrainian relations.
Moscow's actions in Ukraine have twice contributed to the very results it was trying to forestalJ. In 2004, the Kremlin's aggressive backing of Viktor Yanukovich for the presidency helped propel his opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, to power. A year later, Moscow's dispute with Ukraine over natural gas supplies not only strengthened the anti-Russian mood in Ukraine-it also
undennined Putin's dream of turning Russia into an energy superpower that the West accepts as a responsible partner with legitimate ambitions and a right to set out its own rules of the game. Alarmed by Russia's ultimatums over natural gas, Europe has begun more aggressively to seek alternative sources of energy, including nuclear power, as we have already seen in Finland and wiJIlikely see in France, too. The law of unintended consequences affects the domestic arena as much as it does foreign policy. In particular, the more the Kremlin wants to stabilize the situation by centralizing power, the more it ultimately undermines itself. One of the primary sources of stability in any society is a political opposition that is built into the system. When the opposition is excluded from the political process, that process always becomes unpredictable. The Russian people understand this: a recent poll showed that 61 percent of Russians think the country needs a genuine opposition, while just 25 percent oppose the idea. Forty-seven percent of Russians say the country has no genuine opposition at present, and just 30 percent say that it has. The people are looking for influential alternatives to the current regime. Protest acts recently staged by Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Party are the first indication of a period of nonsystemic politics born from groups of young people dissatisfied with the current order. Although the Kremlin appears to have done everything in its power to ensure a smooth succession in 2008, it would be senseless to speculate about the extent to which the ruling team wiJI maintain stability in a closed system that has begun to serve only itself. At present, Russia's situation appears to be secure. But consider the following combination of events: housing reform that includes a substantial hike in rents and utilities, a rise in energy prices, gridlock in major cities, nonpayment of wages to government employees in the regions, student unrest,
Russia and the West Russia's return to a conservative, defensive vector has had a clear impact on its foreign policy. The regime no longer talks about integration with the West, and instead positions Russia as both its partner and its rival. This partner-rival relationship means that Russia wiJI cooperate with the West to tackle a range of international issues, even as it combats Western influence both at home and in what Moscow considers its sphere of influence. Russia's growing assertiveness in the former Soviet republics; its decision to become the defender of Iran and Syria in their relations with the West; its friendly overtures toward the militant Palestinian group Hamas; its difference of opinion with the West on how to deal with Iran's nuclear program; and its sale of anns to countries that are in conflict with the United States (Venezuela, for example)-all of these demonstrate the Russian elite's attempt to restore Russia's role as a geopolitical force and a check on Western ambitions. Some analysts have even spoken of Russia's intention to reestablish itself as an independent geopolitical pole.
The Kremlin has no cause for concern about its position as long as two conditions remain in place: high oil prices and the lack of a political alternative to the ruling team. 145
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At least four factors complicate attempts to make Russia into a consistent partner with the West. First, the Russian political class is not prepared to accept US hegemonism, which would relegate Russia to the role of junior partner. Second, Russia strives to dominate the former Soviet republics. This is only natural when one considers that this is part of Russia's identity. Third, Moscow has resorted increasingly to anti-Westemism, and especially anti-Americanism, in domestic politics. And fourth, Russia rejects the European plan for integration, instead stressing territory, might, and sovereignty. It regards the turn toward Europe by several former Soviet republics-now members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)-as a threat to Russia's interests. It does not follow, however, that Russia has adopted a hostile stance toward the West and is ready for a confrontation with Western civilization. The truth is far more complicated. The ambiguity of the Russian hybrid system is reflected in its simul. taneous movement in several directions, both in its domestic policies and on the world stage. The Russian elite talks tough in its dealings with the West, but it seeks to avoid conflicts that would compromise its own interests as well as the integration of the elite-both on an individual basis and as a group--into Western society. The ruling elite also understands that its dream of turning Russia into an energy superpower is impossible without the cooperation of the West, and even a certain attachment to it. The elite dreams of expanding into Western markets and entering Western redistribution networks. It recognizes that, in order to guarantee its role as energy supplier, Russia will need constructive relations with energy buyers. Russia also will need Western technology and investment to explore oil and gas fields in the Siberian and Arctic hinterlands and to build and repair pipeline infrastructure. Russia's attempts to improve its image in the West, and its presidency of the Group of Eight (G-8), demonstrate the Kremlin team's efforts to become a full-fledged member of the elite club of leading Western industrialized countries. Yet Moscow intends to participate in this club on its own terms. It reserves the right to disagree with the West and even to oppose it on issues that affect its vital interests. And disagreement with the West becomes an important instrument for Russian elite consolidation and revival of its spirits. The Russian political class no longer stops to think how absurd its actions appear at times. If Moscow has drawn up a "road map" for developing closer ties with Europe, why should it regard Ukraine's turn toward Europe as a hostile act? Russia holds the presidency of the G-8, so why in the world does it accuse the West of threatening Russia's territorial integrity? If the United States is Russia's partner in a coalition against Islamic terrorism, why does Moscow insist that Washington pull out of Central Asia? The list of such contradictions goes on and on. Indeed, while the friend-foe strategy that defines Russia's relations with the West seems useful for achieving the regime's current goals, it also indicates that the regime is incapable of formulating a long-term plan and vision. The current strategy is
economically disadvantageous in that it obliges Russia to spend its limited resources to restrain the West in the security sphere, while at the same time it willingly becomes a raw materials warehouse for the West. These contradictory policies can only aggravate the schizophrenic split in the political consciousness of the Russian elite between nationalist and Western leanings. Sooner or later, the elite will have to resolve these contradictions and settle on a single coherent program for the country's development and foreign interactions.
Agreeing to Disagree Russia's CIS policy-intervention in Ukraine's political battles, support for the regime of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, the economic blockade of Moldova, the alliance with Uzbek President Islam Karimov, and the attempt to prevent Georgia from becoming a stronger state-makes it clear that Moscow continues to regard these countries as within the sphere of its domestic concerns. The Kremlin sees its influence on the former Soviet republics as an instrument for strengthening the Russian state. Whenever the West cultivates relations with one of the new independent states without going through Russia, it contributes to the political elite's sense of Russia as a "fortress under siege." Russia must position itself anew, however, because the CIS as an organization seems bound to collapse now that Ukraine has begun to turn toward the West. Russia's transition to charging its neighbors market prices for its products, although aggressive, could prove beneficial in the future. It could force the Russian elite to consider the consequences of its sticksand-carrots policy with regard to the new independent states, as well as spur these states to modernize their economies in the absence of Russian subsidies. Before Russia embraces pragmatism, however, it may well attempt to unite neighboring nondemocratic regimes around itself, which could only complicate its relations with the West. Ironically, the more 'Moscow supports corrupt leaders and foundering regimes in these countries in an attempt to draw them in, the more it gives rise to anti-Russian sentiment in them. Despite the obvious cooling of relations between Russia and Europe, the two have reached agreement on at least one important issue: they agree to disagree while maintaining the semblance of partnership. This suggests that neither side wishes the distance between them to become unbridgeable. Russia has little affection for the European Union, but it has developed healthy bilateral relations with individual EU member states. Russia's relationship with Germany remains crucial, especiany for the Kremlin's ambitions in the energy sector, and Gernaan Chancellor Angela Merkel holds the key to Russia's partnership with Europe. Russia may try to avoid open conflict with the EU, but it has problems with the so-called New Europe. The most obvious source of friction is with Poland, which has attempted to play the role of missionary to Ukraine and Belams. Brussels regards Poland's diplomatic maneuvering with caution, while Washington bolsters Warsaw's self-confidence. The Kremlin
146
Article 27. Russia's Ersatz Democracy has met Poland's efforts to promote democracy on Russia's borders with outrage, as reflected by the anti-Polish hysteria during the summer of 2005, which included assaults on several Polish citizens in Moscow. If Russia is serious about maintaining a good working relationship with Europe, however, sooner or later the Kremlin will have to accept that the road to Brussels will lead not only through Berlin and Paris, but also through Warsaw and other capitals of the old Warsaw Pact nations. If Moscow's relations with Europe have cooled, its relations with Washington are downright cold. The polite smiles of the two countries' leaders hardly make up for growing mutual suspicion and differences of opinion even on the issues that once brought the two sides together: international terrorism, nuclear nonproliferation, and energy security. Washington has been caught unawares by Moscow's aggressive stance, and by all accounts the White House is struggling to chart a new course in its relations with Russia. Washington does not want to legitimize Moscow's growing ambitions, but it also appreciates the need to cooperate with Russia to address pressing global problems. For its part, the Russian elite is trying to combine the incompatible, just as it does in its domestic policy. The Kremlin makes a point of opposing the White House's initiatives while seeking US legitimization of its chosen model of development, particularly its ambition to become an energy superpower. In general, the Russian political class continues to see the world through the prism of Russian-US relations, which it regards as the guarantor of its status in the world community.
the same token could lose control over the consequences of the growing distance between Russia and the West. Moscow, meanwhile, has fostered the illusion that its vast energy reserves will allow it to play the role of spoiler. It is inevitable, however, that the ruling class eventually will realize that power based on raw materials is itself an illusion. We must also not lose sight of the fact that the fear of appearing unpatriotic has trapped all of Russia's political forces, including the liberals. So long as Russia tries to achieve political and social consolidation through a return to the idea of great power status, its ambition itself will continue to reproduce a traditional regime and traditional phobias, myths, and illusions. There is a positive element in all this: the mood of Russian society. Seventy-three percent of Russians think that the country should cultivate a mutually beneficial relationship with the West, while just 16 percent think Russia should distance itself. Fiftythree percent have a good opinion of the United States (against 34 percent who have a negative opinion), and 67 percent have a good opinion of the EU. If Russian society can avoid plunging into nationalism, the country may just manage to break out of this closed circle. But for that to happen, the political class must recognize that clinging to the past is suicide.
The law of Failures There are currently no viable alternatives to the Russian hybrid system. But the system is patently incapable of resolving domestic conflicts, and it contains no impUlse to modernize. In this respect it is similar to the Chinese system, which, as Carnegie Endowment scholar Minxin Pei put it, is "stagnating in its trapped transition." Russia's system cannot adequately respond to the challenges the country faces in searching for a sustainable political order. These challenges include the need to find a replacement for the militarist approach to modernization; a means of renouncing the leading role of the state in favor of individual rights and freedoms; and a way to foster the formation of a ruling class that is capable of rising above its own corporate interests. For the foreseeable future, Russia apparently will operate according to the "law of failures." According to this law, when a society has no structured political alternative, it must continue down its present path until it reaches the logical dead end. Only then can it begin to see a more constructive strategy for development. What will it take for Russia's political class and society to realize that the current paradigm of development leads to a dead end? Systemic crisis and collapse of the sort that brought down the Soviet Union? Even in this case, there is no guarantee that Russia would embrace true liberal democracy, because the current ersatz democracy has not begun to foster political competition. On the contrary, the current system is more likely to create disenchantment with democratic institutions, spurring the country to seek alternative outlets that may mean an even tougher authoritarian regime. Another risk is that stagnation will allow rot to set in, because it robs people of the impulse to change things for the better.
Clinging to Illusions The Kremlin has made no secret over the past two years of its desire to drive the United States out of the post-Soviet space, a policy that could be described as the Russian version of the Monroe Doctrine. In attempting to restore its hegemonic influence, Moscow could well find itself in the role of junior partner, though not vis-a-vis Washington. As Zbigniew Brzezinski has warned, Russia's "rivalry with America is senseless, and an alliance with China would [mean) subordination." Moscow seems not to have heeded his warning, as it has begun-most likely unwittingly-to participate in the furtherance of Chinese interests, specifically the strengthening of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which the Chinese use to promote their interests and to confront the United States, particularly in Central Asia. It appears that Russia and the West are forming new illusions about one another. The West, immersed in its own problems, hopes that Russia will not cross a dangerous line beyond which its relations with the West would deteriorate dramatically. It hopes that Moscow will back down when tensions rise, as it did during the eastward expansion of NATO, the conflict in Yugoslavia, and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. In fact, the Russian elite wants to avoid not just conflict with the West, but excessive distance as well. In its drive to restore Russia's status on the world stage, however, the Kremlin could lose control of events, particularly if more conservative or nationalist groups replace the current pragmatists in the ruling team. The West by
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That could end with the slow degradation of Russian society and even the fragmentation of the country. History does contain examples of authoritarian regimes with varying degrees of competition that have evolved peacefully toward democracy-Mexico and Taiwan, for example. It remains to be seen whether the Russian elite is capable of understanding that its attempt to preserve traditionalism is
dangerous nat just for Russia, but for itself. And it remains to be seen what price the country will have to pay for their leaders to achieve this realization.
LrLIA SHEVTSOVA is a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center. She is the author of Putin s Russia (Carnegie, 2005).
Reprinted from Current History, October 2006, pp. 307-314. Copyright © 2006 by Current History, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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What Does Putin Want? "It is not hard to see Putin as an authoritarian. In most ways he is, based on Western standards. But, given Russia's current development trajectory, he probably has to be.... Either the Kremlin continues its very hard-handed approach to restructuring the economy or Russia risks becoming in effect a Burkina Faso with nuclear weapons:' PETER LAVELLE
ith Russia seewngly returning to its opaque Sovietlike state, many Western journalists and analysts have also returned to their favorite Russia-watching pastime: asking the questioll t I'Who is Putin?" Attempts at answers have rendered limited results, and they mostly overlook what is happening in Vladimir Putin's Russia. More times than
by the oil sector and the much weaker industrial lobby. The top five oil producers early on announced a plan to significantly expand capacity, aggressively pushing for almost uninterrupted growth in oil production and exports. Market observers and analysts assessed the oil lobby's strategy as the "easy money" option. An eager and prepared market for oil and gas exports awaited in the United States, as well as in Russia's European and Asian neighbors, all seeking another source of energy besides the volatile Middle East. The counterpoised agenda came from the weak but resurgent industrial lobby, which has been campaigning hard to have the Russian government diversify away from a dangerously high reliance on the oil and gas sector. This lobby petitions for government special preferences and investment incentives for Russia's other traditional industries, including aerospace, aviation, defense, and steel fabrication. Advocates argue that Russia still has a chance to develop global leadership in these areas, and they also push for building a domestic financial services industry. Both lobbying groups have been forceful in the media in conveying their respective agendas to determine Russia's economic future. During Putin's first term the oil lobby appeared ascendant, and it has remained so to the present. But this ascendance may prove temporary. Another plan for Russia's longer-term econowc future has been aired, and repeatedly supported by none other than President Putin, yet analysts often neglect it. Announced at the start of 2000, this budgetary and economic policy calls for exploiting high inflows of cash from oil and gas exports to aggressively push broad-based growth across all economic sectors. Putin's objective, clearly and consistently stated over the past four years, is to eventually achieve a more diversified and balanced economy-an economy, that is, along lines seen in most European Union countries-with the intent of creating a greater and more egalitarian dispersion of wealth across the entire population.
W
not, perceptions of Russia remain at sharp variance with reality. Asking a better question-"What does Putin wantT-may tell us something about the Russia he intends to create. President Putin's agenda is, if anything, straightforward. What may seem a lurch back to the Soviet past or a lunge for-
ward to a new form of authoritarianism is in fact Russia overcoming the chaos of the first decade of postcommunism. Putin
wants to develop a modern economy, end economic oligarchy, and assure that Russia's energy resources serve the national interest. He is willing to strengthen the state at the expense of
democratic institutions if necessary. He wants to protect property rights, attract foreign investment, and restore an image of strength in the world. His pragmatism is evident for anyone who wishes to see it.
The Economic Reform Agenda Recently, much of the mainstream media and a number of academics have cast doubt on Putin's commitment to the development of a modern market economy in Russia. When Putin entered office, his support for liberalizing econowc reform was clear to anyone who had taken care to note his past as a key aide to St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, as well as his statements in his early days as acting president. Putin saw market reforms then as Russia's only credible future. A reasonable assessment of his economic agenda suggests he still does today-albeit to further the political goal of more broadly dispersed prosperity. The economic reality presented to Putin when he assumed office in 2000 essentially consisted of competing claims made
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A June 2004 study by the World Bank confirms Putin's political instincts. The report concludes, insofar as international comparisons are possible, that Russia has one of the most concentrated economies in the world, if not the most concentrated. A group of billionaires called the "oligarchs" largely controls the economy. Furthermore, ownership concentration is highly sector-specific: major owners dominate large industrial and raw materials sectors. Clearly, with these sectors constituting the Russian economy's main pillar (and primary source of exports), their owners can dominate the economy and, ultimately, politics and economic strategy. The World Bank analysis notes that, because of the immature market for ownership rights, Hownership in Russia's economy has not yet gone through the sort of 'remixing' which would have eliminated the most obvious traces of the transition from state to private ownership," One key to creating a modern market economy in Russia is to reform, and in many cases gut, outdated and economically dysfunctional Soviet social services. To achieve this goal, Putin has risked his stellar public opinion ratings. He also has embarked on these structural changes while trying to break up economic and political oligarchy. This is no coincidence. At the center of attempts to purge the Russian economy of
And this, too, is related to the Yukos affair. The Kremlin has put on display an enormous legal arsenal in going after billions of dollars in taxes allegedly owed by Yukos. Other major tax offenders are unlikely to challenge the Kremlin again. The effect is not lost on the public. Public opinion has long regarded the oligarchs as gross tax avoiders. Putin is attempting to completely reorder Russia's tax payment and collection system as part of his plans to modernize the economy. To convince ordinary Russians t9 honor their tax obligations, a public example had to be made of the oligarchs-with Yukos, Russia's largest privately held company, the signature demonstration. In this respect, Moscow is employing a strategy similar to one used by governments to prosecute organized crime. Since the state's resources are limited, it pursues the offender with the highest profile, hoping that others, along with ordinary Russians, will get the message and act accordingly. The message appears to be working. Russian oil companies such as Tyumen Oil-British Petroleum, Sibneft, and Slavneft have announced that they will increase effective tax rates. In addition, as with most governments in oil-exporting nations, higher effective tax rates are expected during a time of extraordinarily high international petroleum prices. Overall, Russia's tax revenues during the first half of 2004 rose by 23 percent. Increased tax collection in the oil sector has allowed the government to lower tax obligations elsewhere. With Yukos and its core shareholders serving as a test case, Russia's oligarchs will find themselves either cut down to size or allowed the kind of role that big business plays in other modernized economies. This outcome should not be regarded as regressive. Almost by definition, oligarchy represents a manner of fusing economic and political power within one person that institutions in the West have precluded since the 1920s. In Russia, the concentration of both economic and political power in the hands of a few natural-resource oligarchs has been a brake on economic growth and diversification. Through their political influence, and in the face of weak state oversight and a weak industrial sector lobby, the oligarchs were generally able to divert public economic resources toward their own core business concerns and away from other parts of the investmentstarved economy. The outcome of this arrangement has been all too obvious: cash generation, in the form of largely untaxed profits, was transferred abroad to avoid the tax authorities and the Russian public, should the state ever start questioning the legitimacy of the gains. The Yukos affair represents a strong effort to alter the correlation of power between the regime and the oligarchs, designed to turn them into allies and servants rather than competitors and opponents of the state. Putin's thinking on the subject was· revealed in a remarkable statement in 2003. "We have a category of people who have become rich and billionaires ... overnight," he said. "The state has appointed them billionaires, simply by giving away its assets practically free." While more cases similar to the Yukos affair may occur, a comprehensive annihilation of the oligarchs appears unlikely. Putin wants a partial "nationalization" of the oligarch class, not the complete renationalization of their assets. Moving forward, the Kremlin will in effect appoint or dismiss or tolerate
residual Soviet elements is the monetization of the country's social benefits. Although Russia's economy was largely monetized between 1991 and 1992, it is often overlooked that the system of social benefits remained virtually unchanged from the Sovie~ era. The government continued to mandate discounts on pharmaceuticals, transportation, communications, and hous~ ing for retirees, military personnel, the disabled, and other dependent groups. As in the Soviet system, programs of in-kind benefits remained rife with corruption. Putin's response has been to dismantle and remove the Soviet social programs, even though the political costs in doing so may rise as new benefit programs are put into place between nOw and 2006 and as the transition costs pile up. Thus far the reform project has been highly unpopular among recipients of outdated Soviet benefits, with Putin's popularity taking a strong hit for the first time during his presidency.
Cutting Down the Oligarchs This is where the Yukos affair comes in. It would have been politically irresponsible, even dangerous, for Putin to impose additional sacrifices on ordinary Russians as part of structural reforms effected over the next few years without the recent demonstration of state power against the oligarchs. The prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos Oil and Russia's richest man, has added to Putin's public support. The oligarchs, after all, are the personification of what went wrong during the 1990s, when a group of super-wealthy individuals essentially ruled Russia, and economic and political power was intensely concentrated as it had been during the Soviet era. While trying to reduce the state's role in mandating costly entitlements, Putin has sought to increase the state's ability to govern by taking in more tax revenue that the growing economy generates. Only with effective tax collection can Moscow deal with the country's pervasive poverty and gross income differentials. 150
Article 28. What Does Putin Want?
oligarchs-cum-big-businessmen based on their perfonnance and their compatibility with national economic goals.
make petroleum policy without Kremlin consent. The impending breakup of Yukos and changes in ownership of the company's assets will allow the Kremlin to speak with a single voice when making international strategic petroleum alliances. The international environment would appear to support KremPEC's ambitious goals. Terrorism threatens oil export giant Saudi Arabia, the cost of oil hovers around $45 a barrel, a gallon of gasoline costs up to $2.50 in the United States and far more in Europe, and continuing turmoil in Iraq limits the prospect of Iraqi oil significantly affecting international oil markets any time soon. Meanwhile, energy-hungry China and India are eager to find new and secure energy export markets to support their rapid economic growth. The Kremlin has carefully thought out what the future might hold if Saudi Arabia, OPEC's powerbroker, becomes a target of larger and increased terrorist attacks. As the largest producer in the world, Russia might rethink its position concerning membership in the international petroleum cartel if Saudi exports were to face long-term risk. In any event, the Yukos affair will quickly become part of history, its lessons absorbed. When that happens, Russia's oil patch will become more secure, attracting international petroleum investment, as well as providing Russia with needed cash flow to continue the refonn of its economy. The difference is that energy negotiations and strategizing will take place behind Kremlin walls, instead of with oil oligarchs. For an energyhungry world, doing business with KremPEC will become almost risk-free and eventually will make OPEC's current hold over world petroleum markets irrelevant. OPEC is about to be dethroned, with Putin's KremPEC its successor.
Ending Big Oil's Self-Service Seen in this light, the Kremlin's assault on Yukos is hardly an impulsive act of political and economic terrorism against property rights in the oil industry. Compared internationally, Russia is the only major oil exporter (and the only major oil-producing country with the two exceptions of the United States and United Kingdom) where the state is not the major operator drilling and lifting crude for production and export. The Kremlin is reordering the oil sector to roughly match international norms. Putin is also looking to the future. Since 1999, Russia's petroleum production has increased 48 percent, primarily because of new wells. Turning out 9 million barrels of oil a day, Russia competes with Saudi Arabia as the world's largest exporter. Now Putin has called on his oil ministers to finalize plans for adding export pipelines to boost output to 11 million barrels per day by 2009. Russia's expected export increase, in conjunction with other world suppliers, could lower the cost of crude oil as early as 2006. Because of almost unprecedented global demand and equally unprecedented high oil prices, the Kremlin's coffers receive an additional $1.5 billion per month over budget projections. A number of experts claim high petroleum prices last year accounted for almost half of Russia's 7.3 percent growth in gross domestic product. But who benefits from this? Putin has stated that 'The government must base its decisions on the interests of the state as a whole and not on those of individual companies." And these are not just words; Russia's oil giants Lukoil and Sibneft are acutely aware that Putin means business. Lukoil, Russia's second-largest petroleum firm, already has expressed its willingness to pay more taxes and work as a loyal foreign policy conduit on energy matters for the Kremlin. Sibneft, the third-ranked oil producer owned by oligarch and English football enthusiast Roman Abramovich, has also caught the Kremlin's attention. With investigations of Sibneft and Abramovich mushrooming, it appears only a matter of time before Sibneft will be under the Kremlin's heel as well. The fate of Yukos's assets if it is forced into bankrnptcy is open to speculation. The government-owned Rosneft Oil Company is rumored to be the Kremlin's favorite-some of Putin's key aides sit on Rosneft's board of directors. The natural gas monopoly Gazprom, government-owned as well, is also thought to be in the running. In the end it does not really matter. Yukos's transformation will essentially create what has been the Kremlin's goal from the advent of this affair: the creation of what could be called "KremPEC," the Kremlin Petroleum Export Corporation. This outcome would increase revenues and restore a large chunk of the economy under the state's purview for market reforms. In addition to benefiting ordinary Russians, Putin wants the energy sector to serve the country's international political and economic interests. Russia has never had a meaningful relationship with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries because independent domestic producers have been able to
Protecting Property Rights The high-profile legal assault against Yukos has encouraged the perception that Putin is indifferent to property rights in Russia. But, beyond the state bureaucracy's sometimes aggressive, inefficient, or selective application of property rights law, the legal protection of private property is in fact being strengthened. On June 10, 2004, Russia's parliament, the State Duma, adopted in the first of three readings 27 new bills introducing changes to the existing housing code, confirming the principle of private property by emphasizing the centrality of the state registry of property titles and by easing the property registry process and making it more transparent and affordable. The Kremlin designed all of these bills for the legislature. When the Western media comment that Putin is forcing legislation through without debate, these are the kinds of laws that are being passed. Many observers claim that the Kremlin is most interested in asserting the "property rights" of the state, but this focus is overplayed. Putin is trying to redress the claims of property of the average Russian, which ultimately will create more confidence in property rights generally. Indeed, in Russia the government's treatment of Yukos is perceived as a reassertion of propertyrights principles that were violated during the free-for-all privatization of public property in the 1990s. Protecting property rights is one way Putin hopes to draw more foreign investment to his country. During five straight
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years of robust economic growth, Russia became an attractive
It is also often overlooked, and strangely so in light of the
investment target. Today, according to Western media, the Yukos
imperialist tendencies of czarist and Soviet forebears, that Putin is far more interested in promoting Russia's economic inter-
affair has caused enonnous concern that Putin is indifferent to minority shareholders in Russian companies. But the reality paints a different picture. Even though Russia is again experiencing net capital outflows (primarily from Russian nationals' expatriating funds), foreign investment has not stopped or
ests with neighboring countries than in pursuing heavy-handed military ambitions. Putin's Kremlin has learned well the cost of
empire and is trying to avoid it.
reversed, and foreign companies continue to funnel money into Russia.
The Necessary Authoritarian?
Final resolution of the Yukos affair could invite renewed
All too often Russia watchers focus their analysis on what is
interest in Russia as an investment target If in fact smallish
called Russia's "managed democracy." Commentators are not
Kremlin-owned Rosneft becomes the flagship of Russia's oil
wrong to worry about the present state of the country's political parties and weakened opposition, the Duma's tendency to rubberstamp Kremlin initiatives, the lack of checks and balances
sector, absorbing most ofYukos's lucrative assets, there is every reason to believe a company such as ExxonMobil would be
interested in partnering with it or creating a joint venture. Such
in government. and the electronic media's insufficient indepen-
an arrangement would carry little if any political risk. Most analysts fail to understand that in Russia, just as with other emerging markets, the most solid and profitable business partner is the state. A number of Western oil giants have recognized this and are knocking on the Kremlin's door.
dence. Putin's decisions in September to abolish direct popular election of regional governors and to introduce legislation clearly designed to create Kremlin super majorities in the federal parliament have nothing to do with democracy in a Western
sense. However. for democracy to have any meaning in Russia, the Kremlin must first create conditions in which the majority of Russians feel they have a stake in the country's destiny. This
Russia's Image in the World
can come about with the kind of "managed capitalism" Putin is promoting. "Managed capitalism" is not state capitalism.
Since becoming president, Putin has demonstrated flexibility on a number of foreign policy issues that past Russian or Soviet leaders would have deemed unthinkable. Arms agreements can be concluded with a handshake. Expensive bases around the world are closed. Understanding and patience are shown when America establishes bases in parts of the former Soviet Union. Putin's foreign policy has emphasized constructively joining
The state does not want complete control of the economy. But Putin's government does want to help the economy find a more equitable and competitive balance.
Putin's crackdown on electronic media makes clear that the Kremlin will forgo public discussion of its policies as it reorders the country's economic priorities. Indeed, it is not hard to see
international institutions.
Putin as an authoritarian. In most ways he is, based on Western standards. But, given Russia's current development trajectory,
Yet the Kremlin's image in the world continues to suffer from
charges of authoritarianism and revisionist imperialism. As main-
he probably has to be. Russia is at an extremely important juncture. Either the Kremlin continues its very hard-handed approach to restructuring the economy or Russia risks becoming in effect a Burkina Faso with nuclear weapons. It is very clear which future Putin wants.
stream analysts see it, the former KGB official has lived up to their
expectations that he would clamp down on the "'exuberance" of the 1990s; having established his "controlled democracy," Putin proceeds to choke Russia's nascent freedom to death. A fairer assessment is that Putin will not be deterred from his domestic reform agenda, which includes a liberalized economy. The Russian leader has consistently adhered to the belief that his country can enjoy a good and strong image in the world only when it is economically competitive at home and abroad. Putin' s regime is sending unambiguous signals that it is prepared to go to any length-including undermining its international reputation in the short term-to pursue its objective of rearranging the oligarchic economy inherited from the 1990s.
Time is not on Russia's side. During Putin's presidency the country has experienced a remarkable economic recovery, but
its infrastructure remains in a perilous state of disrepair. its demographic trends portend enormous difficulties, and domestic terror-the September hostage crisis in Beslan being the most horrific example-appears on the rise. This is why Putin is pushing the clock as hard as he can without engendering the kind of chaos that Russia experienced during the first failed decade of reform away from communism. The historical question-"Who is Putin?"-ultimately will find an answer. In the meantime, the
Putin also wants Russia to have strong neighbors and meaningful trading partners. What many call "Kremlin meddling" in the "near abroad" more often than not reflects efforts to promote political and economic stability on Russia's borders. It is often overlooked that millions of ethnic Russians live beyond the
Kremlin's economic-refonn juggernaut continues its course, right on schedule.
country's borders. Destabilized regimes and distressed econo-
is a Moscow-based senior analyst for United Press International and author of an electronic newsletter on Russia, "Untimely Thoughts" .
PETER LAVELLE
mies in the countries that make up most of the Commonwealth of Independent States often negatively affect Russia's diaspora.
Reprinted from Current History, October 2004, pp. 314-318. Copyright © 2004 by Current History, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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Article 29
The New American Cold War STEPHEN
F.
COHEN
ontrary to established opinion, the gravest threats to America's national security are still in Russia. They derive from an unprecedented development that most US policy-makers have recklessly disregarded, as evidenced by the undeclared cold war Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-Communist Russia during the past fifteen years. As a result of the Soviet breakup in 1991, Russia, a state bea-
Most tragic and telling, the nation continues to suffer wartime death and birth rates, its population declining by 700,000 or more every year. Male life expectancy is barely 59 years and, at the other end of the life cycle, 2 to 3 million children are homeless. Old and new diseases, from tuberculosis to HIV infections, have grown into epidemics. Nationalists may exaggerate in charging that "the Motherland is dying," but even the head of Moscow's most pro-Western university warns that Russia remains in "extremely deep crisis." The stability ofthe political regime atop this bleak post-Soviet landscape rests heavily, if not entirely, on the personal popularity and authority of one man, President Vladimir Putin, who admits the state "is not yet completely stable." While Putin's ratings are an extraordinary 70 to 75 percent positive, political institutions and would-be leaders below him have almost no public support. The top business and administrative elites, having rapaciously "privatized" the Soviet state's richest assets in the 1990s, are particularly despised. Indeed, their possession of that property, because it lacks popular legitimacy, remains a time bomb embedded in the political and economic system. The huge military is equally unstable, its ranks torn by a lack of funds, abuses of authority and discontent. No wonder serious analysts worry that one or more sudden developments-a sharp fall in world oil prices, more major episodes of ethnic violence or terrorism, or Putin's disappearance-might plunge Russia into an even worse crisis. Pointing to the disorder spreading from Chechnya through the country's southern rim, for example, the eminent scholar Peter Reddaway even asks "whether Russia is stable enough to hold together." As long as catastrophic possibilities exist in that nation, so do the unprecedented threats to US and international security. Experts differ as to which danger is the gravest-proliferation of Russia's enormous stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological materials; ill-maintained nuclear reactors on land and on decommissioned submarines; an impaired early-warning system controlling missiles on hair-trigger alert; or the first-ever civil war in a shattered superpower, the tetTor-ridden Chechen conflict. But no one should doubt that together they constitute a much greater constant threat than any the United States faced during the Soviet era. Nor is a catastrophe involving weapons of mass destruction the only danger in what remains the world's largest territorial country. Nearly a quarter of the planet's people live on Russia's borders, among them conflicting ethnic and religious groups.
C ,
ring every nuclear and other device of mass destruction, virtually collapsed. During the 1990s its essential infrastructures-
political, economic and social-disintegrated. Moscow's hold on its vast territories was weakened by separatism,
official corruption and Mafia-like crime. The worst peacetime depression in modem history brought economic losses more
than twice those suffered in World War I!. GDP plummeted by nearly half and capital investment by 80 percent. Most Russians were thrown into poverty. Death rates soared and the population shrank. And in August 1998, the financial system imploded. No one in authority anywhere had ever foreseen that one of the twentieth century's two superpowers would plunge, along
with its arsenals of destruction, into such catastrophic circum~ stances. Even today, we cannot be sure what Russia's coUapse might mean for the rest of the world. Outwardly, the nation may now seem to have recovered. Its economy has grown on average by 6 to 7 percent annually since 1999, its stock-market index increased last year by 83 percent and its gold and foreign currency reserves are the world's fifth largest. Moscow is booming with new construction, frenzied consumption of Western lUXury goods and fifty-six large casinos. Some of this wealth has trickled down to the provinces and middle and lower classes, whose income has been rising. But these advances, loudly touted by the Russian government and Western investment-fund promoters, are due largely to high world prices for the country's oil and gas and stand out only in comparison with the wasteland of 1998. More fundamental realities indicate that Russia remains in an unprecedented state of peacetime demodemization and depopulation. Investment in the economy and other basic infrastructures remains barely a third of the 1990 level. Some twothirds of Russians stilllivc below or very near the poverty line, including 80 percent of families with two or more children, 60 percent of rural citizens and large segments of the educated and professional classes, among them teachers, doctors and military officers. The gap between the poor and the rich, Russian experts tell us, is becoming «explosive."
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
Any instability in Russia could easily spread to a crucial and exceedingly volatile part of the world. There is another, perhaps more likely, possibility. Petrodollars may bring Russia long-term stability, but on the basis of growing authoritarianism and xenophobic nationalism. Those ominous factors derive primarily not from Russia's lost superpower status (or Putin's KGB background), as the US press regularly misinforms readers, but from so many lost and damaged lives at home since 1991. Often called the "Weimar scenario," this outcome probably would not be truly fascist, but it would be a Russia possessing weapons of mass destruction and large proportions of the world's oil and natural gas, even more hostile to the West than was its Soviet predecessor. How has the US government responded to these unprecedented perils? It doesn't require a degree in international relations or media punditry to understand that the first principle of policy toward post-Communist Russia must follow the Hippocratic injunction: Do no harm! Do nothing to undermine its fragile stability, nothing to dissuade the Kremlin from giving first priority to repairing the nation's crumbling infrastructures, nothing to cause it to rely more heavily on its stockpiles of superpower weapons instead of reducing them, nothing to make Moscow uncooperative with the West in those joint pursuits. Everything else in that savaged country is of far less
Kremlin for promoting a pro-Moscow government in neighboring Ukraine, where Russia has centuries of shared linguistic, marital, religious, economic and security ties, Holbrooke declares that far-away Slav nation part of "our core zone of security." § Even more, a presumption that Russia does not have full sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow's internal affairs since 1992. They have included an on-site crusade by swarms of American "advisers," particularly during the 1990s, to direct Russia's "transition" from Communism; endless missionary sermons from afar, often couched in threats, on how that nation should and should not organize its political and economic systems; and active support for Russian anti-Kremlin groups, some associated with hated Yeltsin-era oligarchs. That interventionary impulse has now grown even into suggestions that Putin be overthrown by the kind of US-backed "color revolutions" carried out since 2003 in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and attempted this year in Belarus. Thus, while mainstream editorial pages increasingly call the Russian president "thug," "fascist" and "Saddarn Hussein," one of the Carnegie Endowment's several Washington crusaders assures us of "Putin's weakness" and vulnerability to "regime change." (Do proponents of "democratic regime change" in Russia care that it might mean destabilizing a nuclear state?) § Underpinning these components of the real US policy are familiar cold war double standards condemning Moscow for doing what Washington does-such as seeking allies and military bases in former Soviet republics, using its assets (oil and gas in Russia's case) as aid to friendly governments and regulating foreign money in its political life. More broadly, when NATO expands to Russia's front and back doorsteps, gobbling up former Soviet-bloc members and republics, it is "fighting terrorism" and "protecting new states"; when Moscow protests, it is engaging in "cold war thinking." When Washington meddles in the politics of Georgia and Ukraine, it is "promoting democracy"; when the Kremlin does so, it is "neoimperialism." And not to forget the historical background: When in the 1990s the US-supported Yeltsin overthrew Russia's elected Parliament and Constitutional Court by force, gave its national wealth and television netwOIks to Kremlin insiders, imposed a constitution without real constraints on executive power and rigged elections, it was "democratic reform"; when Putin continues that process, it is "authoritarianism." § Finally, the United States is attempting, by exploiting Russia's weakness, to acquire the nuclear superiority it could not achieve during the Soviet era. That is the essential meaning of two major steps taken by the Bush Administration in 2002, both against Moscow's strong wishes. One was the Administration's unilateral withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, freeing it to try to create a system capable of destroying incoming missiles and thereby the capacity to launch a nuclear first strike without fear of retaliation. The other was pressuring the Kremlin to sign an ultimately empty nuclear weapons reduction agreement requiring no actual destruction of weapons and indeed allowing development of new ones; providing for no verification; and permitting unilateral withdrawal before the specified reductions are required.
consequence.
Since the early 1990s Washington has simultaneously conducted, under Democrats and RepUblicans, two fundamentally different policies toward post-Soviet Russia--one decorative and outwardly reassuring, the other real and exceedingly reckless. The decorative policy, which has been taken at face value in the United States, at least until recently, professes to have replaced America's previous cold war intentions with a generous relationship of "strategic partnership and friendship." The public image of this approach has featured happy-talk meetings between American and Russian presidents, first "Bill and Boris" (Clinton and Yeltsin), then "George and Vladimir." The real US policy has been very different-a relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia's post-1991 weakness. Accompanied by broken American promises. condescending lectures and demands for unilateral concessions, it has been even more aggressive and uncompromising than was Washington's approach to Soviet Communist Russia. Consider its defining elements as they have unfolded-with fulsome support in both American political parties, influential newspapers and policy think tanks-since the early 1990s: § A growing military encirclement of Russia, on and near its borders, by US and NATO bases, which are already ensconced or being planned in at least half the fourteen other former Soviet republics, from the Baltics and Ukraine to Georgia, Azerbaijan and the new states of Central Asia. The result is a US-built reverse iron curtain and the remilitarization of AmericanRussian relations. § A tacit (and closely related) US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin or contiguous former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. How else to explain, to take a bellwether example, the thinking of Richard Holbrooke, Democratic would-be Secretary of State? While roundly condemning the 154
Article 29. The New American Cold War
The extraordinarily anti-Russian nature of these policies casts serious doubt on two American official and media axioms: that the recent "chill" in US-Russian relations has been caused by Putin's behavior at home and abroad, and that the cold war ended fifteen years ago. The first axiom is false, the second only half true: The cold war ended in Moscow, but not in Washington, as is clear from a brief look back. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in 1985 with heretical "New Thinking" that proposed not merely to ease but to actually abolish the decades-long cold war. His proposals triggered a fateful struggle in Washington (and Moscow) between policy-makers who wanted to seize the historic opportunity and those who did not. President Ronald Reagan decided to meet Gorbachev at least part of the way, as did his successor, the first President George Bush. As a result, in December 1989, at a historic summit meeting at Malta, Gorbachev and Bush declared the cold war over. (That extraordinary agreement evidently has been forgotten; thus we have the New York Times recently asserting that the US-Russian relationship today "is far better than it was 15 years ago.") Declarations alone, however, could not terminate decades of warfare attitudes. Even when Bush was agreeing to end the cold war in 1989-91, many of his top advisers, like many mcmbers of the US political elite and media, strongly resisted. (I witnessed that rift on the eve of Malta, when I was asked to debate the issue in front of Bush and his divided foreign policy team.) Proof came with the Soviet breakup in December 1991: US officials and the media immediately presented the purported "end of the cold war" not as a mutual Soviet-American decision, which it certainly was, but as a great American victory and Russian defeat. That (now standard) triumphalist narrative is the primary reason the cold war was quickly revived-not in Moscow a decade later by Putin but in Washington in the early 1990s, when the Clinton Administration made two epicaUy unwise decisions. One was to treat post-Communist Russia as a defeated nation that was expected to replicate America's domestic practices and bow to its foreign policies. It required, behind the facade of the Clinton-Yeltsin "partnership and friendship" (as Clinton's top "Russia hand," Strobe Talbott, later confirmed), telling Yeltsin "here's some more shit for your face" and Moscow's "submissiveness." From that triumphalism grew the still-ongoing interventions in Moscow's internal affairs and the abiding notion that Russia has no autonomous rights at home or abroad. Clinton's other unwise decision was to break the Bush Administration's promise to Soviet Russia in 1990-91 not to expand NATO "one inch to the east" and instead begin its expansion to Russia's borders. From that profound act of bad faith, followed by others, came the dangerously provocative military encirclement of Russia and growing Russian suspicions of US intentions. Thus; while American journalists and even scholars insist that "the cold war has indeed vanished" and that concerns about a new one are "silly," Russians across the political spectrum now believe that in Washington "the cold war did not end" and, still more, that "the US is imposing a new cold war on Russia."
That ominous view is being greatly exacerbated by Washington's ever-growing "anti-Russian fatwa," as a former Reagan appointee terms it. This year it includes a torrent of official and media statements denouncing Russia's domestic and foreign policies, vowing to bring more of its neighbors into NATO and urging Bush to boycott the G-8 summit to be chaired by Putin in St. Petersburg in July; a call by would-be Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain for "very harsh" measures against Moscow; Congress's pointed refusal to repeal a Sovietera restriction on trade with Russia; the Pentagon's revival of old rumors that Russian intelligence gave Saddam Hussein information endangering US troops; and comments by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, echoing the regime-changers, urging Russians, "if necessary, to change their government." For its part, the White House deleted from its 2006 National Security Strategy the long-professed US-Russian partnership, backtracked on agreements to help Moscow join the World Trade Organization and adopted sanctions against Belarus, the Slav former republic most culturally akin to Russia and with whom the Kremlin is negotiating a new union state. Most significant, in May it dispatched Vice President Cheney to an antiRussian conference in former Soviet Lithuania, now a NATO member. to denounce the Kremlin and make clear it is not "a strategic partner and a trusted friend," thereby ending fifteen years of official pretense. More astonishing is a Council on Foreign Relations "task force report" on Russia, co"chaired by Democratic presidential aspirant John Edwards, issued in March. The "nonpartisan" council's reputed moderation and balance are nowhere in evidence. An unrelenting exercise in double standards, the report blames all the "disappointments" in US-Russian relations solely on "Russia's wrong direction" under Putin-from meddling in the former Soviet republics and backing Iran to conflicts over NATO, energy politics and the "rollback of Russian democracy." Strongly implying that Bush has been too soft on Putin, the council report flatly rejects partnership with Moscow as "not a realistic prospect." It calls instead for "selective cooperation" and "selective opposition," depending on which suits US interests, and, in effect, Soviet-era containment. Urging more Western intervention in Moscow's political affairs, the report even reserves for Washington the right to reject Russia's future elections and leaders as "illegitimate." An article in the council's influential journal Foreign Ajfairs menacingly adds that the United States is quickly "attaining nuclear primacy" and the ability "to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike." Every consequence of this bipartisan American cold war against post-Communist Russia has exacerbated the dangers inherent in the Soviet breakup mentioned above. The crusade to transform Russia during the 1990s, with its disastrous "shock therapy" economic measures and resulting antidemocratic acts, further destabilized the country, fostering an oligarchical system that plundered the state's wealth, deprived essential infrastructures of investment, impoverished the people and nurtured
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ANNUAL EDITIONS dangerous corruption. In the process, it discredited Westernstyle reform, generated mass anti-Americanism where there had been almost none--only 5 percent of Russians surveyed in May thought the United States was a "friend"-and eviscerated the once-influential pro-American faction in Kremlin and electoral politics. Military encirclement, the Bush Administration's striving for nuclear supremacy and today's renewed US intrusions into Russian politics are having even worse consequences, They have provoked the Kremlin into undertaking its own conventional and nuclear buildup, relying more rather than less on compromised mechanisms of control and maintenance, while continuing to invest miserly sums in the country's decaying economic base
and human resources. The same American policies have also caused Moscow to cooperate less rather than more in existing US-funded programs to reduce the multiple risks represented by Russia's materials of mass destruction and to prevent accidental nuclear war. More generally, they have inspired a new Kremlin ideology of "emphasizing our sovereignty" that is increasingly nationalistic, intolerant of foreign-funded NOOs as "fifth columns" and reliant on anti-Western views of the "patriotic" Russian intelligentsia and the Orthodox Church. MOSCQw'S responses abroad have also been the opposite of what Washington policy-makers should want. Interpreting USbacked "color revolutions" as a quest for military outposts on Russia's borders, the Kremlin now opposes pro-democracy movements in former Soviet republics more than ever, while supporting the most authoritarian regimes in the region, from Belarus to Uzbekistan. Meanwhile, Moscow is forming a political, economic and military "strategic partnership" with China, lending support to Iran and other anti-American governments in the Middle East and already putting surface-to-air missiles back in Belarus, in effect Russia's western border with NATO. If American policy and Russia's predictable countermeasures continue to develop into a full-scale cold war, several new factors could make it even more dangerous than was its predecessor. Above all, the growing presence of Western bases and US-backed governments in the former Soviet republics has moved the "front lines" of the conflict, in the alarmed words of a Moscow newspaper, from Germany to Russia's "near abroad." As a "hostile ring tightens around the Motherland," in the view of former Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov, many difTerent Russians see a mortal threat. Putin's chief political deputy, Vladislav Surkov, for example, sees the "enemy ... at the gates," and the novelist and Soviet-era dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sees the "complete encirclement of Russia and then the loss of its sovereignty." The risks of direct military conflict could therefore be greater than ever. Protesting overflights by NATO aircraft, a Russian general has already warned, "If they violate our borders, they should be shot down." Worsening the geopolitical factor are radically different American and Russian self-perceptions. By the mid-1960s the US-Soviet cold war relationship had acquired a significant degree of stability because the two superpowers, perceiving a stalemate, began to settle for political and military "parity." Today, however, the United States, the self-proclaimed "only superpower," has a far more expansive view of its international
entitlements and possibilities. Moscow, on the other hand, feels weaker and more vulnerable than it did before 1991. And in that asymmetry lies the potential for a less predictable cold war relationship between the two still fully armed nuclear states. There is also a new psychological factor. Because the unfolding cold war is undeclared, it is already laden with feelings of betrayal and mistrust on both sides. Having welcomed Putin as Yeltsin's chosen successor and offered him its conception of "partnership and friendship," Washington now feels deceived by Putin's policies. According to two characteristic commentaries in the Washington Post, Bush had a "well-intentioned Russian policy," but "a Russian autocrat ... betrayed the American's faith." Putin's Kremlin, however, has been reacting largely to a decade of broken US promises and Yeltsin's boozy compliance. Thus Putin's declaration four years ago, paraphrased on Russian radio: "The era of Russian geopolitical concessions (is] coming to an end." (Looking back, he remarked bitterly that Russia has been ~'constantly deceived.") Still worse, the emerging cold war lacks the substantive negotiations and cooperation, known as detente, that constrained the previous one. Behind the lingering facade, a well-informed Russian tells us, "dialogue is almost nonexistent." It is especially true in regard to nuclear weapons. The Bush Administration's abandonment of the ABM treaty and real reductions, its decision to build an antimissile shield, and talk of pre-emptive war and nuclear strikes have all but abolished long-established USSoviet agreements that have kept the nuclear peace for nearly fifty years. Indeed, according to a report, Bush's National Security Council is contemptuous of arms control as "baggage from the cold war." In short, as dangers posed by nuclear weapons have grown and a new arms race unfolds, efforts to curtail or even discuss them have ended. Finally, anti-cold war forces that once played an important role in the United States no longer exist. Cold war lobbies, old and new ones, therefore operate virtually unopposed, some of them funded by anti-Kremlin Russian oligarchs in exile. At high political levels, the new American cold war has been, and remains, fully bipartisan, from Clinton to Bush, Madeleine Albright to Rice, Edwards to McCain. At lower levels, once robust pro-detente public groups, particularly anti-arms-race movements, have been largely demobilized by official, media and academic myths that "the cold war is over" and we have been "liberated" from nuclear and other dangers in Russia. Also absent (or silent) are the kinds of American scholars who protested cold war excesses in the past. Meanwhile, a legion of new intellectual cold warriors has emerged, particularly in Washington, media favorites whose crusading anti-Putin zeal goes largely unchallenged. (Typically, one inveterate missionary constantly charges Moscow with "not delivering" on US interests, while another now calls for a surreal crusade, "backed by international donors," to correct young Russians' thinking about Stalin.) There are a few notable exceptions-also bipartisan, from former Reaganites to Nation contributorsbut "anathematizing Russia," as Oorbachev recently put it, is so consensual that even an outspoken critic of US policy inexplicably ends an article, "Of course, Russia has been largely to blame,"
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Article 29. The New American Cold War
Making these political factors worse has been the "pluralist" US mainstream media. In the past, opinion page editors and television producers regularly solicited voices to challenge cold war zealots, but today such dissenters, and thus the vigorous public debate of the past, are almost entirely missing. Instead, influential editorial pages are dominated by resurgent cold war orthodoxies, led by the Post, whose incessant demonization of
Putin's "autocracy" and "crude neoimperialism" reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac. On the conservative New York Sun's front page, US-Russian relations today are presented as "a duel to the death-perhaps literally." The Kremlin's strong preference "not to return to the cold war. era," as Putin stated May 13 in response to Cheney's inflamma~ tory charges, has been mainly responsible for preventing such fantasies from becoming reality. "Someone is still fighting the cold war," aBritishacadernicrecently wrote, "but it isn 'tRussia." A:fateful struggle over this issue, however, is now under way in Moscow, with the "pro-Western" Putin resisting demands for a "more hard line" course and, closely related, favoling larger FDR-style investments in the people (and the country's stability). Unless US policy, which is abetting the hard-liners in that struggle, changes fundamentally, the symbiotic axis between American and Russian cold warriors that drove the last conflict will re-emerge. If so, the Kremlin, whether under Putin or a successor, will fight the new one-with all the unprecedented dangers that would entaiL Given different principles and determined leadership, it is still not too late for a new US policy toward post-Soviet Russia. Its components would include full cooperation in securing Moscow's materials of mass destruction; radically reducing nuclear weapons on both sides while banning the development of new ones and taking all warheads off hair-trigger alert; dissuading other states from acquiring those weapons; countering terrorist activities and drug-trafficking near Russia; and augmenting energy supplies to the West. None of those programs are possible without abandoning the warped priorities and fallacies that have shaped US policy since 1991. National security requires identifying and pursuing essential priorities, but US policy-makers have done neither consistently. The only truly vital American interest in Russia today is preventing its stockpiles of mass destruction from endangering the world, whether through Russia's destabilization or hostility to the West. All of the dangerous fallacies underlying US policy are expressions of unbridled triumphalism. The decision to treat post-Soviet Russia as a vanquished nation, analogous to postwar Germany and Japan (but without the funding), squandered a historic opportunity for a real partnership and established the bipartisan premise that Moscow's "direction" at home and abroad should be determined by the United States. Applied to a country with Russia's size and long history as a world power, and that had not been militarily defeated, the premise was inherently self-defeating and certain to provoke a resentful backlash. That folly produced two others. One was the assumption that the United States had the right, wisdom and power to remake post-Communist Russia into a political and economic replica of America. A conceit as vast as its ignorance of Russia's historical 157
traditions and contemporary realities, it led to the counterproductivecrusade of the 1990s, which continues in various ways today. The other was the presumption that Russia should be America's junior partner in foreign policy with no interests except those of the United States. By disregarding Russia's history, different geopolitical realities and vital interests, this presumption has also been senseless. As a Eurasian state with 20-25 million Muslim citizens of its own and with Iran one of its few neighbors not being recruited by NATO, for example, Russia can ill afford to be drawn into Washington's expanding conflict with the Islamic world, whether in Iran or Iraq. Similarly, by demanding that Moscow vacate its traditional political and military positions in former Soviet republics so the United States and NATO can occupy them-and even subsidize Ukraine's defection with cheap gas-Washington is saying that Russia not only has no Monroe Doctrine-like rights in its own neighborhood but no legitimate security rights at all. Not surprisingly, such flagrant double standards have convinced the Kremlin that Washington has become more belligerent since Yeltsin's departure simply "because Russian policy has become more pro-Russian." Nor was American triumphalism a fleeting reaction to 1991. A decade later, the tragedy of September 11 gave Washington a second chance for a real partnership with Russia. At a meeting on June 16,2001, President Bush sensed in Putin's "soul" a partner for America. And so it seemed after September 11, when Putin's Kremlin did more than any NATO government to assist the US war effort in Afghanistan, giving it valuable intelligence, a Moscow-trained Afghan combat force and easy access to crucial air bases in former Soviet Central Asia. The Kremlin understandably believed that in return Washington would give it an equitable relationship. Instead, it got US withdrawal from the ABM treaty, Washington's claim to permanent bases in Central Asia (as well as Georgia) and independent access to Caspian oil and gas, a second round of NATO expansion taking in several former Soviet republics and bloc members, and a still-growing indictment of its domestic and foreign conduct. Astonishingly, not even September 11 was enough to end Washington's winner-take-all principles. Why have Democratic and Republican administrations believed they could act in such relentlessly anti-Russian ways without endangering US national security? The answer is another fallacy-the belief that Russia, diminished and weakened by its loss of the Soviet Union, had no choice but to bend to America's will. Even apart from the continued presence of Soviet-era weapons in Russia, it was a grave misconception. Because of its extraordinary material and human attributes, Russia, as its intellectuals say, has always been "destined to be a great power." This was still true after 1991. Even before world energy prices refilled its coffers, the Kremlin had ready alternatives to the humiliating role scripted by Washington. Above all, Russia could forge strategic alliances with eager anti-US and non-NATO governments in the East and elsewhere, becoming an arsenal of conventional weapons and nuclear knowledge for states from China and India to Iran and Venezuela. Moscow has already begun that turning away from the West, and it could move much further in that direction.
ANNUAL EDITIONS
Still more, even today's diminished Russia can fight, perhaps win, a cold war on its new front lines across the vast former Soviet territories. It has the advantages of geographic proximity, essential markets, energy pipelines and corporate owner~ ship, along with kinship and language and common experiences. They give Moscow an array of soft and hard power to use, if it chooses, against neighboring governments considering a new patron in faraway Washington. Economically, the Kremlin could cripple nearly destitute Georgia and Moldova by banning their products and otherwise unemployed migrant workers from Russia and by charging Georgia and Ukraine full "free-market" prices for essential energy. Politically, Moscow could truncate tiny Georgia and Moldova, and big Ukraine, by welcoming their large, proRussian territories into the Russian Federation or supporting their demands for independent statehood (as the West has been doing for Kosovo and Montenegro in Serbia). Militarily, Moscow could take further steps toward turning the Shanghai Cooperation Organization-now composed of Russia, China and four Central Asian states, with Iran and India possible members-into an antiNATO defensive alliance, an "OPEC with nuclear weapons," a Western analyst warned. That is not all. In the US-Russian struggle in Central Asia over Caspian oil and gas, Washington, as even the triumphalist Thomas Friedman admits, "is at a severe disadvantage." The United States has already lost its military base in Uzbekistan and may soon lose the only remaining one in the region, in Kyrgyzstan; the new pipeline it backed to bypass Russia runs through Georgia, whose stability depends considerably on Moscow; Washington's new friend in oil-rich Azerbaijan is an
anachronistic dynastic ruler; and Kazakhstan, whose enonnous energy reserves make it a particular US target, has its own large Russian population and is moving back toward Moscow. Nor is the Kremlin powerless in direct dealings with the West. It can mount more than enough warheads to defeat any missile shield and illusion of "nuclear primacy." It can shut US businesses out of multibillion-dollar deals in Russia and, as it recently reminded the European Union, which gets 25 percent of its gas from Russia, "redirect supplies" to hungry markets in the East. And Moscow could deploy its resources, connections and UN Security Council veto against US interests involving, for instance, nuclear proliferation, Iran, Afghanistan and possibly even Iraq. Contrary to exaggerated US accusations, the Kremlin has not yet resorted to such retaliatory measures in any significant way. But unless Washington stops abasing and encroaching on Russia, there is no "sovereign" reason why it should not do so. Certainly, nothing Moscow has gotten from Washington since 1992, a Western security specialist emphasizes, "compensates for the geopolitical harm the United States is doing to Russia." American crusaders insist it is worth the risk in order to democratize Russia and other former Soviet republics. In reality, their campaigns since 1992 have only discredited that cause in Russia. Praising the despised Yeltsin and endorsing other unpopular figures as Russia's "democrats," while denouncing the popular Putin, has associated democracy with the social pain, chaos and humiliation of the 1990s. Ostracizing Belarus
President Aleksandr Lukashenko while embracing tyrants in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan has related it to the thirst for oil. Linking "democratic revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia to NATO membership has equated them with US expansionism. Focusing on the victimization of billionaire Mikhail Kbodorkhovsky and not on Russian poverty or ongoing mass protests against social injustices has suggested democracy is only for oligarchs. And by insisting on their indispensable role, US crusaders have all but said (wrongly) that Russians are incapable of democracy or resisting abuses of power on their own. The result is dark Russian suspicions of American intentions ignored by US policy-makers and media alike. They include the belief that Washington's real purpose is to take control of the country's energy resources and nuclear weapons and use encircling NATO satellite states to "de-sovereignize" Russia, turning it into a "vassal of the West." More generally, US policy has fostered the belief that the American cold war was never really aimed at Soviet Communism but always at Russia, a suspicion given credence by Post and Times columnists who characterize Russia even after Communism as an inherently Hautocratic state" with "brutish instincts." To overcome those towering obstacles to a new relationship, Washington has to abandon the triumphalist conceits primarily responsible for the revived cold war and its growing dangers. It means respecting Russia's sovereign right to determine its course at home (including disposal of its energy resources). As the record plainly shows, interfering in Moscow's internal affairs, whether on-site or from afar, only harms the chances for political liberties and economic prosperity that still exist in that tormented nation. It also means acknowledging Russia's legitimate security interests, especially in its own "near abroad." In particular, the planned third expansion of NATO, intended to include Ukraine, must not take place. Extending NATO to Russia's doorsteps has already brought relations near the breaking point (without actually benefiting any nation'S security); absorbing Ukraine, which Moscow regards as essential to its Slavic identity and its military defense, may be the point of no return, as even pro-US Russians anxiously warn. Nor would it be democratic, since nearly twothirds of Ukrainians are opposed. The explosive possibilities were adumbrated in late May and early June when local citizens in ethnic Russian Crimea blockaded a port and roads where a US naval ship and contingent of Marines suddenly appeared, provoking resolutions declaring the region "anti-NATO territory" and threats of "a new Vietnam." Time for a new US policy is running out, but there is no hint of one in official or unofficial circles. Denouncing the Kremlin in May, Cheney spoke "like a triumphant cold warrior," a Times correspondent reported. A top State Department official has already announced the "next great mission" in and around Russia. In the same unreconstructed spirit, Rice has demanded Russians "recognize that we have legitimate interests ... in their neighborhood," without a word about Moscow's interests; and a former Clinton official has held the Kremlin "accountable for the ominous security threats ... developing between NATO's eastern border and Russia." Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is playing Russian roulette with Moscow's control of its nuclear 158
Article 29. The New American Cold War weapons. Its missile shield project having already provoked a destabilizing Russian buildup, the Administration nOw proposes to further confuse Moscow's early-warning system, risking an accidental launch, by putting conventional warheads on longrange missiles for the first time. In a democracy we might expect alternative policy proposals from would-be leaders. But there are none in either party, only
meat.") It may also be intimidated by another revived cold war practice-personal defamation. The Post and The New Yorker have already labeled critics of their Russia policy "Putin apologists" and charged them with "appeasement" and "again taking the Russian side of the Cold War." The vision and courage of heresy will therefore be needed to escape today's new cold war orthodoxies and dangers, but it is hard to imagine a US politician answering the call. There is, however, a not-too-distant precedent. Twenty years ago, when the world faced exceedingly grave cold war perils, Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged from the orthodox and repressive Soviet political class to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?
demands for a more anti-Russian course, or silence. We should not be surprised. Acquiescence in Bush's monstrous war in Iraq has amply demonstrated the political elite's limited capacity for introspection, independent thought and civic courage. (It prefers to falsely blame the American people, as the managing editor of Foreign Affairs recently did, for craving "ideological red
Reprinted by permission from the July 10, 2006 issue of The Nation. Copyright © 2006 by The Nation. For subscription information, caUI-800-333-8536.
Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at www.thenation.com.
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UNIT4
Political Diversity in the Developing World Unit Selections 30. 31. 32.
33. 34. 35. 36.
Mexico's Disputed Election, Luis Rubio and Jeffrey Davidow Latin America's Left Turn, Jorge G. Casteneda Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State, Ike Okonta China: The Quiet Revolution, Doug Guthrie Where's Mao? Chinese Revise History Books, Joseph Kahn India's Path to Greatness, Martin Walker Bin Laden, the Arab "Street:' and the Middle East's Democracy Deficit, Dale F. Eickelman
Key Points to Consider o
What have developing countries in common, and how are they diverse? How did the PR1 maintain its dominance in Mexican politics for so long? Give a couple of reasons why many supporters of President Fox eventually became disillusioned with his leadership. Why is there a new "leftward turn" in Latin American politics? Why do" economic development and representative government run into such difficulties in most of Latin America and Africa? How has Nigeria landed in its fourth republic since independence? And why is the current political outlook in that country so bleak? How do you explain China's relative success in turning toward market reforms, as compared to the Soviet Union? How do you explain the apparent resilience of Indian democracy? What are some of the most common obstacles to the installation of a democracy in a country like Iraq or Afghanistan? Why is there so much attention paid to Turkey in the discussion of both the European Union and the development of the Middle East? Iran a few years ago seemed ready to pursue a more secular and moderate foreign and domestic policy. Who were the moderates and what happe~ed to them?
Student Web Site
www.mhcls.com/on!ine
Internet References
Further information regarding these Web sites may be found in this book's preface or online.
Africa News Online http://allafrica.com/
ArabNet http://www.arab.net
Inside China Today htfp:llwww.einnews.comlchinaJ
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development http://www.oecd.org/home/
Sun SITE Singapore http://sunsite.nus.edu.sg/noframe.htmJ
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The Third World was a widely used umbrella term for a disparate group of states that are now more frequently called the developing countries. Their most important shared characteristic may well be that these countries have been relatively late or incomplete in their modernization. Most, but not all, of the developing nations also share the problems of poverty and, now less frequently, rapid population growth. In many other ways, these countries vary hugely in their socio-cultural and political characteristics. Their governmental forms are predominantly "authoritarian:' They include all 55 countries listed by the index of democracy in this category and all but one or two of the 30 countries listed in the "hybrid regime" group. But they also make up more than half of the 54 countries classified as "flawed democracies," That includes such countries as South Africa, Chile, South Korea, Italy, India, and Brazil. It would be difficult to define any of the 28 members of the ''full democracy" category as a developing country, with the possible exception of Uruguay or the island nation of Mauritius. Until a few years ago, market-oriented development seemed to have been gaining late favor in some of these countries-at least among some of the policy-influential elites-that had previously subscribed to some version of heavy state regulation or socialist planning of the economy. Some observers saw a paradigm shift to economic liberalization that resembled what also occurred in former Communist~ruled nations as well as in some of the more advanced industrial countries (compare the "Thatcher revolution" in the UK). The shift was not uniform in timing, form, or intensity. Sometimes it did not go beyond a pragmatic acceptance of privatization and a reduced role for the public sphere in an essentially "mixed economy;' but it could also take the form of a doctrinaire espousal of laissezfaire capitalism-though usually less so in policy than rhetoric. Targeted state intervention usually continued to playa role in economic development, but it was no longer as pervasive, rigid, or heavy-handed as often in the past. In studying attempts by developing countries to promote their socioeconomic development, it is important not to leave out the international context. Political and intellectual leaders in these countries have often drawn upon some version of what is called dependency theory to explain why they were poor. They sometimes combined their analysis with demands for special treatment or compensation from the industrial world. Inspired in part by derivatives of Marxist or leninist theories of imperialist exploitation by the richer nations, dependency theorists concentrated on external factors to explain a country's failure to generate self-sustained growth and create wealth. All along, rival explanations gave greater emphasis to a country's internal obstacles to development (whether socio-cultural, political, environmental, or a combination of these). Such theoretical disagreements are not merely of academic interest, for the theories potentially supply the intellectual basis for strikingly different policy conclusions and development strategies.
The debate has had some tangible consequences in recent years. It now appears that dependency theory, at least in its simplest and most direct form, has lost some intellectual and political support. It is now more frequently encountered as one of the component of more complex, multivariable explanations of lagging developments. A "one-size-fits-all" approach has given way to middle-range theories that pay greater attention to the contextual or situational aspects of each case of development. That is also true for policy responses: strategies of development that may work in one setting may come to naught in a different environment. Latin America. The problems of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition in much of the developing world are socially and politically explosive. In their fear of revolution and their opposition to meaningful reform, the privileged classes have often resorted to brutal repression as a means of preserving a status quo highly favorable to themselves. In latin America, this led to politicization during the 1970s of many lay persons and clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, who demanded social reform in the name of what was called liberation theology. For them, this variant of dependency theory filled a very practical ideological function by providing a relatively simple analytical and moral explanation of a complex reality. It also gave some strategic guidance for political activists who were determined to change this state of affairs. Their views on the inevitability of class struggle, and the need to take an active part in it, often clashed with the Vatican's far more conservative outlook. like dependency theory, liberation theology today appears to have been effectively absorbed into more pluralist outlooks and pragmatic strategies for socioeconomic development. The collapse of Communist rule in Europe had a profound impact on the ideological explanation of the developing world's poverty and on the resulting strategies to overcome it. The Soviet model of modernization now appears to offer very little of practical value to developing countries. The fact that the ruling Communists in China have been eager to experiment with mar~ ket reforms, and have on occasion celebrated the profit motive, has added to the general discredit of the centrally planned economy. Perhaps the most important shift was not from a more statist approach to one with more market-orientation, but instead a new openness to choose policies and strategies that meet the pragmatic test, where the crucial question is "do they work?" rather than "are they ideologically correct?" This pragmatic orientation is nicely illustrated by an often told story about Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist reformer, who broke with Maoism. He reputedly explained his embrace of market reforms by remarking that he did not care what color a cat is-as long as it catches mice. The preference for a cat that catches mice may help explain the intellectual and political shift of someone like the nowdeceased Michael Manley, the former prime minister of Jamaica, who broke away from the combination of dependency theory
161
countries. Finally, the negative social, economic, and political experience with authoritarian rulers is one of the strongest cards held by their democratic successors. In order to survive and develop, each of the new democracies must meet the pragmatic test ("does it work?"), by providing evidence of social and economic progress. Many of them may yet turn out to have been short interludes between authoritarian regimes. It is worth remembering that Argentina was one of the world's most prosperous countries at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today it serves as a warning that both authoritarian-populist and radical neoliberal policy directions can end in socio~economic and political disaster. Mexico. The presidential election in Mexico in the summer of 2000 will be remembered primarily because it ended with defeat for the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI had held power for more than 70 years, but there had been advance indications that its grip was loosening. Three years earlier, the hegemonic party had lost control of the lower house of congress, and the two main opposition parties had begun to transform the chamber, previously regarded as a rubber stamp, into a political check on the president. In 2000 the PRI candidate, Francisco Labastida, was defeated by businessman Vicente Fox, the candidate of the center-right National Action Party (PAN), who received about 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race. Although it also became the leading party in Congress, PAN did not win a controlling majority. The political turnover could be seen as a milestone in Mexican politics, but it also demonstrated that the real challenge came in dealing with political gridlock and economic setbacks. The new president's reform agenda soon stalled in the bitterly divided legislature. It did not take long before the high expectations that accompanied a long-awaited transfer of power were followed by grave disappointments. Disputed elections are nothing new in Mexico, but the presidential race of 2006 was unusual. It was followed by intensive protests in the streets, the courts, and the halls of government by one of the candidates and many of his followers who did not accept the official results. The election was extremely close and sharply divisive, as Luis Rubio and Jeffrey Davidow emphasize in their account. The official winner, with about one~third of the vote, was Felipe Calderon of the PAN. His closest rival was Lopez Obrador of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRO). The central issue of the campaign was whether to continue with the economic liberalization of Mexico, as Calderon wants-or return to the state-driven, protectionist economic model, as advocated by Lopez. This is really the "national question;' for Mexico as our two authors point out. And for other countries in the region as well, one might add. There is no easy solution to such a dilemma. Nigeria covers a large area with 130 million inhabitants, making it the most populous country in Africa. The former British colony has returned to electoral politics after 15 years of oppressive military rule that brought economic havoc to the potentially rich nation. The path towards a stable and effective democratic governance in this culturally diverse country will be long and difficult. Ethnic and religious conflicts have thwarted the emergence of a well-functioning civil society and a stable form of
and socialist strategies that he had once defended vigorously. During the 1980s, Manley made a strategic U-turn as he gained a new respect for marketMoriented economic approaches, withM out abandoning his commitment to promote the interests of the poor. A somewhat similar political reorientation was taken by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who came to embrace private enterprise before he became president of Brazil until 2002. In his youth, Cardoso had been exiled by the then-ruling military junta for having written a book on dependency and underdevelopment that became a primer of left-wing analysis in Latin America. More recently, the political scientist and activist Jorge G. Castaneda called upon the Left in Latin America to abandon utopian goals and seek social reforms within "mixed" market economies. Until his resignation in 2003, he served as foreign minister of Mexico in President Fox's relatively market-friendly government. But the story does not end there. In today's Latin America, there is an unmistakable leftward turn in politics. This is evident almost everywhere. In much of Latin America there seems to be a questioning of the turn toward a greater emphasis on market economics that replaced the traditional commitment to strategies of statist intervention. It is too simple to explain this phenomenon as a product of impatience alone. A basic problem is that the benefits of economic growth do not "trickle down" as freely in practice as they do in economic theory. Instead, there are many instant losers in the economic dislocations that usually attend a liberalization of the economy. In his article, Castaneda differentiates between two Left orientations. They can be explained by the growing disillusionment with the free market approach of the so-called Washington Consensus that was promoted as a replacement for such stateMdriven nostrums as import-substitution and protectionism. It would appear that the neo-liberal policies have themselves failed to meet the pragmatic test. The reasonable reaction would be to replace the pure bred, neoliberal cat with one that, even though of "mixed" pedigree, will really catch mice. Latin America illustrates the difficulty of establishing stable pluralist democracies in many parts of the developing world, but also shows that they are not insurmountable. Robert Dahl lists only one "old democracy" in Latin America (Costa Rica) and the democracy index finds only two '~ull democracies" but seventeen "flawed democracies" there. Some authors have argued that Latin America's dominant political tradition is basically authoritarian and corporatist rather than competitively pluralist. They see the region's long tradition of centralized oligarchic governments, in the past usually of the Right, as the result of an authoritarian "unitary" bias in the pOlitical culture. From this perspective, there would seem to be little hope for a lasting pluralist development, and the recent trend toward democratization in much of Latin America would also appear unlikely to last. There are indeed signs pointing in that direction. On the other hand, there are other countries with corporatist traditions where democracy has taken roots. Also, it is no mean accomplishment that one after the other dictatorship in Latin America has been replaced by an elected government. The demonstration effect of democratic governments in Spain and Portugal may well have played a role for the Latin American
162
population and ahead of the continents of Latin America and Africa combined. India is listed as a democracy by our index, albeit a "flawed" one, with its deeply divisive ethnic, religious,
representative government. The democracy index lists the country as ruled by an authoritarian regime. It gives very low marks
for the functioning of the governmental and electoral process,
and regional differences. It is a secular state, but tense relations between politicized Hindu extremists and members of the large Muslim minority occasionally erupt in violence. For the vast
which appear to be a polite way of saying corruption. But Nigeria could turn around, and it bears close watching by students of
comparative pOlitics. China is the homeland of nearly 1.3 billion people, or about one-fifth of the world's population. Here the reform Communists, who took power after Mao Zedong's death in 1976, began a decade before their Soviet counterparts to steer the country toward a relatively decontrolled market economy. They also introduced some political relaxation, by ending Mao's recurrent ideological campaigns to mobilize the masses. In their place came a domestic tranquility such as China had not known for over half a century. But the regime encountered a basic dilemma: it wished to maintain tight controls over politics and society while
majority of the huge population, a life of material deprivation has long seemed inescapable, That may be changing. There is now a possibility of meaningful relief if the country's struggling economy could be freed from heavy-handed state interference. An important turn in that direction can be traced back to the early 1990s, when the market revolution cautiously touched India.
freeing the economy. When a new openness began to emerge
one of its veteran politicians, P.v. Narasimha Rao, headed the new government. He followed cautiously in the neoliberal steps of other reformers in the developing world at that time, by loos-
The economic changes have taken place in a context that carries the potential for political chaos. In 1992 the national elections were marred by the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, a for-
mer prime minister. When his Congress party won the election,
in Chinese society, comparable in some ways to the pluralism encouraged more actively by Gorbachev's glasnost policy of
openness in the Soviet Union, it ran into determined opposition
ening economiC planning and controls on international trade and
among hard-line Communist leaders. The aging reform leader, Deng Xiaoping, presided over a bloody crackdown on student demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in May 1989. The regime has refused to let up on its tight political controls of soci-
investment. These market-oriented policies brought substantial
economic gains but were accompanied by a flurry of corruption scandals that tainted several members of Rao's cabinet. His Congress party was badly defeated in the general election of May 1996. There followed some short-lived multiparty coalition
ety, but it continues to loosen the economic controls in the areas or zones designated for such reforms. In recent years, China has experienced a remarkable economic surge with growth rates
governments. In the spring of 1998, parliamentary elections produced a result that seemed to promise even more instability for the world's largest democracy. The Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), dominated by Hindu nationalists, won the most seats, but it was only able to govern in alliance with several smaller parties. The coalition provided a weak parliamentary majority, but it was able to survive just over a year, partly because the BJP leader, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, was able to tame the rhetoric of
unmatched elsewhere in the world. A still unanswered question
is whether the emerging market-oriented society can long coexist with a tightly controlled political system. In February 1997 Beijing announced the death of Deng Xiaoping, but the leadership since then has not really changed direction. Jiang Zemin, chosen by Deng as his successor in 1989, had been the country's president since 1993. As government and party leader, he appeared determined to continue the relatively pragmatic course adopted by Deng. It needs to be added that the regime has revived a hard line in dealing with real, imagined,
his own party's more militant Hindu-nationalist members. As long expected, the government collapsed in April 1999, when a small coalition defected. Some 300 million Indian voters took part in the new elections that followed. The result was a clear victory for the incumbent
or potential political disSidence, which includes some forms of religious expression. Moreover, there are familiar signs of socia! tenSion, as China's mixed economy leaves both "winners" and "losers" in its wake. Despite the country's undeniable problems
governing coalition, now numbering 24 parties. It was the first time in 27 years that an incumbent prime minister won rewelection
and shortcomings, China's leaders have steered clear of
in India. The once·dominant Congress party, which had hoped to
the chaos that has plagued post-Soviet Russia. They seem
revive and return to power, instead suffered its worst defeat since
determined to continue with their tight political controls, even as their economy becomes freer and more market-oriented.
independence. In the elections of 2004, however, it recuperated and returned to power ,as key member of the United Progressive Alliance. The BJP returned to the opposition. In the near future, at least, the dramatic political change seems likely to be accompanied by continuity of economic strategy, for the new Prime Minister, Mr. Singh, is also identified with market-friendly policies. Ironically, this deregulating and increasingly dynamic economy may be the source of "real change" in India, but the cumbersome political institutions provide the framework that holds the country together. Some India watchers
Some observers believe that the basic economic and political norms will eventually begin to converge, but that remains to be seen. A test case is the movement known as Falun Gong, which
the ruling Communists see as a threat because of its effective organization and solidarity-qualities that no longer characterize the Communist Party to the same degree as earlier. Hu Jintao was named party leader in the latter half of 2002. He moved quietly to further consolidate power. In September 2004 he replaced Jing Zemin as the country's military chief-a major political change. India is often referred to as a subcontinent. With more than one billion people, this country ranks second only to China in
warn that the country's market reforms have caused social and economic dislocations that could spark new political turmoil and ethnic strife. As always, this huge muitiethnic democracy bears watching.
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Article 30
Mexico's Disputed Election LUIS RUBIO AND JEFFREY DAVIDOW
A Wake-Up Call Mexico's July 2 election was not only a contest to select a president and a new Congress. It was also a referendum on the future of the country, and voters recognized it as such. The national question essentially came down to whether Mexicans wanted continuity with the reforms of recent years or a return to the past-whether the country should keep pursuing the political and economic liberalization that started in the mid-1980s or go back to the state-driven development model of the 1970s. The first choice was represented by Felipe Calder6n of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), the second by Andres Manuel L6pez Obrador of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Although Calderon seems to have edged out L6pez Obrador for a victory, both received about one-third of the vote. (L6pez Obrador rejected the results and took his protest to the streets and the courts.) But neither Calderon's promise of continuity nor Lopez Obrador's reactionary populism offers a solution to Mexico's deep and abiding structural problems. Calderon's appeal-most evident among the better educated and the better off and in the northern half of the country, where the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and economic reform have had the most beneficial effects-rested on his argument that the financial stability, social peace, and moderate economic growth of recent years were too important to risk with a return to the policies and governing methods that had not served the country well in the past. L6pez Obrador spoke more to the less educated and the less well off and to the center and south of the country, where the reforms of the past two decades have produced considerably less positive change. He rejected Mexico's current governing doctrine, which holds that the nation is best served by the internationalization of its economy, the reduction of state controls, the creation of independent, counterbalancing institutions, a greater play of market forces, and a decreased role for politics and parties in
the running of daily life. L6pez Obrador argued that the country has been heading in the wrong direction since it broke away from its tradition of strong government and a subordinate economy. During the campaign, Calderon attempted to distance himself from fellow PAN member President Vicente Fox, who had canned him from the cabinet. He argued for more effective and expansive social programs. But in fact, Calderon's message was an endorsement of Fox's policies and the recent trends in Mexico's economic and political development. His campaign was oriented toward the future; L6pez Obrador looked to the past. Nostalgia for a simpler time played a strong role in L6pez Obrador's campaign. As mayor of Mexico City, he "got things done"-a new highway and city beautification projects-in a way that suggested that he was a throwback to the power brokers of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) before that mammoth became hopelessly mired in the tar pits of corruption, cronyism, and economic crisis. (Rebels such as Lopez Obrador abandoned the PRI to form the PRD.) He also capitalized on Fox's inability to meet the inordinately high expectations that he had created. (Probably no politician could have met those expectations, even one much more skilled in political infighting thau Fox proved to be.) Lopez Obrador's greatest strength was his ability to exploit Mexicans' sense of victimization and disillusionment. He spoke to and for those who see themselves as the losers in the process of modernization. With a campaign appeal more blatantly class-based than anything recently seen in Mexican politics, he turned a passive population of poor and middle-class people who have remained on the sidelines of economic growth into a social movement demanding to play a role in the transformation of their society. Poverty in Mexico remains endemic. Neither the old PRI approach to development (which in this election was espoused by L6pez Obrador) nor the more recent attempt to modernize the economy through limited market-based
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policies has succeeded in reducing inequality in any significant way. In fact, Mexico never really liberalized its economy and pOlitics to the extent necessary for a modem society: some reforms were ambitious, but many favored cronies, and under the PRJ governments that preceded Fox, reform left the old political system and its vested interests untouched. As a result, the benefits of reform have been less than expected, and many people were wounded and left wanting: the peasants, workers, and small-business and factory owners overwhelmed by international competition and displaced by the forces of a modem economy. It was from these groups and their sympathizers-the intellectuals and social activists of the left-that Lopez Obrador constructed his movement. He reinforced their belief that now more than ever success in Mexico depends on having the right parents rather than on effort and merit, and that there is an imbalance not only of wealth but of opportumties kept in place by the rich and the powerful. Lopez Obrador's supporters were unconcerned that much of what the candidate advocated--stronger state control, more subsidies, greater government spending, lower international reserves-had been tried hefore and failed, often resulting in monumental financial crises for the country. Nor were they particularly troubled that his approach might lead to a more heavy-handed and intolerant and less open government. He seemed to promise a return to a purified, powerful, but this time honest and competent PRI (although he never explained his vision in that way). Optimism characterized Fox's 2000 campaigu: the expectation that the alternation of parties in governmeut would opeu up a world of possibilities for the couutry and its citizens. Although an understandable thirst for social justice motivated many of Lopez Obrador's followers, that desire was heavily mixed with feelings of disappointment, resentment, bitterness, and jealousy, which were so apparent in the masses of people who came to the streets to protest the electoral results. The deep divisions that marked the campaign and the post-July 2 reaction do not bode well for Mexico. When he is inaugurated on December 1, the new president will have to deal with a challenge that neither continuity nor a return to the past can successfully overCome.
government institutions, bureaucratic procedures, the tax and educational systems, many laws, and even the constitution. Mexico's political and economic leadership has not seriously taken on this challenge, prefen'ing the comfortable status quo. And although both Lopez Obrador and Calderon talked incessantly of change during the campaign, they provided little evidence that they clearly understand the depth of the problem. The path that Mexico started down 20 years ago is not the wrong road: it has simply not been well enough traveled. The country's principal goal should be to put the economy into a high-growth orbit and to make the leap from the pack of struggling second-tier economies into the developed world. Mexico's economy has sustained its hard-won stability for the past dozen years-no mean feat after 25 years of inflation, crises, and devaluations. But it has not grown fast enough to absorb the supply of labor or to tend to the serious social tasks that the country has been postponing for decades. Fox promised to deliver seven percent annual GDP growth and to create over a million new jobs a year. He managed only three percent annual growth and an average of only 100,000 new jobs a year. True, he was hobbled by the effects of a lackluster U.S. economy for much of his term, but this government's failure to meet its goals was mostly due to its inability to bring about important structural changes that could unleash the Mexican economy and provide opportunity to many of the people who would come to vote for L6pez . Obrador in 2006. These failures were all symptoms of a more fundamental problem: the inability of Mexico's institutions to work effectively. For seven decades of PRJ rule, the institutions of government were secondary actors. The party conferred on the president an extraordinary ability to influence all events through its wide web of extragovernmental control. With the defeat of the PRJ in 2000, the "new" presidency became much weaker, for Fox had only his constitutional powers to manipulate. This change, along with both a PRI attitude that saw Fox's failure as its ticket back to power and Fox's own political inexperience, led to a six-year period of governmental paralysis that added strength to Lopez Obrador's campaign. The ineffectiveness and the political manipulation of the institutions of government have led to widespread distrust on the part of much of the population. Lopez Obrador was able to generate mass support for his rejection of the election results because so many of his compatriots are preternaturally inclined to believe the worst about their government, including, in this instance, the
An Incomplete Transition To deal with the disaffected and the dispossessed, Mexico's economy needs to deliver more benefits to more of its citizens, and its government must become more effective, open, and honest. This will require deep reform of
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national electoral commission, which is in fact effective, efficient, and honest. For Mexico to break the vicious cycle of public distrust, resentment, and insufficient development, there must be a reform that matches the new reality of political power with the institutions that are supposed to wield it. In a sense, Mexico's institutions need to be refounded. An ambitious reform would transform the relationship between the Congress and the executive, the structure of Congress itself, and the party system. Those political institutions served the PRI era well, but they make little sense today. For instance, 200 of the 500 members of Mexico's lower house represent no constituencies but are political operatives chosen by the party hierarchies. The hallowed Mexican tradition of no reelection of public officials (at least not to the same office) means that many officials pay little attention to their constituents, causing further disaffection. A revision of the relationship between the states and the national government and of the operation of the giant state-owned oil and electricity monopolies are also in order. Even a modest reform, one that would create mechanisms such as a "guillotine law," which establishes a peremptory period for a legislature to act on an executive bill lest it be automatically approved, would help rebalance the relationship between the legislature and the presidency.
tries that still prohibit private risk investment in oil and gas exploration. This restriction limits the potential for energy growth at a time when Mexico (the United States' second-largest source of foreign oil) sees its oil production declining and gas imports from the United States increasing, Legal and constitutional changes are imperative if Mexico is going to be able to exploit its vast energy resources. Attaining higher levels of economic growth will require a combination of foreign and domestic investment and a more competent government. In some sectors, such as energy, attracting more investment will be dependent on significant legal or constitutional changes. But in all cases, increased investment will demand a much more effective government, less cumbersome regulations, a fair and transparent judicial system, more consumer-conscious public utilities, improved infrastructure, and a concerted effort to promote competition by limiting the power of private and government monopolies and of public-sector unions, all of which profit from keeping things the way they are. The enormous social gaps that the country faces and that L6pez Obrador effectively spoke to in his campaign must be addressed with greater vigor. The overarching perception is that many people (perhaps a majority) have been left out of the development process. Many of these are not the poorest of the poor but rather those who face unsurpassable obstacles in their daily lives while watching wealthier Mexicans do well and boast loudly. The administrations of Ernesto Zedillo (1994--2000) and Fox developed professional, high-quality programs to address poverty. These programs (which have even been copied in other countries) actually made a considerable dent in Mexico's level of abject poverty, but the percentage of those considered to be poor still hovers around 50 percent. These programs use the educational system to help children of today's poor stay in school, thereby disrupting the cycle of poverty. But the educational system as a whole is in profound need of investment and reform-the latter much fought against by powerful teachers unions. Public education in Mexico has not yet risen to the challenge of converting itself into a vital source of opportunity for the era of the information economy and of Mexico's introduction into the global market. Changing the system will take much more than new textbooks. A modern educational system geared toward the development of true equality of opportunity would alter Mexico's social structure radically. Equally important, a modern system to finance education and to fund higher studies for poorer people would create opportunities that today are absent. All of this will require not only the resolve on the part
Much political blood will be spilled in the coming months, but partly instability could create opportunities. Some of the most glaring dysfunctions of the Mexican system are well known and frequently discussed. But little has been done to change them, because the status quo benefits important vested interests. Evasion and loopholes in the tax system mean that the government collects too little of Mexico's national product to allow for adequate growth-stimulating redistribution through social programs, infrastructure development, and education. The need for serious fiscal reform is paramount, and will be even more so as pensions become ever more costly for an aging population. In addition, the labor market remains inflexible. Excessive protection for workers translates into fewer jobs: industries are unwilling to hire new workers because they cannot release them when an econoinic downturn takes place. Labor reform is an important key to economic growth. Mexico also shares shame of place with North Korea as the only two coun-
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of the new president and the neW Congress to carry out changes but the political skills necessary to transform the underlying structures as well. Mexico's government must also find ways to lighten the weight of bureaucracy and red tape. Creating a new company in Mexico is difficult and expensive. Maintaining a legal entity and complying with tax and other requirements is so burdensome that millions of Mexicans set up informal, non-tax-paying businesses. Avoiding bureaucracy and tax collectors makes sense from the perspective of the individuals involved, but it does not do enough to create wealth, permanent well-paying jobs, and resources for legitimate government needs. Mexico must expand the modern sector of the economy by developing government competence and entrepreneurial competitiveness while addressing the inequitable social structure of Mexican society. Neither Lopez Obrador's reformulated PRI-ism nor Calderon's Foxist campaign promises offer the kind of root-and-branch strnctural reform that'is needed. Once the new president is sworn in on December I, he will have to begin immediately to promote both economic growth and greater social equity to provide today's poor with opportunities to move upward. The new president will have no time to spare. The world is moving too fast. Mexico no longer follows Canada as the United States' second-biggest trading partner. It has been bumped down the pecking order by China. Unless the next six years bring high and sustained economic growth, millions of new jobs, and accompanying programs designed to decrease social inequality, the country will fall further behind in the global race, and more of its people will become disaffected and disenchanted. The grievances and resentments that played such an important role in Lopez Obrador's run for power were not created by him. And they will grow unless Mexico enters a period of profound institutional and economic change. Such reforms are essential, but some are so immense and politically difficult that they have disheartened Mexico's political leaders and caused them to redirect their energies to softer targets. Mexican politics has been notably sterile and unimaginative in recent years, marked by smallminded games of intrigue and daily point-scoring over opponents. All of the three major parties need considerable internal overhauls. The PRD is a collection of tribes, and its moral leader and founder, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, is notably uncomfortable with Lopez Obrador's brand of populism. The PRI, humiliated by its third-place showing, will likely enter a period of internecine warfare. And the PAN will surely recognize that its performance in the election was hampered by an internal division between its more modern, business-oriented wing and the old school of social conservatism.
Much political blood will be spilled in the coming months, but the very instability could provide some new opportunities. Both Calderon and L6pez Obrador made reassuring sounds during the campaign about broadening the base of their governments to include former opponents. Whether they were serious remains to be tested, but in a divided Congress, there will be no chance for movement without political coalitions built on a consensual program of reform.
Joined at the Hip It is a given that Mexico's success or failure will have a significant impact on the United States. The two countries are linked by a constant flow of commerce, culture, and people. Mexico's complex attitude toward the United States defies easy description. It is often contradictory: at times Mexico seems to act like one large Melanesian cargo cult waiting for whatever might fall from the northern sky, and at other times its fears of a loss of sovereignty and its natural prickliness keep the United States at an unnecessary distance. Mexico has tried to maintain the pride of distance while still enjoying the practical benefits of propinquity. The relationship is particularly awkward now because of the high tensions in both countries over immigration. Misreading President George W. Bush's natural Texas goodwill and rudimentary understanding of the issue, President Fox decided to bet his administration's fortunes on a change in U.S. immigration policy. The two presidents met at Fox's ranch in February 2001 and agreed to reach an understanding on a new approach within a matter of months. Political operatives in the White House, however, soon put a stop to serious consideration of the proposals offered by the State Department. They argued that liberalizing the law was too dangerous politically so early in the president's first term. After September 11, this
view was set in concrete. Unfortunately, Fox and his first foreign minister, Jorge Castaneda, could not, or would not, read the writing on the border wall. They blundered by insisting on pushing for solutions that had become politically untenable in the United States and by actively scuttling possibilities for incremental change. Fox and Castaneda made the same mistake that successive U.S. administrations had earlier: they publicly reduced the complexity of the U.S.-Mexican relationship to just one issue; for Washington it had been drugs in the 1990s, and for Mexico City it became immigration. The Mexicans' absolutist position and misreading of the U.S. political scene gave the White House a way out of taking any action, allowed the immigration issue to fester, and turned what had been a fringe group of right-wing
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members of the U.S. Congress into the voice of the Republican Party, ultimately resulting in the grotesque House bill passed in 2006 that would declare illegal aliens felons (as if the United States needed II million more criminals to track down). The poorly handled immigration issue also caused both governments to lose focus on the most critical goal: facilitating trade and investment to promote economic growth and greater competitiveness for North America as a whole. This is the tme key issue in the U.S.-Mexican relationship. The immigration mess is a direct result of the lack of growth and opportunity in Mexico. The U.S. Congress may pass some legislation that will be touted by its supporters as the answer to the problem, but it will be as ineffective as previous efforts. As long as Mexico remains poor and the lure of opportunity across the border persists, workers will continue to head north. Neither walls nor new laws will stop the flow. But there are immediate steps that the United States could take to make the flow more orderly and humane and, not incidentally, give the new Mexican government an important public victory early in its tenure. An early test of how willing Washington will be to help Mexico relates to the last stage of compliance with the NAFTA agricultural provisions, which would end the remaining Mexican limitations on the importation of corn, beans, and powdered milk. Previous Mexican governments did not concern themselves enough with preparing Mexico's poorest peasants to face competition. The new government should create an assistance program directed to that segment of Mexican agriculture, so that the producers can survive, while at the same time negotiating a schedule of compliance with its NAFTA partners. This is one area in which a comprehending U.S. attitude could help immeasurably.
Washington should also focus on how to help Mexico grow its economy. There are several possible steps it should consider. A major fund for infrastructure development to facilitate trade, along the lines of what the wealthier northern European nations created for their poorer European Union colleagues, would make sense and benefit both countries. But it is doubtful that the political mood of the United States would support that or that Mexico could develop the right mechanisms to make the best use of the additional resources. Another initiative, perhaps with a greater chance of political success, might be a massive infusion of funds to improve Mexico's educational system. Certainly, the United States could end its foot-dragging on some NAFTA provisions (such as opening the border to Mexican long-haul tmcks) and try to find a mechanism for NAFTA dispute resolution that is effective and efficient. Energy cooperation with Mexico has been limited, largely owing to Mexico's sensitivity on the issue, but the new focus on alternative fuels could open some doors for international cooperation. And among the many good reasons for the United States to review and reduce its farm subsidies, an especially compelling one is that these subsidies undercut small Mexican producers, which pushes them across the border to find work. Nearly 200 years of often rocky U.S.-Mexican relations cannot be totally reversed over the next six years. But a closer working relationship would help both nations address mutual issues. Mexico must provide its citizens with more opportunities. This is a Mexican task, but the United States has a vested interest-and a role to play-in its success. LUIS RUBIO is President of CIDAC (the Center of Research for Development), in Mexico City, and a co-author of Mexico Under Fox. JEFFREY DAVIDOW is President of the Institute of the Americas and the author of The U.S. and Mexico: The Bear and the Porcupine. He was U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 1998 to 2002,
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs, September/Oclober 2006, pp. 75-85. Copyright © 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. Inc.
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Article 31
Latin America's Left Thrn JORGE
G.
CASTANEDA
A Tale of Two lefts Just over a decade ago, Latin America seemed poised to begin a virtuous cycle of economic progress and improved democratic governance, overseen by a growing number of centrist technocratic governments. In Mexico, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, buttressed by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, was ready for his handpicked successor to win the next presidential election. Former Finance Minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso was about to beat out the radical labor leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for the presidency of Brazil. Argentine President Carlos Menem had pegged the peso to the dollar and put his populist Peronist legacy behind him. And at the invi· tation of President Bill Clinton, Latin American leaders were preparing to gather in Miami for the Summit of the Americas, signaling an almost unprecedented convergence between the southern and nOlthern halves of the Western Hemisphere. What a difference ten years can make. Although the region has just enjoyed its best two years of economic growth in a long time and real threats to democratic rule are few and far between, the landscape today is transformed. Latin America is swerving left, and distinct backlashes are under way against the predominant trends of the last 15 years: free· market reforms, agreement with the United States on a number of issues, and the consolidation of representative democracy. This reaction is more politics than policy, and more nuanced than it may appear. But it is real. Starting with Hugo Chavez's victory in Venezuela eight years ago and poised to culminate in the possible election of Andres Manuel L6pez Obrador in Mexico's July 2 presidential contest, a wave of leaders, parties, and movements generically labeled "leftist" have swept into power in one Latin American country after another. After Chavez, it was Lula and the Workers' Party in Brazil, then Nestor Kirchner in Argentina and Tabare Vazquez in Uruguay, and then, earlier this year, Evo Morales in Bolivia. If the long shot Ollanta Humala wins the April presidential election in Peru and L6pez Obrador wins in Mexico, it will seem as if a veritable left-wing tsunami has hit the region. Colombia and Central America are the only exceptions, but even in Nicaragua, the possibility of a win by Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega cannot be dismissed. The rest of the world has begun to take note of this left-wing resurgence, with concern and often more than a little hysteria. But understanding the reasons behind these developments requires recognizing that there is not one Latin American left today; there are two. One is modem, open-minded, refonnist,
and internationalist, and it springs, paradoxically, from the hard· core left of the past. The other, born of the great tradition of Latin American popUlism, is nationalist, strident, and close-minded. The first is well aware of its past mistakes (as well as those of its erstwhile role models in Cuba and the Soviet Union) and has changed accordingly. The second, unfortunately, has not.
Utopia Redefined The reasons for Latin America's turn to the left are not hard to discern. Along with many other commentators and public intellectuals, I started detecting those reasons nearly fifteen years ago, and I recorded them in my book Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War, which made several points. The first was that the fall of the Soviet Union would help the Latin American left by removing its geopolitical stigma. Washington would no longer be able to accuse any left-of-center regime in the region of being a "Soviet beach· head" (as it had every such government since it fomented the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz's administration in Guatemala in 1954); left-wing governments would no longer have to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union, because the latter had simply disappeared. The second point was that regardless of the success or failure of economic reforms in the 1990s and the discrediting of traditional Latin American economic policies, Latin America's extreme inequality (Latin America is the world's most unequal region), poverty, and concentration of wealth, income, power, and opportunity meant that it would have to be governed from the left of center. The combination of inequality and democracy tends to cause a movement to the left everywhere. This was true in western Europe from the end of the nineteenth century until after World War II; it is true today in Latin America. The impoverished masses vote for the type of policies that, they hope, will make them less poor. Third, the advent of widespread democratization and the consolidation of democratic elections as the only road to power would, sooner or later, lead to victories for the left-precisely because of the social, demographic, and ethnic configuration of the region. In other words, even without the other proximate causes, Latin America would almost certainly have tilted left. This forecast became aU the more certain once it became evident that the economic, social, and political reforms imple· mented in Latin America starting in the mid·1980s had not delivered on their promises. With the exception of Chile, which has been governed by a left-of·center coalition since 1989, the
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established a solid presence in organized labor, and exercised significant influence in academic and intellectual circles. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, these parties had lost most of their prestige and combativeness. Their corruption, submission to Moscow, accommodation with sitting governments, and assimilation by local power elites had largely discredited them in the eyes of the young and the radical. But the Cuban Revolution brought new life to this strain of the left. In time, groups descended from the old communist left fused with Havana-inspired guerrilla bands. There were certainly some tensions, Castro accused the leader of the Bolivian Communist Party of betraying Che Guevara and leading him to his death in Bolivia in 1967; the Uruguayan and Chilean Communist Parties (the region's strongest) never supported the local Castroist armed groups. Yet thanks to the passage of time, to Soviet and Cuban understanding, and to the sheer weight of repression generated by military coups across the hemisphere, the Castroists and Communists all came together-and they remain together today. The origin of the other Latin American left is peculiarly Latin American. It arose out of the region's strange contribution to political science: good old-fashioned populism. Such populism has almost always been present almost everywhere in Latin America. It is frequently in power, or close to it. It claims as its founders historical icons of great mythical stature, from Peru's Victor Raul Haya de la Torre and Colombia's Jorge Gaitan (neither made it to office) to Mexico's Lazaro Cardenas and Brazil's Getulio Vargas, both foundational figures in their countries' twentieth-century history, and to Argentina's Juan Per6n and Ecuador's Jose Velasco Ibarra. The list is not exhaustive, but it is illustrative: many of these nations' founding-father equivalents were seen in their time and are still seen now as noble benefactors of the working class. They made their mark on their nations, and their followers continue to pay tribute to them. Among many of these countries' poor and dispossessed, they inspire respect, even adulation, to this day. These populists are representative of a very different leftoften virulently anticommunist, always authoritarian in one fashion or another, and much more interested in policy as an instrument for attaining and conserving power than in power as a tool for making policy. They did do things for the poorPer6n and Vargas mainly for the urban proletariat, Cardenas for the Mexican peasantry-but they also created the corporatist structures that have since plagued the political systems, as well as the labor and peasant movements, in their countries. They nationalized large sectors of their countries' economies, extending well beyond the so-called commanding heights, by targeting everything in sight: oil (Cardenas in Mexico), railroads (Per6n in Argentina), steel (Vargas in Brazil), tin (Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia), copper (Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru). They tended to cut sweetheart deals with the budding local business sector, creating the proverbial crony capitalism that was decried much later. Their justifications for such steps were always superficially ideological (nationalism, economic development) but at bottom pragmatic: they needed money to give away but did not like taxes. They squared that circle by
region has had singularly unimpressive economic growth rates. They remain well below those of the glory days of the region's development (1940-80) and also well below those of other developing nations-China, of course, but also India, Malaysia, Poland, and many others. Between 1940 and 1980, Brazil and Mexico, for example, averaged six percent growth per year; from 1980 to 2000, their growth rates were less than half that. Low growth rates have meant the persistence of dismal poverty, inequality, high unemployment, a lack of competitiveness, and poor infrastructure. Democracy, although welcomed and supported by broad swaths of Latin American societies, did little to eradicate the region's secular plagues: corruption, a weak or nonexistent rule of law, ineffective governance, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few. And despite hopes that relations with the United States would improve, they are worse today than at any other time in recent memory, including the 1960s (an era defined by conflicts over Cuba) and the 1980s (defined by the Central American wars and Ronald Reagan's "contras"). But many of us who rightly foretold the return of the left were at least partly wrong about the kind of left that would emerge. We thought-perhaps naively-that the aggiomamento of the left in Latin America would rapidly and neatly follow that of socialist parties in France and Spain and of New Labour in the United Kingdom. In a few cases, this occurred-Chile certainly, Brazil tenuously. But in many others, it did not. One reason for our mistake was that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring about the collapse of its Latin American equivalent, Cuba, as many expected it would. Although the links and subordination of many left-wing parties to Havana have had few domestic electoral implications (and Washington has largely stopped caring anyway), the left's close ties to and emotional dependency on Fidel Castro became an almost insurmountable obstacle to its reconstruction on many issues. But the more fundamental explanation has to do with the roots of many of the movements that are now in power. Knowing where left-wing leaders and parties come from-in particular, which of the two strands of the left in Latin American history they are a part of-is critical to understanding who they are and where they are going.
Origins of the Species The left-defined as that current of thought, politics, and policy that stresses social improvements over macroeconomic orthodoxy, egalitarian distribution of wealth over its creation, sovereignty over international cooperation. democracy (at least when in opposition. if not necessarily once in power) over governmental effectiveness-has followed two different paths in Latin America. One left sprang up out of the Communist International and the Bolshevik Revolution and has followed a path similar to that of the left in the rest of the world. The Chilean, Uruguayan, Brazilian, Salvadoran, and, before Castro's revolution, Cuban Communist Parties. for example, obtained significant shares of the popular vote at one point or another, participated in "popular front" or "national unity" governments in the 1930s and 1940s,
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Article 31. Latin America's Left Turn capturing natural-resource or monopoly rents, which allowed them to spend money on the descamisados, the "shirtless," without raising taxes on the middle class. When everything else fails, the thinking went, spend money.
A makeover for the radical left is exactly what is needed for good governance in the region.
The ideological corollary to this bizarre blend of inclusion of the excluded, macroeconomic folly, and political staying power (Per6n was the dominant figure in Argentine politics from 1943 through his death in 1974, the Cardenas dynasty is more present than ever in Mexican politics) was virulent, strident nationalism. Per6n was elected president in 1946 with the slogan "Braden or Peron" (Spruille Braden was then the U.S. ambassador to Buenos Aires). When Vargas committed suicide in 1954, he darkly insinuated that he was a victim of American imperialism. Such nationalism was more than rhetorical. In regimes whose domestic policy platform was strictly power-driven and pragmatic, it was the agenda. These two subspecies of the Latin American left have always had an uneasy relationship. On occasion they have worked together, but at other times they have been at war, as when Per6n returned from exile in June 1973 and promptly massacred a fair share of the Argentine radical left. In some countries, the populist left simply devoured the other one, although peacefully and rather graciously: in Mexico in the late 1980s, the tiny Communist Party disappeared, and former PRJ (Institutional Revolutionary Party) members, such as Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, Portirio Munoz Ledo, and the current presidential front-runner, Lopez Obrador, took over everything from its buildings and finances to its congressional representation and relations with Cuba to form the left-wing PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution). More recently, something funny has happened to both kinds of leftist movements on their way back to power. The communist, socialist, and Castroist left, with a few exceptions, has been able to reconstruct itself, thanks largely to an acknowledgment of its failures and those of its erstwhile models. Meanwhile, the populist left-with an approach to power that depends on giving away money, a deep attachment to the nationalist fervor of another era, and no real domestic agenda-has remained true to itself. The latter perseveres in its cult of the past: it waxes nostalgic about the glory days of Peronism, the Mexican Revolution, and, needless to say, Castro. The former, familiar with its own mistakes, defeats, and tragedies, and keenly aware of the failures of the Soviet Union and Cuba, has changed its colors.
Castro's Unlikely Heirs When the reformed communist left has reached office in recent years, its economic policies have been remarkably similar to those of its immediate predecessors, and its respect for
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democracy has proved full-fledged and sincere. Old-school anti-Americanism has been tempered by years of exile, realism, and resignation. The best examples of the reconstructed, formerly radical left are to be found in Chile, Uruguay, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Brazil. This left emphasizes social policy--education, antipoverty programs, health care, housing-but within a more or less orthodox market framework. It usually attempts to deepen and broaden democratic institutions. On occasion, Latin America's age-old vices-corruption, a penchant for authoritarian rulehave led it astray. It disagrees with the United States frequently but rarely takes matters to the brink. In Chile, former President Ricardo Lagos and his successor, Michelle Bachelet, both come from the old Socialist Party (Lagos from its moderate wing, Bachelet from the less temperate faction). Their left-wing party has governed for 16 consecutive years, in a fruitful alliance with the Christian Democrats. This alliance has made Chile a true model for the region. Under its stewardship, the country has enjoyed high rates of economic growth; significant reductions in poverty; equally significant improvements in education, housing, and infrastructure; a slight drop in inequality; a deepening of democracy and the dismantling of Augusto Pinochet' s political legacy; a settling of accounts (although not of scores) regarding human rights violations of the past; and, last but not at all least, a strong, mature relationship with the United States, including a free-trade agreement signed by George W. Bush and ratified by the U.S. Congress and Washington's support for the Chilean candidate to head the Organization of American States. U.S.-Chilean ties have continued to prosper despite Chile's unambiguous opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council in 2003. In Uruguay, Vazquez ran for president twice before finally winning a little more than a year ago. His coalition has always been the same: the old Uruguayan Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and many former Marxist Tupamaro guerrillas, who made history in the 1960s and 1970s by, among other things, kidnapping and executing CIA station chief Dan Mitrione in Montevideo in 1970 and being featured in Costa-Gavras' 1973 film State of Siege. There was reason to expect Vazquez to folIowa radical line once elected-but history once again trumped ideology. Although Vazquez has restored Uruguay's relations with Cuba and every now and then rails against neoliberalism and Bush, he has also negotiated an investment-protection agreement with the United States, sent his finance minister to Washington to explore the possibility of forging a free-trade agreement, and stood up to the "antiglobalization, politically correct" groups in neighboring Argentina on the construction of two enormous wood-pulp mills in the Uruguay River estuary. He refused to attend Morales' inauguration as president of Bolivia and has threatened to veto a bill legalizing abortion if it gets to his desk. His government is, on substance if not on rhetoric, as economically orthodox as any other. And with good reason: a country of3.5 million inhabitants with the lowest poverty rate and the least inequality in Latin America should not mess with its relative success.
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Brazil is a different story, but not a diametrically opposed one. Even before his inauguration in 2003, Lula had indicated that he would follow most of his predecessor's macroeconomic policies and comply with the fiscal and monetary targets agreed on with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He has done so, achieving impressive results in economic stability (Brazil continues to generate a hefty fiscal surplus every year), but GDP growth has been disappointing, as have employment levels and social indicators. Lula has tried to compensate for his macroeconomic orthodoxy with innovative social initiatives (particularly his "Zero Hunger" drive and land reform). At the end of the day, however, perhaps his most important achievement on this front will be the generalization of the Bolsa Familia (Family Fund) initiative, which was copied directly from the antipoverty program of Mexican Presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox. This is a successful, innovative welfare program, but as neoliberal and scantly revolutionary as one can get. On foreign policy, Brazil, like just about every Latin American country, has had its run-ins with the Bush administration, over issues including trade, UN reform, and how to deal with Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela. But perhaps the best metaphor for the current state of U.S.-Brazilian relations today was the scene in Brasilia last November, when Lula welcomed Bush at his home, while across the street demonstrators from his own party burned the U.S. president in effigy. The Workers' Party, which Lula founded in 1980 after a long metalworkers' strike in the industrial outskirts of Sao Paulo, has largely followed him on the road toward social democracy. Many of the more radical cadres of the party, or at least those with the most radical histories (such as Jose Genoino and Jose Dirceu). have become moderate reformist leaders, despite their pasts and their lingering emotional devotion to Cuba. (Lula shares this devotion, and yet it has not led him to subservience to Castro: when Lula visited Havana in 2004, Castro wanted to hold a mass rally at the Plaza de la Revoluci6n; instead, Castro got a 24-hour in-and-out visit from the Brazilian president, with almost no public exposure.) Lula and many of his comrades are emblematic of the transformation of the old, radical, guerrillabased, Castroist or communist left. Granted, the conversion is not complete: the corruption scandals that have rocked Brazil's government have more to do with a certain neglect of democratic practices than with any personal attempt at enrichment. Still, the direction in which Lula and his allies are moving is clear. Overall, this makeover of the radical left is good for Latin America. Given the region's inequality, poverty, still-weak democratic tradition, and unfinished nation building, this left offers precisely what is needed for good governance in the region. If Chile is any example, this left's path is the way out of poverty, authoritarian rule, and, eventually, inequality. This left is also a viable, sensitive, and sensible alternative to the other left-the one that speaks loudly but carries a very small social stick.
Populism Redux The leftist leaders who have arisen from a populist, nationalist past with few ideological underpinnings-Chavez with his military background, Kirchner with his Peronist roots, Morales with
his coca-leaf growers' militancy and agitprop, Lopez Obrador with his origins in the PRI-have proved much less responsive to modernizing influences. For them, rhetoric is more important than substance, and the fact of power is more important than its responsible exercise. The despair of poor constituencies is a tool rather than a challenge, and taunting the United States trumps promoting their countries' real interests in the world. The dif ference is obvious: Chavez is not Castro; he is Per6n with oil. Morales is not an indigenous Che; he is a skillful and irresponsible populist. L6pez Obrador is neither Lula nor Chavez; he comes straight from the PRI of Luis Echeverria, Mexico's president from 1970 to 1976, from which he learned how to be a cash-dispensing, authoritarian-inclined populist. Kirchner is a true-blue Peronist, and proud of it. For all of these leaders, economic performance, democratic values, programmatic achievements, and good relations with the United States are not imperatives but bothersome constraints that miss the real point. They are more intent on maintaining popularity at any cost, picking as many fights as possible with Washington, and getting as much control as they can over sources of revenue, including oil, gas, and suspended foreigndebt payments. Argentina's Kirchner is a classic (although somewhat ambiguous) case. Formerly the governor of a small province at the end of the world, he was elected in the midst of a monumental economic crisis and has managed to bring his country out of it quite effectively. Inflation has been relatively controlled, growth is back, and interest rates have fallen. Kirchner also renegotiated Argentina's huge foreign debt skillfully, if perhaps a bit too boldly. He has gone further than his predecessors in settling past grievances, particularly regarding the "dirty war" that the military and his Peronist colleagues waged in the 1970s. He has become a darling of the left and seems to be on a roll, with approval ratings of over 70 percent. But despite the left-wing company he keeps, Kirchner is at his core a die-hard Peronist, much more interested in bashing his creditors and the IMF than in devising social policy, in combating the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) than in strengthening Mercosur, in cuddling up to Morales, Castro, and Chavez than in lowering the cost of importing gas from Bolivia. No one knows exactly what will happen when Argentina's commodity boom busts or when the country is forced to return to capital markets for fresh funds. Nor does anyone really know what Kirchner intends to do when his economic recovery runs out of steam. But it seems certain that the Peronist chromosomes in the country's DNA will remain dominant: Kirchner will hand out money, expropriate whatever is needed and available, and lash out at the United States and the IMP on every possible occasion. At the same time, he will worry little about the number of Argentines living under the poverty line and be as chummy with Chavez as he can. Chavez is doing much the same in Venezuela. He is leading the fight against the FTAA, which is going nowhere anyWay. He is making life increasingly miserable for foreign-above all American-companies. He is supporting, one way or the other, left-wing groups and leaders in many neighboring countries. He has established a strategic alliance with Havana that w
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Article 31. Latin America's Left Turn was to Havana, his second to Caracas. Humala, a retired lieu~ tenant colonel in the Peruvian army, has confessed to being an admirer of the Venezuelan president. Like Chavez, he started his political career with a failed coup, in his case against Alberto Fujimori in 2000. L6pez Obrador's deputy, certain to be the next mayor of Mexico City, has openly declared his admiration for Chavez and Castro, despite having been a high-level official under Salinas. What will prove most damaging is that the populist left loves power more than democracy, and it will fight to keep it at great cost. Its disregard for democracy and the rule oflaw is legendary. Often using democratic means, it has often sought to concentrate its power through new constitutions, take control of the media and the legislative and judicial branches of government, and perpetuate its rule by using electoral reforms, nepotism, and the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Chavez is the best example of this left, but certainly not the only one: L6pez Obnidor has already committed himself to "cleaning up" Mexico's Supreme Court and central bank and opposes any autonomy for the countty's infant regulatory agencies. This populist left has traditionally been disastrous for Latin America, and there is no reason to suppose it will stop being so in the future. As in the past, its rule will lead to inflation, greater poverty and inequality, and confrontation with Washington. It also threatens to roll back the region's most important achievement of recent years: the establishment of democratic rule and respect for human rights.
includes the presence of nearly 20,000 Cuban teachers, doctors, and cadres in Venezuela. He is flirting with Iran and Argentina on nuclear-technology issues. Most of all, he is attempting, with some success, to split the hemisphere into two camps: one pro-Chavez, one pro-American. At the same time, Chavez is driving his country into the ground. A tragicomic symbol of this was the collapse of the highway from Caracas to the Maiquetfa airport a few months ago because of lack of maintenance. Venezuela' s poverty figures and human development indices have deteriorated since 1999, when Chavez took office. A simple comparison with Mexicowhich has not exactly thrived in recent years-shows how badly Venezuela is faring. Over the past seven years, Mexico's economy grew by 17.5 percent, while Venezuela's failed to grow at all. From 1997 to 2003, Mexico's per capita GDP rose by 9.5 percent, while Venezuela's shrank by 45 percent. From 1998 to 2005, the Mexican peso lost 16 percent of its value, while the value of the Venezuelan bolivar dropped by 292 percent. Between 1998 and 2004, the number of Mexican households living in extreme poverty decreased by 49 percent, while the number of Venezuelan households in extreme poverty rose by 4.5 percent. In 2005, Mexico's inflation rate was estimated at 3.3 percent, the lowest in years, while Venezuela's was 16 percent. Although Chavez does very little for the poor of his own country (among whom he remains popular), he is doing much more for other countries: giving oil away to Cuba and other Caribbean states, buying Argentina's debt, allegedly financing political campaigns in Bolivia and Peru and perhaps Mexico. He also frequently picks fights with Fox and Bush and is buying arms from Spain and Russia. This is about as close to traditional Latin American populism as one can get-and as far from a modern and socially minded left as one can be. The populist left leaders who are waiting in the wings look likely to deliver much the same. Morales in Bolivia has already made it to power. L6pez Obrador in Mexico is close. Although Humala in Peru is still a long shot, he certainly cannot be dismissed. Such leaders will follow the footsteps of Chavez and Kirchner, because they have the same roots and share the same creed. They will all, of course, be constrained by their national realities-Morales by the fact that Bolivia is South America's poorest nation, L6pez Obrador by a 2,000-mile border with the United States, Humala by a fragmented country and the lack of an established political party to work with. Still, they will tread the same path. Morales and Humala have both said that they will attempt either to renationalize their countries' natural resources (gas, oil, copper, water) or renego~ tiate the terms under which foreign companies extract them. L6pez Obrador has stated that he will not allow private investment in PEMEX, Mexico's state-owned oil company, or in the national electric power company. He has given away money right and left in Mexico City, financing his magnanimity with debt and federal tax revenues. Morales has deftly played on his indigenous origins to ingratiate himself with the majority of his country's popUlation, to whom he is promising everything but giving very little. Morales and Humala have received at least rhetorical support from Chavez, and Morales' first trip abroad
Right left, Wrong left Distinguishing between these two broad left-wing currents is the best basis for serious policy, from Washington, Brussels, Mexico City, or anywhere else. There is not a tremendous amount Washington or any other government can actually do to alter the current course of events in Latin America. The Bush administration could make some difference by delivering on its promises to incumbents in the region (on matters such as immigration and trade), thereby supporting continuity without interfering in the electoral process; in South American nations where there is a strong European presence, countries such as France and Spain could help by pointing out that certain policies and attitudes have certain consequences. But there is a much bolder course, a more statesmanlike approach, that would foster a "right left" instead of working to subvert any left's resurgence. This strategy would involve actively and substantively supporting the right left when it is in power: signing free-trade agreements with Chile, taking Brazil seriously as a trade interlocutor, engaging these nations' governments on issues involving third countries (such as Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela), and bringing their leaders and public intellectuals into the fold. The right left should be able to show not only that there are no penalties for being what it is, but also that it can deliver concrete benefits. The international community should also clarify what it expects from the "wrong left," given that it exists and that attempts to displace it would be not only morally unacceptable but also pragmatically ineffective. The first point to emphasize
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City to the U.S. border, live and let live. If CMvez really wants to acquire nuclear technology from Argentina, let him, as long as he does it under International Atomic Energy Agency supervision and safeguards. Under no circumstances should anyone accept the division of the hemisphere into two camps-for the United States, against the United States-because under such a split, the Americas themselves always lose out. Such a division happened over Cuba in the 1960s and over Central America in the 1980s. Now that the Cold War is over, it should never happen again. So instead of arguing over whether to welcome or bemoan the advent of the left in Latin America, it would be wiser to separate the sensible from the irresponsible and to support the former and contain the latter. If done right, this would go a long way toward helping the region finally find its bearings and, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez might put it, end its hundreds of years of solitude.
is that Latin American governments of any persuasion must abide by their countries' commitments regarding human rights and democracy. The region has built up an incipient scaffolding on these matters over recent years, and any backsliding, for whatever reason or purpose, should be met by a rebuke from the international community. The second point to stress is that all governments must continue to comply with the multilateral effort to build a new international legal order, one that addresses, among other things, the environment, indigenous people' s rights, international criminal jurisdiction (despite Washington's continued rejection of the International Criminal Court and its pressure on several Latin American governments to do the same), nuclear nonproliferation, World Trade Organization rules and norms, regional agreements, and the fight against corruption, drug trafficking, and terrorism, consensually defined. Europe and the United States have enormous leverage in many of these countries. They should use it. Finally, Washington and other governments should avoid the mistakes of the past. Some fights are simply not worth fighting: If Morales wants to squabble with Chile over access to the sea, with Argentina over the price of gas, with Peru over border issues and indigenous ancestry, stand aside. If, for whatever reason, L6pez Obrador wants to build a bullet train from Mexico
JORGE G. CASTANEDA is the author of Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War and Compaiiero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. Having resigned as Mexico's Foreign Minister in 2003. he is currently Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at New York University.
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006, pp. 28-43. Copyright © 2006 by the Council on Foreign Reiations,lnc.
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Article 32
Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State "The ruling party is the state, the regime, and the government melded into a seamless whole, sustained by violence and deploying violence to eviscerate all obstacles to its endless trips to the oil wells."
IKE OKONTA
T
o understand Nigeria today it may help to return to a bloody event that took place in early July 2002 in the country's oil-rich Niger Delta. Primary elections for the country's rnling People's Democratic Party were held in the town of Nembe that month. Two PDP factions, led by local politicians with substantial youth followings, supported separate candidates whom they hoped to see nominated local council chairman in the primary. The stakes were high. Whoever emerged victorious would most certainly move easily to victory when the main interparty elections were conducted in a year's time, given the PDP's near-total grip on power and strategic resources in Nigeria's various states and the country's capital. The new leader would in tum oversee the five oil fields in the area surrounding Nembe, from which Shell Petroleum Development Company, the Nigerian subsidiary of Royal Dutch/Shell, produces an estimated 200,000 barrels of oil per day. By the evening of July 6, when primary elections came to an end in Nembe and the seven other local councils in Bayelsa State, 40 people had been killed in election-related violence, most of them in Nembe and Brass, a satellite community where the local subsidiary of Agip of Italy operates an oil terminal. The two factional leaders and their storm troopers were at the heart of the political violence that engulfed Nembe and forced many of its residents to flee. Lionel Jonathan, one of the factional leaders, was head of Isongufuro, a cultural organization formed in 1992 that had metamorphosed into one of the most feared youth vigilante groups in Nembe. Jonathan, a former Bayelsa state commissioner for the environment, and his band of vigilantes were the state governor's political enforcers in Nembe. (He would later act as campaign manager for the governor's bid for reelection in April 2003.) Pitted against Jonathan and Isongufuro was Nimi Barigha-Amange, a former oil executive who nursed the ambition of displacing the governor and saw the local council pri' mary election as his opening move. Barigha-Amange was leader of Isenasawo, a rival vigilante group that emerged in 1998 to counter Isongufuro's excesses in Nembe. Although Isongufuro had the state government's backing and the machinery
of "legitimate" violence at its disposal, Isenasawo was the dominant political force in Nembe at the time of the elections.
How to Rig an Election The primary elections were a farce, in which men of violence played the starring role. The governor, anxious to ensure that candidates of his choice emerged victorious, had dispatched teams of heavily armed anti-riot police on the evening of July 4 to Nembe, Brass, and other areas where he feared a free and open vote would go against him. Groups like Isongufuro were to provide local backup. When party members in the region came out to vote on the morning of July 5, they found that voters' cards and other electoral materials had been diverted to the homes of local politicos loyal to the governor and his henchmen. In Nembe, Isongufuro dispersed voters, murdered several people who attempted to put up a fight, and confiscated election materials. In Brass, supporters of the governor, aided by a full complement of antiriot police, launched a violent attack on politicians and their youth followers, beating them and setting their homes on fire. Officials dispatched by the PDP from the national capital to ensure an impartial vote were kidnapped when they proved "uncooperative. " Officials of Shell and Agip were on hand to lend support to the governor. Ordinarily, nonpartisan party officials would have taken election materials directly to voting centers, since the governor was also a PDP member and had a compelling interest in shaping the vote's outcome. Instead, Creek House, the governor's office and official residence in the state capital of Yenogoa, became a clearinghouse and storage center for voter cards. It was from here that helicopters provided by Shell airlifted the materials to Nembe, where Jonathan and Isongufuro then took over proceedings. Agip also airlifted voting material directly to its own terminal in Brass instead of to Twon, the local council headquarters designated by the party's national executive as the voting center. Votes were then allocated to candidates favored by the governor by aides sent from the capital for the
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purpose. A violent clash ensued between protesting locals and the anti-riot police and local toughs in the pay of the governor. When the results of the party primaries were announced a week later, all the governor's candidates in the eight local councils, including Nembe and Brass, either were returned unopposed or "won" outright. The governor expressed satisfaction with the outcome and declared that the elections had been conducted in an atmosphere of "peace and tranquility." The state police chief dismissed as "unfounded" press reports that the primary election had been marked by murder, brigandage, and vote rigging. Local nongovernment organizations and journalists who had monitored the elections called for their cancellation and the removal of the head of police. No one paid attention to their pleas. Ordinary Nigerians picked up their disrupted lives and continued to plod on.
gangs are siphoning so much crude oil from pipelines in the Niger Delta that they have started using tankers to spirit it away . ... Siphoning off such quantities amid a landscape of jungle and marsh, with thousands of creeks, requires sophisticated equipment and organization. To the dismay of the government and oil companies, the thieves have proved that they have this in abundance." Nigeria is the world's seventh-largest exporter of oil, and Africa's largest. The country's daily output of 2.2 million barrels accounts for 80 percent of state revenues and 90 percent of foreign exchange earnings. (The government owns all oil rights in Nigeria and has a majority interest in every oil company operating there, including the joint venture with Royal Dutch/Shell Group.) Oil, clearly, is a strategic resource, at least viewed from the perspective of the country's governing elites. ' Yet government power and the administrative structures vital to securing the all-important oil fields are dramatically shrinking in the Niger Delta and elsewhere in the country. What the Guardian neglected to point out was why the oil "bunkerers" are able to so flagrantly ply their illegal trade with impunity: the thieves too are members of the governing elite-invatiably senior political figures and military officers deployed to the delta to police the oil fields and ensure that production is not disrupted by "restless" youth protesting the oil industry's adverse effects on their farmlands and water sources, As social and economic conditions worsen in Nigeria, politics is no longer the instrument through which contending interests are conciliated in a stmctured framework. Politics is itself a struggle for control of the country's oil largesse, which, once secured in the form of loot, is used to further and consolidate political ends. In this struggle, the state and the means of violence at its disposal are the ultimate spoils. For whoever dominates the state necessarily controls the means to displace rival contenders for a disproportionate share of the oil bonanza. The adept, the unscrupulous, and sometimes the lucky emerge triumphant in this bruising contest. The losers, smarting from defeat and humiliation, tum their sights to lesser prizes. Some steal oil from pipelines.
Born and Raised in Violence Clearly, the political orderin Nembe is founded on and sustained by violence. The British colonial project inaugurated this order in 1895 with unprecedented violence. Local Nigerian political elites reproduced and institutionalized it following formal independence in 1960. Yet, today, this malformed political order is in its last throes-with Nembe and the Niger Delta's other oilbearing communities at the epicenter of a death dance. Central to the order is a regime of rapine despotism and the poverty and powerlessness that are born of this condition. Producing political repression and material scarcity instead of the freedom and prosperity that are the legitimate goals of citizens globally, this order has not been able to find legitimacy in the eyes of the local people whom it has reduced to subjects these past 100 years. Thus, it is unable to find fertile soil in which to root and flourish. This malformed political order is dying because new social forces, forged in a cauldron of violence and the unremitting serldom and scarcity that are its legacy, are now pressing against the barricades. The prominent symptoms of the order's precariousness can be seen in the political and social crisis in which Nembe, the wider Niger Delta, and Nigeria are currently engulfed. The three components of this crisis are an accelerating loss of state sovereignty and concomitant decay of state institutions, locally and nationally; the government's failure to promote economic development, including for the people of Nigeria's oil communities; and worsening communal violence and youth anomie that are reshaping social relations into malignant forms in a region already awash in weapons and riven by ethnic conflict. Tensions that increasingly cut across local (Nembe), national (Nigeria), and global (Shell in Nembe oil fields) arenas suggest that the current regime of institutionalized despotism is collapsing under the weight of past violence and present inequities.
An estimated 200,000 barrels are piped out of Nembe daily and the inhabitants receive neither rent nor royalties.
When Politics Fails
Terry Lynn Karl argues in The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States that "the revenues a state coUects, how it collects them, and the uses to which it puts them define its nature." Oil revenues and the array of political and economic arrangements thrown up to perpetuate this predatory enclave economy powerlully shape the nature of the Nigerian state, preoccupied as it is with a vicious, bare-knuckled struggle between dominant
Rory Carrol, the Africa correspondent of the Guardian of London, has written about a central feature of Nigerian economic life today. "What Nigerians call bunkering and oil executives call rustling has hit the big time," he wrote. "Criminal
and rising elites to control this revenue, The state as a result cannot act as the impartial arbiter of last resort between competing interests, embedded in social, economic, and political society but sitting above them. As a
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Article 32. Nigeria: Chronicle of a Dying State political instrument hijacked by the temporarily successful faction in the struggle for the oil prize, the Nigerian state is resented by unsuccessful rival factions. It may still be able to project power, but it is power lacking in real authority because its motives are suspect. It is also power without legitimacy, because rival factions and ordinary people on whom it is exercised see only commandments backed up by the threat of violence. And the commandments appear designed to make them part with their property on the pain of death.
shootings of unarmed youths and the raping of young girls. The piling of corpses and the young innocents traumatized for life testify to their earnestness. But the soldiers have no heart in the fight. They pile back into their trucks and beat a hasty retreat as soon as the latest round of killing is done. They do not hold conquered territory. There are no proconsuls to discipline and punish the new subjects. A few soldiers are left to guard the oil wells and the oil company workers, and the rest scamper off. The survivors crawl out of the bush, bury their dead, and resume their calls for justice.
Enter the Military
The Hollow State
Those able to challenge this illegitimate power, such as the oil rustlers, do. Ordinary citizens, such as the people of Nembe and the other oil-bearing communities in the Niger Delta, resort to civil disobedience, angry that their traditional sources of livelihood-their farmlands and fishing waters-have been devastated by half a century of uncontrolled oil exploitation. In the case of youth, this involves direct confrontation with Nigerian troops and riot police-the immediate, direct face of the oil rentiers who have visited so much grief and ruin on their
In the capital, spokesmen for the rentiers deny that massacres are taking place in the delta oil fields. They speak only of rival ethnic militias hacking each other to death with blunt machetes. They are killing each other because . . . well, they hate each other. It is a "tribal" thing; ancient, not at all amenable to rational political solutions. They speak also of the bunkerers, loudly, threatening them with the full weight of the law. The oil companies join the charade. Indeed, they amplify it by flying in obliging journalists from London and Paris and Houston to witness "firsthand" what these tribesmen are doing to each other. "This has nothing to do with us," they note. "We don't understand the thinking of these people. They are not like 'us.' Frankly, we don't know why they are fighting and killing each other." Then they bring up the subject of oil bunkerers. «They are ruining our business! We don't know what to do about them. And the guns. Where did they get such sophisticated weapons? The government must step in. We need more security or else this place will go up in flames!"
communities. The victorious faction responds by dispatching to the "volatile" region special forces equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, tear gas, stun grenades. attack helicopters, fast-attack naval patrol boats, and the other paraphernalia of modern warfare, including experts in psychological terror. Entire hamlets and villages are razed and some of the inhabitants murdered or mutilated. Even peaceful demonstrations provoke harsh reaction. On November 20, 2004, seven men were killed and many more injured when they attempted to mount a demonstration at an oil rig operated by Shell. More than 100 protesters had gathered on a barge near the rig and sent leaders to demand a meeting with oil officials to discuss languishing development projects. Instead, army troops appeared in boats and opened fire on the barge. When faced with well-organized and determined opposition with popular grassroots support-as they have been with the 500,000 Ogoni people in the eastern Niger Delta fringesgovernment forces may decide to «sanitize" troublesome sites and root out the "subversive elements" disturbing the "public peace." An entire area may be secured in a lightning military maneuver. Death squads are sent in. When a squad suffers fatalities, as happened in Odi, a central Niger Delta town, in December 1999, remaining squad members may shoot everything in sight-including goats, chickens, and an 85-year-old woman too frail to leave her hut. The houses are torched and the experts in psychological warfare scrawl graffiti on the charred walls insulting the dead town and its gods. It is all very impressive, all very military. This must be a powerful state, with its ann reaching out to smite its enemies even in the furthest uncharted parts of the empire! In fact, all this display of disproportionate violence, obscene in its extravagance, this spectacle-it is all a show. The rentiers and the men of violence in their employ may be deadly serious in their determination to maintain their grip on the oil fields; this is demonstrated clearly enough by the
Government power and the administrative structures vital to securing the all-important oil fields are dramatically shrinking in the Niger Delta and elsewhere. It all rings hollow. Everybody, the rentiers and oil executives included, knows who the oil bunkerers are. They cannot move against them because they are all partners in the same dirty crime: plunder. They also all know the sOUrce of the guns that have flooded the delta: poorly paid soldiers selling their weapons to anyone, including "enemy" youth, for hard cash; the oil companies, stocking up their private caches and arming company police who subsequently pass them on to third parties; youth vigilantes recruited by the oil companies to protect their facilities and who use the money so obtained to buy rifles and machine guns to secure yet more "protection" work. These are guns for hire, as in the American West during the gold rush. Only here crude oil is the new gold. The government's presence is only felt in the form of machine guns and jackboots. But that presence has an eerie evanescent quality: here now and gone the next instant, leaving bullet-perforated bodies to bear mute witness.
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and crude oil theft in the delta. But the youth insurgents there are not impressed. Poverty, state violence, and the bald fact of a dying ecosystem have combined to drive them to stand firm. The soldiers do not like what they hear. Entire swathes of the delta are now virtually no-go for them. Nor are they particularly unhappy about this. It is not really their fight. The petrodollars, after all, are shared in the presidential fortress in the capital. Slowly, relentlessly, the sharp edge of the all-important instrument of violence is being blunted. It may not be immediately apparent, but the Nigerian state is dying. A lion without his claws may as well be dead.
The decay of state institutions continues apace. The April 2003 presidential and governorship elections were openly and blatantly rigged by the PDP, in some areas returning more votes than there were actual people in the electoral register. The USbased Carter Center, which had sent a team to monitor the exercise, declared it a fraud. The inspector general of police, the nation's chief law enforcement officer, was accused of solicitirig and accepting
financial rewards from state governors in return for "cooperation" during election time-that is, turning a blind eye when thugs hijacked ballot boxes from polling stations to enable them to inflate the vote in the governors' favor. A fonner deputy governor, under investigation for aiding and abetting the murder of the country's minister of justice, was released from detention and elected a senator on the ruling party's platform. High court judges assigned the case dropped it when they began receiving threatening phone calls in the night. Elsewhere in that election year, in one of Nigeria's eastern states, a political contractor whose only claim to fame was that his brother was President Olusegun Obasanjo's chief of staff, organized the abduction of the governor whose election he had bankrolled only the previous month, sequestered him in a hotel room, and obtained his resignation at gun point. But not before readying a more pliable candidate to take over. In so doing he offered clear proof, if indeed any more were needed, that the ruling party is the state, the regime, and the government melded into a seamless whole, sustained by violence and deploying violence to eviscerate all obstacles to its endless trips to the oil wells.
Breakdown in Nembe How do these symptoms of a dying political order play out in Nembe? The signs of morbidity apparent in the wider Nigerian
system are very much evident in the present political, economic, and social life of Nembe. The political order has broken down. The two rival militias are locked in a deadly duel for power. The traditional king of Nembe lives in Port Harcourt, some 100 nautical miles away, and rarely visits his people. He steers clear of the political turbulence generated by the militias. The majority of his council of chiefs also live in Port Harcourt, and the handful in Nembe do not participate in public affairs. Youth and vigilantes alike hold king and council partly responsible for the
social and economic crisis that has taken over their lives. The little semblance of authority that does exist is the armed anti-riot police dispatched by federal authorities. An uneasy truce holds between the police and the warring factions. Each watches the other carefully. All are armed and patrol the streets ostentatiously, brandishing machine guns. The vigilantes say the police are partisan-they support their rivals and also give protection to oil company officials whose activities have laid waste to their farmlands and fishing waters. The police say
The Lion Without Claws The Maxim machine gun brooked no opposition in colonial times when Her Majesty's proconsuls embarked on the hazardous but very profitable project of taking the fat of the land, and in the process reduced its owners from citizens to subjects. A hundred years later their local clones continue dutifully on this path. The state sits on society; it does not emanate from it the better to secure it and make it more prosperous. Lacking a raison d'etre, the Nigerian state looks more and more like a beached whale thrashing on the sand before its inevitable demise. Meanwhile, the violent unrest spreads. In September 2004, Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, the head of a militia group called the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force, declared war on the
the two vigilante groups are criminal elements that have been terrorizing the city and extorting money from law-abiding oil workers. The ordinary people distrust all three groups, but keep their heads down in the face of the guns. Violerice, not public
virtue, is the basis of authority in Nembe. The economic life of the people once turned on fishing. This was before the incessant oil spills, some of them caused by sabotage and theft, began to take their toll on fish life in Nembe creek and the surrounding lakes, ponds, and rivers. Now Nembe
fishermen and women spend hours in the open sea and some-
region's oil companies, interrupting production for several days
times go home with no catch at all. The gas flaring in the vicinity of the oil fields has also substantially damaged plant life. Tidal waves spread spilled oil through the mangroves and onto farmlands, rendering them infertile. There is no manufacturing; indeed, there is little economic life in Nembe. The bulk of the city's food is brought from Port Harcourt. The oil fields are all that is left, yet an estimated 200,000 barrels are piped out of Nembe daily and the inhabitants receive neither rent nor royal-
and sending world oil prices above $50 a barrel. He succeeded
in drawing senior government officials into negotiations. which resulted in a tentative peace deal. But Dokubo-Asari, who says he is fighting on behalf of more than 8 million Ijaws-the dominant ethnic group in the southern delta region-warns he could shut off oil flows at any time. In the past he has called for secession of the Niger Delta as the only means for residents to gain control of its oil wealth. Violent conflict between his militia and a rival group; Niger Delta Vigilante, has resulted in numerous deaths of innocents. The US government has sent warships to President Obasanjo
ties. The anti-riot police are there to ensure that the arrangement remains in place. Nembe is a city under pennanent curfew. The streets are deserted. Social capital is a scarce commodity. All are at war with each other: king against his council; youth vigilantes
under a security cooperation program ostensibly to check unrest
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against both and against themselves. The youths accuse the king and his council of "eating" the oil money and giving none to the ordinary people. Youth accuse youth of accepting money from Shell and refusing to share it. The quarrel usually ends in violence. Elders and women have been elbowed out of the public arena; they raise their voices on the pain of death and physical punishment, administered with relish by the vigilantes. The factions of Nembe fight each other intermittently. They quarrel about whose leaders are supreme and which have the right to represent the city at the state level. Fierce arguments erupt over where local council buildings and other social facilities should be placed. Gunshots are exchanged. Young men die. Clashes with Olaika, a neighboring community, also are frequent, chalking up more bodies. Ownership of oil-bearing land is the perennial source of conflict. Neither thoughtful gov-
This predatory framework, since taken over by indigenous Nigerian elites, could not be permanently institutionalized. It has encountered sustained and determined resistance since the early years of the twentieth century from those to whom it has given only poverty and arbitrary rule. To maintain this illegitimate regime, constantly at risk of collapse, violence has to be applied and re-applied. But herein lies the paradox of violence as the structuring basis of a political order. The more violence is deployed to prop up and sustain unjust economic and social arrangements, the more it undennines the very goal it seeks to achieve: a degree of social order within which the dominant elite can continue its business of seizing loot. People forcefully deprived of the right to represent their own interests in the crucial arenas of political and economic life are by definition discontented and impoverished subjects. The discontented represent a real threat to the existing order, and that order is also deprived of vital contributions to the project of creating prosperity for the commonweal. Scarcity is the soil in which revolt is nurtured. Political violence deployed to maintain control over the dollars generated by oil wealth may work in the short term, but ultimately it defeats its own purpose. This process is clearly evident in Nembe and throughout Nigeria today. And that is why the malformed political order is dying.
ernment policies nor mediating civil society agencies exist to deliver permanent peace.
Twilight of a Malformed Order The political order in Nembe, based on rapine despotism, has not embedded itself in local society because its project runs against the deep desire of ordinary Nigerians for democracy and its material fruits. Power, social theorists have told us, is the ability to make someone do what you desire of them. During the colonial period violence, not capital, was used to extract wealth from the colonized. The state did not deliver development; it was the very repository of the violence necessary to reduce the inhabitants into subjects and coerce them to give up their wealth, in labor and raw material.
IKE OKONTA is a visiting fellow at the University of California at Berke ley and coauthor, with Oronto Douglas, of Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil (London: Verso, 2003). M
Reprinted from Current History, May 2005, pp. 203-208. Copyright © 2005 by Current History, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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Article 33
China: The Quiet Revolution The Emergence of Capitalism DOUG GUTHRIE hen Deng Xiaoping unveiled his vision of economic reform to the Third Plenum of the 11 th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in December 1978, the Chinese economy was faltering. Reeling from a decade of stagnation during the Cultural Revolution and already falling short of .the projections set forth in the 1976 lO-year plan, China needed more than a new plan and the Soviet-style economic vision of Deng's political rival, Hua Guofeng, to improve the economy. Deng's plan was to lead the country down a road of gradual and incremental economic reform, leaving the state apparatus intact, while slowly unleashing market forces. Since that time, the most common image of China, promulgated by members of the US Congress and media, is of an unbending authoritarian regime that has grown economically but seen little substantive change. There is often a sense that China remains an entrenched and decaying authoritarian government run by corrupt Party officials; extreme accounts depict it as an economy on the verge of collapse. However, this vision simply does not square with reality. While it is true that China remains an authoritarian one-party system, it is also the most successful case of economic reform among communist planned economy in the 20th century. Today, it is fast emerging as one of the most dynamic market economies and has grown to be the world's sixth largest. Understanding how this change has come about requires an examination of three broad changes that have come together to shape China's transition to capitalism: the state's gradual recession from control over the economy, which caused a shift in economic control without privatization; the steady growth of foreign investment; and the gradual emergence of a legal-rational system to support these economic changes.
W
Reform Without Privatization During the 1980s and 1990s, economists and institutional advisors from the West advocated a rapid transition to
market institutions as the necessary medicine for transforming communist societies. Scholars argued that private property provides the institutional foundation of a market economy and that, therefore, communist societies making the transition to a market economy must privatize industry and other public goods. The radical members of this school argued that rapid privatization-the so-called "shock therapy" or "big bang" approach to economic reforms-was the only way to avoid costly abuses in these transitional systems. The Chinese path has been very different. While countries like Russia have followed Western advice, such as rapidly constructing market institutions, immediately removing the state from control over the economy, and hastily privatizing property, China has taken its time in implementing institutional change. The state has gradually receded from control over the economy, cautiously experimenting with new institutions and implementing them incrementally within existing institutional arrangements. Through this gradual process of reform, China has achieved in 20 years what many developing states have taken over 50 to accomplish. The success of gradual reform in China can be attributed to two factors. First, the gradual reforms allowed the government to retain its role as a stabilizing force in the midst of the turbulence accompanying the transition from a planned to a market economy. Institutions such as the "dual-track" system kept large state-owned enterprises partially on the plan and gave them incentives to generate extra income by selling what they could produce above the plan in China's nascent markets. Over time, as market economic practices became more successful, the "plan" part of an enterprise's portfolio was reduced and the "market" part grew. Enterprises were thus given the stability of a continued but gradually diminishing planned economy system as well as the time to learn to set prices, compete for contracts, and produce efficiently. Second, the government has gradually promoted ownership-like control down the government administrative hierarchy to
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the localities. As a result, the central government was able to give economic control to local administrators without privatization. But with economic control came accountability, and local administrators became very invested in the successful economic reform of the villages, townships, and municipalities under their jurisdictions. In a sense, as Professor Andrew Walder of Stanford University has argued, pushing economic responsibilities onto local administrators created an incentive structure much like those experienced by managers of large industrial firms.
has been to ignore questions of political reform and concentrate instead on the need to adopt economic and legal systems that will allow the countly to integrate smoothly into the international community. From rhetoric on "linking up with the international community" to laws such as the 2000 Patent Law to institutions such as the State Intellectual Property Office and the Chinese International Economic Trade and Arbitration Commission, this phase of reform has been oriented toward enforcing the standards and norms of the international investment community. Thus, Zhu's objective is to deepen all of the reforms that have been discussed above, while holding these changes to the standards of the international community. After two decades of transition, the architects of the reforms have established about 700 new national laws and more than 2,000 new local laws. These legal changes, added regulations, and experiments with new economic institutions have driven the reform process. A number of laws and policies in the 1980s laid the groundwork for a new set of policies that would redefine labor relations in fundamental ways. For example, the policies that set in motion the emergence of labor contracts in China were first introduced in an experimental way in 1983, further codified in 1986, and eventually institutionalized with the Labor Law in 1994. While there are economic incentives behind Chinese firms' willingness to embrace labor contracts, including the end of lifetime employment, these institutional changes have gradually rationalized the labor relationship, eventually providing a guarantee of due process in the event of unfair treatment and placing workers' rights at the center of the labor relationship. Incremental changes such as these have been crucial to the evolution of individual rights in China. The obvious and most common response to these changes is that they are symbolic rather than substantive, that a changing legal and policy framework has little meaning when an authoritarian government still sits at the helm. Yet the scholarship that has looked extensively at the impact of these legal changes largely belies this view. Workers and managers take the new institutions seriously and recognize that the institutions have had a dramatic impact on the structure of authority relations and on the conception of rights within the workplace. Other research shows that legal and policy changes that emphasize individual civil liberties are also significant. In the most systematic and exhaustive study to date of the prison system, research shows that changes in the treatment of prisoners have indeed resulted in the wake of the Prison Reform Law. And although no scholarship has been completed on the National Compensation Law, it is noteworthy that 97,569 suits were filed under this law against the government in 1999, a proportional increase
Change from Above Even as economic reform has proceeded gradually, the cumulative changes over two decades have been nothing short of radical. These reforms have proceeded on four levels: institutional changes instigated by the highest levels of government; firm-level institutions that reflect the legal-rational system emerging at the state level; a budding legal system that allows workers institutional backing outside of the factory and is heavily influenced by relationships with foreign investors; and the emergence of new labor markets, which allow workers the freedom and mobility to find new employment when necessary. The result of these changes has been the emergence of a legalrational regime of labor, where the economy increasingly rests upon an infrastructure of ordered laws that workers can invoke when necessary. Under Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang brought about radical change in China by pushing the country toward constitutionality and the rule of law to create rational economic processes. These changes, set forth ideologically asa package of reforms necessary for economic development, fundamentally altered the role of politics and the Communist Party in Chinese society. The early years of reform not only gave a great deal of autonomy to enterprise managers and small-scale entrepreneurs, but also emphasized the legal reforms that would undergird this process of change. However, by creating a body of civil and economic law, such as the 1994 Labor Law and Company Law and the 1995 National Compensation Law upon which the transforming economy would be based, the Party elites held themselves to the standards of these legal changes. Thus the rationalization of the economy led to a decline in the Party's ability to rule over the working population. In recent years, this process has been continued by global integration and the tendency to adopt the norms of the international community. While championing global integration and the Rule of Law, Zhu Rongji also brought about broader political and social change, just as Zhao Ziyang did in China's first decade of economic reform. Zhu's strategy
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of over 12,000 percent since the beginning of the economic reforms. These institutions guarantee that, for the first time in the history of the People's Republic of China, individuals can have their day in court, even at the government's expense. The 1994 Labor Law and the Labor Arbitration Commission (LAC), which has branches in every urban district, work hand-in-hand to guarantee workers their individual rights as laborers. Chapter 10 of the Labor Law, entitled "Labor Disputes," is specifically devoted to articulating due process, which laborers are legally guaranteed, should a dispute arise in the workplace. The law explicitly explains the rights of the worker to take disputes to outside arbitration (the district's LAC) should the resolution in the workplace be unsatisfactory to the worker. Further, many state-owned enterprises have placed all of their workers on fixed-term labor contracts, which significantly rationalize the labor relationships beyond the personalized labor relations of the past. This bundle of changes has fundamentally altered the nature of the labor relationship and the mechanisms through which authority can be challenged. For more than a decade, it has been possible for workers to file grievances against superiors and have those grievances heard at the LACs. In 1999, 52 percent of the 120,191 labor disputes settled by arbitration or mediation were decided wholly in favor of the workers filing the suits. These are official statistics from the Chinese government, and therefore should be viewed skeptically. However, even if the magnitude is incorrect, these numbers illuminate an important trend toward legal activity regarding workers' rights.
Many of these changes in labor practices were not originally adopted with workers' rights in mind, but the unintended consequence of the changes has been the construction of a regime of labor relations that emphasizes the rights of workers. For instance, extending the example of labor contracts that were being experimented with as early as 1983, these were originally intended as a form of economic protection for ailing enterprises, allowing a formal method of ending lifetime employment. However, workers began using the terms of employment codified in the contracts as the vehicle for filing grievances when contractual agreements were not honored. With the emergence of the LACs in the late 1980s and the further codification of these institutions in the Labor Law, the changes that were in progress became formalized in a set of institutions that ultimately benefited workers in the realm of rights. In a similar way, workers' representative committees were formed in the state's interest, but became an institution workers claimed as their own. These institutions, which many managers refer to as "our own little democracy," were adopted early in the reforms to co-opt the agitation for independent labor unions. These committees do not have the same power or status as independent labor unions in the West, but workers have made them much more significant in factories today than they were originally intended to be.
Foreign Investment's Impact At the firm level, there is a process of rationalization in which firms are adopting a number of ration a! bureaucratic
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Figure 1 An Age of Jurisprudence. The above graphs depict two recent trends in China: a growing body of lawyers and an increasing number of legal cases. As the graph at left indicates, the number of lawyers in China has increased dramatically in the past 20 years, riSing from fewer than 10,000 in 1980 to over 100,000 in 2000. The graph at right shows the growth in various types of legal cases over the same period. In particular, there have been significant increases in civil, economic, and first-trial cases.
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Article 33. China: The Quiet Revolution
systems, such as grievance filing procedures, mediation committees, and formal organizational processes, that are more often found in Western organizations. In my own work on these issues, I have found that joint venture relationships encourage foreign joint ventures to push their partner organizations to adopt stable legal-rational structures and systems in their organizations. These stable, legal-rational systems are adopted to attract foreign investors, but have radical implications for the structure of authority relations and the lives of individual Chinese citizens. Chinese factories that have formal relationships with foreign, and particularly Western, firms are significantly more likely to have institutionalized formal organizational rules, 20 times more likely to have formal grievance filing procedures, five times more likely to have worker representative committee meetings, and about two times more likely to have institutionalized formal hiring procedures. They also pay about 50 percent higher wages than other factories and are more likely to adopt China's new Company Law, which binds them to abide by the norms of the international community and to respect international legal institutions such as the Chinese International Economic Arbitration and Trade Commission. Many managers openly acknowledge that the changes they have set in place have little to do with their own ideas of efficient business practices and much more to do with pressure brought on them by their foreign partners. Thus, there is strong evidence that foreign investment matters for on-the-ground change in China.
land these partnerships and position themselves as suitable investment partners by adopting a number of the practices that Western partners will recognize as stable and reformminded. Among the basic reforms they adopt to show their fitness for "linking up" with the international community are labor reforms. Thus, the signaling of a commitment to stable Western-style business practices through commitments to labor reform has led to fundamental changes in Chinese workplace labor relations. Foreign investors and Chinese firms are not interested in human rights per se, but the negotiations in the marketplace lead to transformed workplaces, which affect millions of Chinese citizens on a daily basis. However, changes at the firm level are not meaningful if they lack the legal infrastructure upon which a legalrational system oflabor is built. The construction of a legal system is a process that takes time; it requires the training of lawyers and judges, and the emergence of a culture in which individuals who are part of the legal system come to process claims. This process of change is difficult to assess because it relies on soft variables about the reform process, such as, for example, how judges think about suits and whether a legal-rational culture is emerging. But we can look at some aspects of fundamental shifts in society. All of these changes, in turn, rest upon a legal-rational system that is slowly but surely emerging in China. Finally, beyond the legal and institutional changes that have begun to transform Chinese society fundamentally, workers are no longer tied to workplaces in the way that they once were. In the pre-reform system, there was very little mobility of labor, because workers were generally bound to their "work units" for life. The system created a great deal of stability for workers, but it also became one of the primary means through which citizens were controlled. Individuals were members of their work units, which they were dependent on for a variety of fundamental goods and services. This manufactured dependence was one of the basic ways that the Party exercised control over the popUlation. Writing about the social uprisings that occun-ed in 1989, Walder points out that the erosion of this system is what allowed citizens to protest with impunity on a scale never before observed in communist China: "[W]hat changed in these regimes in the last decade was not their economic difficulties, widespread cynicism or con-uption, but that the institutional mechanisms that served to promote order in the past-despite these long-standing problems-lost their capacity to do so." It is precisely because labor markets have opened up that workers are no longer absolutely dependent upon the government for job placements; they now have much more leverage to assert the importance of their own rights in the workplace. And while the private
Foreign investors and Chinese firms are not interested in human rights per se, but the negotiations in the marketplace lead to transformed workplaces, which affect millions of Chinese citizens on a daily basis. ·a'_''''i\.:',:,',§·-'''··
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Given the common image of multinational corporations seeking weak institutional environments to capitalize on cheap labor, why would joint venture relationships with Western multinationals have a more positive impact in the Chinese case? The answer has to do with the complex reasons for foreign investment there. Corporations are rarely the leading advocates of civil liberties and labor reform, but many foreign investors in China are more interested in long-term investments that position them to capture market share than they are in cheap labor. They generally seek Chinese partners that are predictable, stable, and knowledgeable about Western-style business practices and negotiations. Chinese factories desperately want to
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institutions and a history to which they can be linked. The transition from a command economy to a market economy can be a wrenching experience, not only at the institutional level but also at the level of individual practice. Individuals must learn the rules of the market and new institutions must be in place long enough to gain stability and legitimacy. The PRC government's methodical experimentation with different institutional forms and the Party's gradual relinquishing of control over the economy has brought about a "quiet revolution." It is impossible to create a history of a legal-rational economic system in a dramatic moment of institutional change. The architects of China's transition to capitalism have had success in reforming the economy because they have recognized that the transition to a radically different type of economic system must occur gradually, allowing for the maximum possible institutional stability as economic actors slowly learn the rules of capitalism. Capitalism has indeed arrived in China, and it has done so via gradual institutional reform under the communist mantle.
sector was nonexistent when the economic reforms began, the country has seen this sector, which includes both private enterprises and household businesses, grow to more than 30 million individuals. With the growth of the private sector, there is much greater movement and autonomy among laborers in the economy. This change has afforded workers alternative paths to status attainment, paths that were once solely controlled by the government.
Quiet Revolution Much like the advocates of rapid economic reform, those demanding immediate political and social reform often take for granted the learning that must occur in the face of new institutions. The assumption most often seems that, given certain institutional arrangements, individuals will naturally know how to carry out the practices of capitalism. Yet these assumptions reflect a neoclassical view of human nature in which rational man will thrive in his natural environment-free markets. Completely absent from this view are the roles of history, culture, and pre-existing institutions; it is a vision that is far too simplistic to comprehend the challenge of making rational economic and legal systems work in the absence of stable
DOUG GUTHRIE is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University,
From Harvard lntemQliotw( Review, Summer 2003, pp. 48-53. Copyright © 2003 by the President of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission.
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Article 34
Where's Mao? Chinese Revise History Books JOSEPH KAHN hen high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization. Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once-in a chapter on etiquette. Nearly overnight the country's most prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated standard history texts since the 1950' s. The changes passed high-level scrutiny, the authors say, and are part of a broader effort to promote a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today's economic and political goals. Supporters say the overhaul enlivens mandatory history courses for junior and senior high school students and better prepares them for life in the real world. The old textbooks, not unlike the ruling Communist Party, changed relatively little in the last quarter-century of market-oriented economic reforms. They were glaringly out of sync with realities students face outside the classroom. But critics say the textbooks trade one political agenda for another. They do not so much rewrite history as diminish it. The oneparty state, having largely abandoned its official ideology, prefers people to think more about the future than the past. The new text focuses on ideas and buzzwords that dominate the state-run media and official discourse: economic growth, innovation, foreign trade, political stability, respect for diverse cultures and social harmony. J. P. Morgan, Bill Gates, the New York Stock Exchange, the space shuttle and Japan's bullet train are all highlighted. There is a lesson on how neckties became fashionable. The French and Bolshevik Revolutions, once seen as turning points in world history, now get far less attention. Mao, the Long March, colonial oppression of China and the Rape of Nanjing are taught only in a compressed history curriculum in junior high. "Our traditional version of history was focused on ideology and national identity," said Zhu Xueqin, a historian at Shanghai
University. "The new history is less ideological, and that suits the political goals of today." The changes are at least initially limited to Shanghai. That elite urban region has leeway to alter its curriculum and textbooks, and in the past it has introduced advances that the central government has instructed the rest of the countty to follow. But the textbooks have provoked a lively debate among historians ahead of their full-scale introduction in Shanghai in the fall term. Several Shanghai schools began using the texts experimentally in the last school year. Many scholars said they did not regret leaving behind the Marxist perspective in history courses. It is still taught in required classes on politics. But some criticized what they saw as an effort to minimize history altogether. Chinese and world history in junior high have been compressed into two years from three, while the single year in senior high devoted to history now focuses on cultures, ideas and civilizations. "The junior high textbook castrates history, while the senior high school textbook eliminates it entirely," one Shanghai history teacher wrote in an online discussion. The teacher asked to remain anonymous because he was criticizing the education authorities. Zhou Chunsheng, a professor at Shanghai Normal University and one of the lead authors of the new textbook series, said his purpose was to rescue history from its traditional emphasis on leaders and wars and to make people and societies the central theme. "History does not belong to emperors or generals," Mr. Zhou said in an interview. "It belongs to the people. It may take some time for others to accept this, naturally, but a similar process has long been under way in Europe and the United States." Mr. Zhou said the new textbooks followed the ideas of the French historian Fernand Braudel. Mr. Braudel advocated including culture, religion, social customs, economics and ideology into a new "total history." That approach has been popular in many Western countries for more than half a century. Mr. Braudel elevated history above the ideology of any nation. China has steadily moved away from its ruling ideology of Communism, but the Shanghai textbooks are the fIrst to tty examining it as a phenomenon rather than preaching it as the truth. Socialism is still referred to as having a "glorious future." But the concept is reduced to one of 52 chapters in the senior
W
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mean that the content of the core Chinese history course has contracted sharply. The new textbook leaves out some milestones of ancient history. Shanghai students will no longer learn that Qin Shihuang, who unified the country and became China's first emperor, ordered a campaign to burn books and kill scholars, to wipe out intellectual resistance to his rule. The text bypasses well-known rebellions and coups that shook or toppled the Zhou, Sui, Tang and Ming dynasties. It does not mention the resistance by Han Chinese, the country's dominant ethnic group, to Kublai Khan's invasion and the founding of the Mongol-controlled Yuan dynasty. Wen Tianxiang, a Han Chinese prime minister who became the country's most transcendent symbol of loyalty and patriotism when he refused to serve the Mongol invaders, is also left out. Some of those historic facts and personalities have been replaced with references to old customs and fashions, prompting some critics to say that history teaching has lost focus. "Would you rather students remember the design of ancient robes, or that the Qin dynasty unified China in 221 B.C.?" one high school teacher quipped in an online forum for history experts. Others speculated that the Shanghai textbooks reflected the political viewpoints of China's top leaders, including Jiang Zemin, the former president and Communist Party chief, and his successor, Hu Jintao. Mr. Jiang's "Three Represents" slogan aimed to broaden the Communist Party's mandate and dilute its traditional emphasis on class struggle. Mr. Hu coined the phrase "harmonious society," which analysts say aims to persuade people to build a stable, prosperous, unified China under one-party rule. The new textbooks de-emphasize dynastic change, peasant struggle, ethnic rivalry and war. some critics say, because the leadership does not want people thinking that such things matter a great deal. Officials prefer to create the impression that Chinese through the ages cared more about innovation, technology and trade relationships with the outside world. Mr. Zhou, the Shanghai scholar who helped write the textbooks, says the new history does present a more hannonious image of China's past. But he says the alterations "do not come from someone' s political slogan ," but rather reflect a sea change in thinking about what students need to know. lIThe government has a big role in approving textbooks," he said. "But the goal of our work is not politics. It is to make the study of history more mainstream and prepare our students for anew era."
high school text. Revolutionary socialism gets less emphasis than the Industrial Revolution and the information revolution. Students now study Mao-still officially revered as the founding father of modern China but no longer regularly promoted as an influence on policy-only in junior high. In the senior high school text, he is mentioned fleetingly as part of a lesson on the custom of lowering flags to half-staff at state funerals, like Mao's in 1976. Deng Xiaoping, who began China's market-oriented reforms, appears in the junior and senior high school versions, with emphasis on his economic vision. Gerald A. Postiglione, an associate professor of education at the University of Hong Kong, said mainland Chinese education authorities had searched for ways to make the school curricu-
lum more relevant. "The emphasis is on producing innovative thinking and preparing students for a global discourse," he said. "It is natural that they would ask whether a history textbook that talks so much about Chinese suffering during the colonial era is really creating the kind of sophisticated talent they want for today's Shanghai." That does not mean history and politics have been disentangled. Early this year a prominent Chinese historian, Yuan Weishi, wrote an essay that criticized Chinese textbooks for whitewashing the savagery of the Boxer Rebellion, the violent movement against foreigners in China at the beginning of the 20th century. He called for a more balanced analysis of what provoked foreign interventions at the time. In response, the popular newspaper supplement Freezing Point, which carried his essay, was temporarily shut down and its editors were fired. When it reopened, Freezing Point ran an essay that rebuked Mr. Yuan, a waming that many historical topics remained too delicate to discuss in the popular media. The Shanghai textbook revisions do not address many domestic and foreign concerns about the biased way Chinese schools teach recent history. Like the old textbooks, for example, the new ones play down historic errors or atrocities like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the army crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989. The junior high school textbook still uses boilerplate idioms to condemn Japan's invasion of China in the 1930's and includes little about Tokyo's peaceful, democratic postwar development. It will do little to assuage Japanese concerns that Chinese imbibe hatred of Japan from a young age. Yet over all, the reduction in time spent studying history and the inclusion of new topics, like culture and technology,
From The New York Times, September 1, 2006. Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
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Article 35
India's Path to Greatness After decades of dormancy, India has blossomed into one of Asia's two emerging powers and an important strategic partner of the United States. How-and whether-it navigates its rise could well determine the future of the whole region. MARTIN WALKER hen the U.S. Air Force sent its proud F-IS fighter pilots against the Indian Air Force in the Cope India war games two years ago, it received a shock. The American pilots found themselves technologically outmatched by nimbler warplanes; tactically outsmarted by the Indian mix of high, low, and converging attack waves; and outfought by the Indians, whose highly trained pilots average more than 180 flying hours a year-roughly the same as their U.S. and Israeli counterparts and slightly more than those of NATO allies such as France and Germany. U.S. general Hal Homburg said that the results of the exercise, against Indian pilots flying Russian-built Sukhoi Su-30 and French Mirage 2000 fighters, were "a wakeup call." According to testimony in a House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing, the U.S. F-lSs were defeated more than 90 percent of the time in direct combat exercises against the Indians. But beyond the evidence of India's military expertise and its possession of state-of-the-art fighter aircraft, the real significance of the Cope India war games is that they demonstrated the extent of the cooperation between the Indian and U.S. militaries. Their mountain troops now train together in the Himalayas and Alaska, and their special forces mount joint exercises in jungle and underwater warfare. Their aircraft carrier task forces have conducted exercises in the Indian Ocean, and joint antipiracy and antisubmarine drills are routine. Indian and U.S. forces are working together with an intimacy once reserved for the closest NATO allies. The goal-that the militaries of the two countries be able to operate in lockstepwould have been inconceivable in the Cold War era, when India, with its Soviet-supplied military, was seen as a virtual client of Moscow. The foundation of this new relationship was laid before George W. Bush took office in the White House. In the spring of 1999, Bush, then governor of Texas, was briefed for tile first time by the team of foreign-policy advisers that became known as the Vulcans, after the Roman god of fire and iron. Bush began with the frank admission that he knew little about foreign policy. The
W
Vulcans, led by Condoleezza Rice-later to be his national security adviser and then secretary of state-delivered a broad-brash survey of the world, its problems, and its prospects, and recommended muscular American leadership in cool-headed pursuit of American interests. When the group finished, Bush had one question: What about India? Another Vulcan team member who was present, future ambassador to India Robert Blackwill, recalled asking Bush why he was so interested in India: "He immediately responded, "A billion people in a functioning democracy. Isn't that something? Isn't that something?" Bush's curiosity had been stirred by a number of Indian supporters living and prospering in Texas, including some businessmen who helped build the state's high-tech corridor, dubbed Silicon Canyon. One ofthose businessmen was DurgaAgrawal, born in Lakhanpur, a central Indian village without water or electricity, who had earned a master's degree at the University of Houston and stayed on to found a highly successful company called Piping Technology & Products and to raise more than $100,000 for the Bush presidential campaign in the local Indian community. After Bush became president, Agrawal was invited to the White House as a guest at the banquet for visiting Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, where Bush introduced him as "my good friend from Texas." Bush's question to his Vulcans prompted Rice to include a highly significant paragraph in her January 2000 Foreign Affairs essay "Promoting the National Interest," which was widely studied as the blueprint for a Bush administration foreign policy. She contended that China should be regarded as "a strategic competitor, not the 'strategic partner' the Clinton administration once called it," and suggested that America should redirect its focus. The United States "should pay closer attention to India's role in the regional balance. There is a strong tendency conceptually to connect India with Pakistan and to think only of Kashmir or the nuclear competition between the two states. But India is an element in China's calculation, and it should be in America's, too. India is not a great power yet, but it has the potential to emerge as one,"
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
The intervening September 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war perhaps explain why it took five years for the Bush administration to act formally on that calculus. But on aMarch 2005 visit to India, Rice told Prime Minister Singh that part of the United States' foreign policy was to "help India become a major world power in the 21st century." At a later briefing, U.S. ambassador to India David Mulford described the vision behind a broader strategic relationship with India that would foster cooperation on a number of fronts. "The U.S.-India relationship is based on our shared common values. We are multiethnic democracies committed to the rule of law and freedom of speech and religion" Mulford said, adding that "there is no fundamental conflict or disagreement between the United States and India on any important regional or global issue." A July 2005 visit by Prime Minister Singh to Washington, and President Bush's trip this year to New Delhi, along with detailed negotiations for nuclear, military, economic, and technological cooperation, have institutionalized that relationship. But, as former deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott said of his own earlier path-breaking negotiations with foreign minister Jaswant Singh, "What took us so long?" The short answer is the Cold War. American officials were uncomprehending and resentful offndia's determination to stay neutral as a founder and pillar of the Non-Aligned Movement. By contrast, Pakistan swiftly decided to become an American ally and to buy American weapons. In response, India bought Soviet weapons. Pakistan, with whom India has fought three wars since the two countries simultaneously became independent from Britain in 1947, was also a close ally of China, so the Sino-Soviet split gave Soviet diplomats a strong incentive to cement their ties with India, deepening American suspicions.
weakness of its old friends in Moscow, gave the country's leaders the spur and the self-confidence to rethink India's foreign policy. But there was a further goal: India's nervousness at the rapid growth of its Asian neighbor, China, by whom it had been humiliated in a brief border war in 1962. In May 1998, at the time of India's nuclear tests, Indian defense minister George Fernandes claimed that China was exploiting Pakistan, Burma, and Tibet in order to "encircle" India. "China has provided Pakistan with both missile as well as nuclear know-how/' Fernandes said, adding, "China has its nuclear weapons stockpiled in Tibet right along our borders." He concluded that China was India's most severe threat, and that while India had pledged "no first use" of nuclear weapons, the Indian nuclear arsenal would be targeted appropriately. With Pakistan to the west and China to the north and east, India has long feared encirclement. Despite soothing diplomatic statements, China has sharpened these fears with an assertive
new presence in the Indian Ocean, beginning in the late 1990s with an electronic listening post in Myanmar's Coco Islands. In 2001, China agreed to help Pakistan build a new port and naval base at Gwadar, close to the Iranian border and the Persian Gulf. China has also pitched in to build a road network from the new port to the Karakoram Highway, a feat of engineering that connects China and Pakistan through the Himalayas. The Gwadar naval base planned to India's west is matched by another to the east, where Chinese engineers are building a similar facility on Myanmar's Arakan coast, connected by a new road and rail link through Myanmar to China's Yunnan Province. China is also helping Cambodia build a rail link to the sea, and in Thailand, it is proposing to help fund a $20 billion canal across the Kra Isthmus, which would allow ships to bypass the Strait of Malacca. A recent Pentagon report described these new bases as China's "string of pearls" to secure the sea routes to the vital oil fields of the Persian Gulf.
India's explosion of a nuclear device (not a weapon, Indira
Gandhi's government insisted) in 1974 exposed India to various restrictions in obtaining nuclear supplies under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and to some other mildly punitive but symbolic U.S. legislation. After India's full-scale nuclear weapons tests in 1998 (swiftly followed by rather less impressive tests by Pakistan), the Clinton administration sought engagement through the Talbott-Singh talks and Bill Clinton's own highly successful visit to India. When Pakistan-backed militants crossed Kashmir's mountains into the Indian-controlled area of Kargil, Clinton's intervention prevented the incursion from escalating into a full-scale war. The Bush administration had to launch another panicked round of diplomacy in early 2002, after an attack on the Indian parliament by Kashmiri terrorists with apparent Pakistani connections. At one critical point, then-U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage asked his staff, "Who thinks they're heading for nuclear war?" and everyone except for Armitage reportedly raised a hand. One senior British official who was involved recalls it as the nearest thing to nuclear war since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
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In a number of off-the-record conversations in New Delhi on the eve of Bush's visit earlier this year, including extremely rare meetings with senior officials of the secretive Research and Analysis Wing, Indian security and military figures stressed their profound concern at these developments. The degree of alarm is evident in India's recent flurry of arms purchases, including a $3.5 billion deal to buy six Scorpene "stealth" submarines from France along with the technology to build more. The Scorpene will augment India's existing submarine fleet of 16 vessels, mainly Soviet-built Kilo and Foxtrot attack submarines. India was the world's biggest customer for arms last year, and more deals for advanced aircraft are in the works, which seem likely to include U.S.-made F-16 and 17-18 warplanes, even as India builds its own family of nuclear-capable Agni missiles, the latest version of which is designed to reach Shanghai. With almost
erhaps these brushes with disaster served as an awful warning to India. Or perhaps its successful market-style economic reforms in the 1990s, along wllh the palpable
188
Article 35. India's Path to Greatness 1.4 million troops, India's armed forces are already roughly the
Indian security officials already see themselves fated to play central roles in what Aaron Friedberg, a Princeton scholar now on the White House national security staff, has called "the struggle for mastery in Asia." That phrase was the title of an essay he published in the neoconservative monthly Commentary when Bush was first elected. Friedberg's central message was that over the next several decades the United States would likely find itself engaged in an "open and intense geopolitical rivalry" with China. "The combination of growing Chinese power, China's effort to expand its influence, and the unwillingness of the United States to entirely give way before it are the necessary preconditions of a 'struggle for mastery,' he wrote, adding that hostilities or a military confrontation could be slow to develop or could occur as a result of a "single catalytic event, such as a showdown over
same size as those of the United States, and they are increasingly well trained and well anned. India is so far the only Asian country with an aircraft carrier, which can deploy British-built Sea Harrier fighters, vertical-takeoff jets like those used by the U.S. Marines. The alarm over China's rise is plain in India's military and policy debates. An article last year by the Indian Defense Ministry's Bhartendu Kumar Singh in the journal Peace and Conflict, published by the New Delhi-based Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, is typical. Singh speculated that China's military buildup might be explained in part by Taiwan, but that its long-term goal could be to ensure Chinese dominance of the Asia-Pacific region. While Singh doubted that this challenge would result in an allout war between China and India, India was bound "to feel the effects of Chinese military confidence .... Is India prepared? It can wage and win a war against Pakistan under every circumstance, but it is not sure about holding out against China." The irony and the danger is that China has similar reasons to feel encircled. The United States has established new military bases in Central Asia since 9/1 I, adding to existing outposts in Japan and South Korea, and it is expanding its existing facilities at Guam to include a base for submarines and longrange stealth bombers. Now Beijing nervously watches the warming strategic partnership between Washington and New Delhi. Moreover, China's construction of the "string of pearls" reflects its own deep concern about the security of its oil supplies. Its tankers must pass through the Indian Ocean, and China's new pipeline from the Kazakh oil and gas fields of
Taiwan."
India is now playing tortoise to China's hare, not only in its rate of growth but also because the Indian and Chinese economies are two very different creatures. The strategic and energy concerns of the United States, China, and India will be difficult to manage. But Pakistan, Russia, Japan, and North and South Korea all factor into the extraordinarily complex equation of Asian security. (India maintains that Pakistan's missile technology came from China and North Korea.) And through Pakistan and the terrorist attacks from militants in Kashmir, India also feels itself threatened by Islamic
Central Asia will lie within easy cruise missile or air strike
extremism, a matter of grave concern for a country whose popu-
distance of India. The tension between these two rising powers is underscored by their rivalry for essential energy resources. "India, panicked over future oil supply, went after international oil assets competing directly with China," India Daily reported last year when Subir Raha, chairman of India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, announced that the company was buying a fifth of Iran's giant Yadavaran oil field and was in the market to buy assets of Yukos, the Russian energy giant. The Indian company had already invested nearly $2 billion to buy a share of the Sakhalin-l field in Siberia, run by ExxonMobil. India, which imports more than two-thirds of its oil, has since signed a $40 billion deal with Iran to import liquefied natural gas and join in developing three Iranian oil fields. Energy geopolitics can promote harmony as well as rivalry. Pakistan and Thrkmenistan have signed a memorandum of understanding on a multibillion-dollar gas pipeline through Afghanistan that could eventually end as a "Peace Pipeline" in India, in what would be a major breakthrough in Indo-Pakistani relations. Former Indian petroleum minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, a strong advocate for the pipeline, says, "Almost everywhere in the world where an Indian goes in quest of energy, chances are that he will run into a Chinese engaged in the sarne hunt." Aiyar proposed that India, China, Japan, and South Korea establish a system of cooperative access to energy supplies. His subsequent demotion to minister for youth and sport was widely perceived in India as reflecting U.S. pressure against the Iran oil deal.
lation of just over one billion includes 145 million Muslims. It is in this context that the nuclear dimension of the Bush
administration's embrace of India has aroused so much controversy. The administration seeks to steer India into "compliance" with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) system while leaving India's nuclear weapons reactors out of the international control regime. This stance has been challenged by critics in the United States for driving a coach and horses through the Non-Proliferation Treaty just as international support for diplomatic pressure on Iran depends on strict compliance with it. Under the deal, India will separate its civilian from its military nuclear programs, but it has until 2014 to complete this division. New Delhi will declare 14 of an expected total of 22 nuclear reactors to be for civilian use and place them under IAEA controls. But India has managed to keep its new fastbreeder reactors out of the control system, which means that there will be no nuclear fuel shortages to constrain the future manufacture and development of nuclear weapons. Moreover, because India will reserve the right to determine which parts of its nuclear program will be subject to IAEA controls and which will not, it will be able to shield its own nuclear research labs from the IAEA system. New Delhi has also reinterpreted the U.S. insistence that the deal be made "in perpetuity" by making this conditional on continued supplies of enriched uranium, of which India is desperately short, to fuel its reactors.
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
The main concession India made was cosmetic. It agreed not to be formally included, in the eyes of the United States and the IAEA, in the category of the five recognized nuclear weapons states (the United States, Russia, Britain, Prance, and China). The deal is still the subject of hard bargaining in the U.S. Congress, where it has yet to be ratified, despite intense pressure from the Bush administration. But if, as expected, the
endemic traffic jams included bicycles, flimsy three-wheeled rickshaws, and somnolent cows, whose excrement was swiftly scooped up by hordes of small children and patted into flat, plate-shaped discs, which are dried in the sun and sold for fuel. So to the usual tourist dangers of stomach upsets from eating local foods is added the prospect of respiratory infection from breathing air suffused with fecal matter. Yet there is no denying the furious commercial energy of a country that is currently signing up five million new mobile phone subscribers each month. Competition has come to the container industry, the airports are being privatized despite labor union opposition, and new highways are being built. The gas and electricity grids are slated for reform next. India has its high-tech centers of Bangalore and Hyderabad, as well as a few new towns such as Gurgaon, just outside Delhi, with a modern automaking plant, high-rise shopping malls, and telemarketing centers. But it can boast nothing like the jaw-dropping array of new skYscrapers that zigzag the skylines of modern Shanghai and Guangdong. Still, some of the smart money is on the tortoise. The global consultancy firm PwC (still better known by its old name, Price Waterhouse Coopers) produced a report this year forecasting that India would have the fastest growth among all the major economies over the next 50 years, averaging 7.6 percent annually in dollar terms. In 50 years' time, the Indian and U.S. economies would be roughly equivalent in size. The report also suggested that by 2050 the existing economies of the G-7 group of advanced industrial nations (the United States, Britain, Prance, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Canada) would be overtaken by the E-7 emergent economies of China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Mexico, and Turkey.
agreement succeeds, India will become a special case, with a free hand to augment its nuclear weapons systems, and to develop its nuclear power stations with full access to the fuel and technology monopolized by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group. And India will secure all this with the blessing of the IAEA, thus negating the efforts of the international community since the 1970s to constrain India's nuclear ambitions by putting sanctions on its access to nuclear fuel and technology.
In India, the agreement has come in for criticism for wedding the country to U.S. strategic interests, to the detriment of India's relations with China and Iran. The policy is also viewed by some Indians as a lever to steadily increase international control over India's nuclear assets, and to make it more dependent on the United States as the prime supplier of nuclear fuel. India long saw itself as neutral and nonaligned, endowed by Gandhi's nonviolent legacy with a singular innocence of such geopolitical games. It has been thrust with remarkable speed into a prominent strategic role that matches its new economic robustness. But its ability to sustain military power and buy advanced weaponry will dearly depend on its economic growth, which began in earnest 15 years after China launched its OWn economic reforms. While India 30 years ago enjoyed a slightly higher per capita income than China, today it has an annual per capita income (at purchasing power parity) of $3,300, not quite half of China's level of $6,800, and less than one-tenth of the $41,800 level of the United States. India is now playing the tortoise to China's hare, not only in its rate of growth but also because the Indian and Chinese economies are two very different creatures. China has become the world's low-cost manufacturing center, making and assembling components that are often designed or developed elsewhere, and relying heavily on foreign investment. India's boom, by contr~st. has so far been largely based on services and software, and it has been self-financing, with about a tenth of China's level of foreign direct investment. Still, it has produced an Indian middle class-usually defined by the ability to buy a private car-of some 300 million people, a number greater than the entire population ofthe United States. One central reason why India has not enjoyed a Chinesestyle boom led by manufacturing is the dismal state of so much of the country's infrastructure. Its ports, railroads, highways, electricity supplies, and grid systems are aged and ramshackle,
There is no denying the furious commercial energy of a country that is currently signing up five million new mobile phone subscribers each month. The most significant difference between India and China, however, may be how their respective demographic trends and political systems shape their futures. The Chinese leadership is already coming to regret its nearly 30-year-old policy of permitting most couples to have only one child. Now China is rapidly aging and heading for a pensions crisis, as an entire generation of only children grapples with the problem of helping to support two parents and four grandparents. A recent DeutscheBank survey on China's pension challenge predicted, "China is going to get old before it gets rich." The policy has also created a serious gender disparity. The ability to predict the sex of a fetus in a country limited to one child per family has led to a situation in which 120 boys are born for every 100 girls, and President Hu Jintao last year asked a task force of scientists and officials to address the tricky problems posed by an excess of single men. India has a similar sex disparity problem in certain regions, notably those where Sikhs are numerous, but overall, with half of its population below the age of 25, it boasts a far healthier demographic profile.
and traffic jams and power outages are routine, reinforcing each other when the traffic lights blink out. Critical segments of the economy-such as the container transport system, which allows easy shipping of freight by land, sea, and air-have been state monopolies, subject to the usual debilitating problems of the breed. Arriving foreigners receive a startling introduction to the bustle and backwardness of India before they ever reach a hotel. On my most recent trip to New Delhi and Jaipur, the maddening
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Article 35. India's Path to Greatness simultaneously to grapple with the cultural, theological, eco-
he contest between the Indian tortoise and the Chinese hare has a political dimension as well. India is a democracy, without an equivalent of China's ruling Communist Party. Its elections, provincial governments, and free news media give the country great social resilience. China's breakneck economic growth and social disruption seem likely to have
T
nomic, and social revolutions now under way. Facing the additional problem of militant Hindu national-
ism, India has no choice but to stand in the front line against Islamic extremism. India is the great geographic obstruction to an Islamic arc that would stretch from Morocco across Africa and the Middle East all the way to Malaysia, Indonesia, and into the Philippines. Pakistan and Bangladesh are deeply uncomfortable neighbors for India, being Muslim, poor, the scenes of concerted jihadist campaigns, and worrisomely close to becoming failed states. But there is another arc, which stretches from Japan and South Korea through China and the increasingly
potent consequences as its new middle class finds a political voice. The Chinese Communist Party is becoming less ideological
and far more technocratic in its orientation, but it still can manipulate the most authoritarian levers of state power in aggres-
sive pursuit of economic and strategic goals. Indians are stuck
prosperous countries of the Association of Southeast Asian
with their messy but comfortable democracy. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, an Oxford-educated economist who is deputy chairman of the national planning commission, says, "The biggest thing about India is that it's a very participative, very pluralistic, open democracy where even if the top 1,000 people technocratically came to the conclusion something is good, it has to be mediated into a political consensus. And I'm being rcalistic. I don't think it's going to be that easy to put in place everything
Nations to India. This swath of rising prosperity and economic growth now includes three billion people-half the world's population. It is easy to foresee wretched outliers such as North Korea, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Pakistan being swept up in the wake of this boom, should it continue, but for that to happen,
Asia needs stability, peace, and a cessation of anus races.
that from a technocratic point of view everybody knows needs to be done."
I
In short, India's pluralism could be to China's advantage, although given the track record of bureaucratic technocrats from
t
is an open question whether the burgeoning new stra-
tegic friendship of India and the United States will help this process or derail it. It could do both, deterring China from adventurism or bullying its neighbors, and stabilizing the
Moscow to Japan in wasting massive resources to pursue the wrong goals, it may not be that simple. But India has its own
strategic environment while India and China manage a joint
special asset, recognized by the American presidential candidate
and peaceful rise to wealth and status. But at the same time, the new U.S.-Indian accord could help spur a new nuclear arms race in Asia, where Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and probably North Korea already have the bomb, and Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have the technological capability to build it quickly. One wild card is already being played that could bring this about: the prospect of Japan and India sharing in American anti-missile technology. If India gains the ability to shoot down
George W. Bush and suggested by the celebrated prediction a century ago by Otto von Bismarck that "the most important fact of the 20th century will be that the English and the Americans speak the same language." The most important factor in the 21st century may well be that Americans and Indians (and perhaps Britons and Australians and Microsoft employees and global businesspeople) all speak English. This is not simply a matter of a shared language, although that is important; it also encom-
incoming missiles, this threatens to negate the deterrent that
passes those other aspects of the common heritage that include
Pakistan and China thought they possessed against India, with potentially destabilizing results. Even though India's prospects now look brighter than they
free speech and free press, ilial by jury and an independent judiciary, private property, and individual as well as human rights. While retaining its rich and historic cultures, India is thoroughly familiar with these core values and determinants of the American
have for a generation. the country faces some sobering challenges, including the accelerating pace of expectations among
civic system. And as a religiously tolerant, multi~ethnic democracy with commercial, legal, and educational systems devel-
its own people and their understandable demand that the new wealth be shared quickly, that the poorest villages get schools and electricity. Almost half the population still lives in rural hamlets, and only 44 percent of these rural residents have electricity. Enemies of globalization populate the Indian Left and
oped during the British Raj, India is-like the English language
itself-familiar and reassuring to Americans. A decisive factor in the short tenn may be India's importance
sit in the current coalition government. India must grapple with the familiar difficulties of Hindu nationalism, inadequate infra~ structure, and a large Muslim population, as well as environmental crisis, deep rural poverty, and the caste system.
to the United States in the strategic and cultural campaign now being waged against Islamic extremism. This will be a struggle much deeper and longer than the mainly military effort the Bush administration calls GWOT (Global War on Terrorism), as currently being fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. India, itself a regular target, has been from the beginning a firm partner in the war on terrorism, instantly offering flyover and landing rights to U.S. aircraft engaged in the war against the Taliban. But with its 145 million Muslims, India risks becoming embroiled in the tumult now shaking so much of the Islamic world as the faithful try
India finds itself in a delicate position. It must manage and
maintain its relationship with China while accommodating American strategists who are relying on its support to keep Asia on the rails of democratic globalization. Americans also regard India as insurance against China's domination of Asia to the exclusion of the United States. India, on the other hand, wants
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
freedom of action and does not want to serve merely as a tool of American influence. "We want the United States to remain as the main stabilizer in Asia and the balance against China until such time as India can manage the job on its own" an influential security adviser to the Indian government said recently, very much on background. What will happen once India believes it can do this alone? I asked. "Well, then we shall see," he replied. "By then it will be
a different Asia, probably a different China, and possibly a different America. It will certainly be a different world, dominated by the Indian, Chinese, and American superpowers." MARTlN WALKER is the editor of United Press International and a senior scholar at the Wilson Center, His most recent books are America Reborn: A Twentieth-Century Narrat,ive in Twenty-Six Lives (2000) and the novel The Caves oj Nrigord (2002).
From Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2006, pp. 22·30. Copyright © 2006 by Martin Walker. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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Article 36
Bin Laden, the Arab "Street," and the Middle East's Democracy Deficit "Bin Laden speaks in the vivid language of popular Islamic preachers, and builds on a deep and widespread resentment against the West and local ruling elites identified with it. The lack of formal outlets to express opinion on public concerns has created [al democracy deficit in much of the Arab world, and this makes it easier for terrorists such as bin Laden, asserting that they act in the name of religion, to hijack the Arab street."
DALE
I
F.
EICKELMAN
n the years ahead, the role of public diplomacy and open communications will play an increasingly significant role
in countering the image that the Al Qaeda terrorist net
Jerusalem, Lebanon, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Indonesia (but not Muslim violence against Christians and Chinese in the last). It also shows United States generals received by Saudi princes, intimating the collusion of local regimes with the West and challenging the legitimacy of many regimes, including Saudi Arabia. The sufferings of the Iraqi people are attributed to American brutality against Muslims, but Saddam Hussein is assimilated to the category of infidel ruler.
M
work and Osama bin Laden assert for themselves as guardians of Islamic values. In the fight against terrorism for which bin Laden is the photogenic icon, the first step is to recognize that he is as thoroughly a part of the modern world as was Cambodia's French-educated Pol Pot. Bin Laden's videotaped presentation of self intends to convey a traditional Islamic warrior brought up-to-date, but this sense of the past is a completely invented one. The language and content of his videotaped appeals convey more of his participation in the modem world than his camouflage jacket, Kalashnikov, and Timex watch. Take the two-hour Al Qaeda recruitment videotape in Arabic that has made its way to many Middle Eastern video shops and Western news media.' It is a skillful production, as fast paced and gripping as any Hindu fundamentalist video justifying the destruction in 1992 of the Ayodhya mosque in India, or the political attack videos so heavily used in American presidential campaigning. The 1988 "Willie Horton" campaign video of Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush-in which an off-screen announcer portrayed Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis as "soft" on crime while showing a mug shot of a convicted African-American rapist who had committed a second rape during a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison-was a propaganda masterpiece that combined an explicit although conventional message with a menacing, underlying one intended to motivate undecided voters. The Al Qaeda video, directed at a different audience-presumably alienated Arab youth, unemployed and often Jiving in desperate conditions-shows an equal mastery of modern propaganda. The Al Qaeda producers could have graduated from one of the best film schools in the United States or Europe. The fastmoving recruitment video begins with the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, but then shows a montage implying a seemingly coordinated worldwide aggression against Muslims in Palestine,
Osama bin laden ... is thoroughly imbued with the values of the modern world, even if only to reject them.
Many of the images are taken from the daily staple of Western video news-the BBC and CNN logos add to the videos' authenticity, just as Qatar's al~Jazeera satellite television logo rebroadcast by CNN and the BBC has added authenticity to Western coverage of Osama bin Laden. Alternating with these scenes of devastation and oppression of Muslims are images of Osama bin Laden: posing in front of bookshelves or seated on the ground like a religious scholar, holding the Koran in his hand. Bin Laden radiates charismatic authority and control as he narrates the Prophet Mohammed's flight from Mecca to Medina, when the early Islamic movement was threatened by the idolaters, but returning to conquer them. Bin Laden also stresses the need for jihad, or struggle for the cause of Islam, against the "crusaders" and "Zionists." Later images show military training in Afghanistan (including target practice at a poster of Bill Clinton), and a final sequence-the word "solution" flashes across the screen-captures an Israeli soldier in full riot gear retreating from a Palestinian boy throwing stones, and a reading of the Koran.
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
The Thoroughly Modern Islamist Osaroa bin Laden, like many of his associates, is imbued with the values of the modern world, even if only to reject them. A 1971 photograph shows him on family holiday in Oxford at the age of 14, posing with two of his half-brothers and Spanish girls their own age. English was their COmmon language of communication. Bin Laden studied English at a private school in Jidda, and English was also useful for his civil engineering courses at Jidda's King Abdul Aziz University. Unlike many of his estranged half-brothers, educated in Saudi Arabia, Europe, and the United States, Osama's education was only in Saudi Arabia, but he was also familiar with Arab and European society. The organizational skills he learned in Saudi Arabia came in to play when he joined the mujahideen (guerrilla) struggle against the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He may not have directly met United States intelligence officers in the field, but they, like their Saudi and Pakistani counterparts, were delighted to have him participate in their fight against Soviet troops and recruit willing Arab fighters. Likewise, his many business enterprises flourished under highly adverse conditions. Bin Laden skillfully sustained a flexible multinational organization in the face of enemies, especially state authorities) moving cash, people, and supplies almost undetected across international frontiers. The organizational skills of bin Laden and his associates were never underestimated. Neither should be their skills in conveying a message that appeals to some Muslims. Bin Laden lacks the credentials of an established Islamic scholar, but this does not diminish his appeal. As Sudan's Sorbonneeducated Hasan al-Turabi, the leader of his country's Muslim Brotherhood and its former attorney general and speaker of parliament, explained two decades ago, "Because all knowledge is divine and religious, a chemist, an engineer, an economist, or a jurist" are all men of learning.2 Civil engineer bin Laden exemplifies Turabi's point. His audience judges him not by his ability to cite authoritative texts, but by his apparent skill in applying generally accepted religious tenets to current political and social issues.
The Message on the Arab "Street" Bin Laden's lectures circulate in book form in the Arab world, but video is the main vehicle of communication. The use of CNN-like "zippers"-the ribbons of words that stream beneath the images in many newscasts and documentaries-shows that Al Qaeda takes the Arab world's rising levels of education for granted. Increasingly, this audience is also saturated with both conventional media and new media, such as the Internet: 3 The Middle East has entered an era of mass education and this also implies an Arabic lingua franca. In Morocco in the early 1970s, rural people sometimes asked me to "translate" newscasts from the standard transnational Arabic of the state radio into colloquial Arabic. Today this is no longer required. Mass education and new communications technologies enable large numbers of Arabs to hear-and see-AI Qaeda's message directly.
Bin Laden's message does not depend on religious themes alone. Like the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, his message contains many secular elements. Khomeini often alluded to the "wretched of the earth." At least for a time, his language appealed equally to Iran's religiously minded and to the secular left. For bin Laden, the equivalent themes are the oppression and corruption of many Arab governments, and he lays the blame for the violence and oppression in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, and elsewhere at the door of the West. One need not be religious to rally to some of these themes. A poll taken in Morocco in late September 2001 showed that a majority of Moroccans condemned the September 11 bombings, but 41 percent sympathized with bin Laden's message. A British poll taken at about the same time showed similar results. Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist movement are thus reaching at least part of the Arab "street." Earlier this year, before the September terrorist attacks, United States policymakers considered this "street" a "new phenomenon of public accountability, which we have seldom had to factor into our projections of Arab behavior in the past. The information revolution, and particularly the daily dose of uncensored television coming out oflocal TV stations like al-Jazeera and international coverage by CNN and others, is shaping public opinion, which, in turn, is pushing Arab governments to respond. We don't know, and the leaders themselves don't know, how that pressure will impact on Arab policy in the future.'" Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet was even more cautionary on the nature of the "Arab street." In testi~ mony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February 2001, he explained that the "right catalyst-such as the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence--can move people to act. Through access to the Internet and other means of communication, a restive public is increasingly capable of taking action without any identifiable leadership or organizational structure." Because many governments in the Middle East are deeply suspicious of an open press, nongovernmental organizations, and open expression, it is no surprise that the "restive" public, increasingly educated and influenced by hard-to-censor new media, can take action "without any identifiable leadership or organized structure." The Middle East in general has a democracy deficit, in which "unauthorized" leaders or critics, such as Egyptian academic Saad Eddin Ibrahim-founder and director of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, a nongovernmental organization that promotes democracy in Egypt-suffer harassment or prison terms. One consequence of this democracy deficit is to magnify the power of the street in the Arab world. Bin Laden speaks in the vivid language of popular Islamic preachers, and builds on a deep and widespread resentment against the West and local ruling elites identified with it. The lack of formal outlets to express opinion on public concefl1s has created the democracy deficit in much of the Arab world, and this makes it easier for terrorists such as bin Ladin, asserting that they act in the name of religion, to hijack the Arab street. The immediate response is to learn to speak directly to this street. This task has already begun. Obscure to all except 194
Article 36. Bin Laden, the Arab "Street," and the Middle East's Democracy Deficit specialists until September 11, Qatar's al-Jazeera satellite television is a premier source in the Arab world for uncensored
ghayr mutanahiya, implying that an earthly power arrogated to itself the task of divine retribution. Likewise, President George W. Bush's inadvertent and unscripted use of the word "crusade" gave Al Qaeda spokesmen an Oppoltunity to attack Bush and Western intentions. Mistakes will be made, but information and arguments that reach the Arab street, including on al-Jazeera, will eventually have an impact. Some Westerners might condemn al-Jazeera as biased, and it may well be in terms of making assumptions about its audience. However, it has broken a taboo by regularly inviting official Israeli spokespersons to comment live on current issues. Muslim religious scholars, both in the Middle East and in the West, have already spoken out against Al Qaeda's claim to act in the name of Islam. Other courageous voices, such as Egyptian playwright Ali Salem, have even employed humor for the same purpose.' We must recognize that the best way to mitigate the continuing threat of terrorism is to encourage Middle Eastern states to be more responsive to participatory demands, and to aid local nongovernmental organizations working toward this goaL As with the case of Egypt's Saad Eddin Ibrahim, some countries may see such activities as subversive. Whether Arab states like it or not, increasing levels of education, greater ease of travel, and the rise of new communications media are turning the Arab street into a public sphere in which greater numbers of people, and not just a political and economic elite, will have a say in governance and public issues.
news and opinion. It is more, however, than the Arab equivalent of CNN. Uncensored news and opinions increasingly shape
"public opinion"-a term without the pejorative overtones of "the street"-even in places like Damascus and Algiers. This public opinion in turn pushes Arab governments to be more responsive to their citizens, or at least to say that they are. Rather than seek to censor al-Jazeera or limit Al Qaeda's
access to the Western media-an unfortunate first response of the United States government after the September terror attacks-we should avoid censorship. Al Qaeda statements
should be treated with the same caution as any other news source. Replacing Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams' voice and image in the British media in the 1980s with an Irish-accented actor appearing in silhouette only highlighted what he had to say, and it is unlikely that the British public would tolerate the same restrictions on the media today. Ironically, at almost the same time that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice asked the American television networks not to air Al Qaeda videos unedited, a former senior CIA officer, Graham Fuller, was explaining in Arabic on al-Jazeera how United States policymaking works. His appearance on al-Jazeera made a significant impact, as did Secretary of State Colin Powell's presence on a later al-Jazeera program and former United States Ambassador Christopher Ross, who speaks fluent Arabic. Likewise, the timing and content of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's response to an earlier bin Laden tape suggests how to take the emerging Arab public seriously. The day after al-Jazeera broadcast the bin Laden tape, Blair asked for and received an opportunity to respond. In his reply, Blair-in a first for a Western leader-directly addressed the Arab public through the Arab media, explaining coalition goals in attacking Al Qaeda and the Taliban and challenging bin Laden's claim to speak in the name of Islam.
Notes 1. It is now available on-line with explanatory notes in English. See
. 2. Hasan al-Turabi, ''The Islamic State," in Voices oj Resurgent Islam, John L. Esposito, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 245. 3. On the importance of rising levels of education and the new me~ dia, see Dale F. Eickelman, ''The Coming Transfonnation in the Muslim World," Current History, January 2000.
Putting Public Diplomacy to Work
4. Edward S. Walker, "The New US Administration's Middle East Policy Speech," Middle East Economic Survey, vol. 44, no. 26 (June 25, 2001). Available at .
Such appearances enhance the West's ability to communicate a primary message: that the war against terrorism is not that of one civilization against another, but against terrorism and fanaticism in all societies. Western policies and actions are subject to public scrutiny and will often be misunderstood. Public diplomacy can significantly diminish this misapprehension. It may, however, involve some uncomfortable policy decisions. For instance, America may be forced to exert more diplomatic pressure on Israel to alter its methods of dealing with Palestinians. Western public diplomacy in the Middle East also involves uncharted waters. As Oxford University social linguist Clive Holes has noted, the linguistic genius who thought up the first name for the campaign to oust the Taliban, "Operation Infinite Justice," did a major disservice to the Western goaL The expression was literally and accurately translated into Arabic as adala
5. See his article in Arabic, "I Want to Start a Kindergarten for Extremism," AZ-Hayat (London), November 5,2001. This is translated into English by the Middle East Media Research Institute as Special Dispatch no. 298, Jihad and Terrorism Studies, Novem ber 8, 2001, at . M
F. EICKELMAN is Ralph and Richard Lazarus Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations at Dartmouth College. His most recent book is The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 2002). An earlier version of this article appeared as ''The West Should Speak to the Arab in the Street," Daily Telegraph (London), October 27, 2001. DALE
Reprinted from Current History, January 2002, pp. 36-39. Copyright © 2002 by CUrren! History, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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UNITS
Comparative Politics: Some Major Trends, Issues, and Prospects Unit Selections 37. 38.
39. 40. 41. 42.
Democracy's Sobering State, Thomas Carothers Capitalism and Democracy, Gabriel A. Almond Cultural Explanations: The Man in the Baghdad Cafe, The Economist Globalization Is About Blending, Not Homogenizing, Joseph S. Nye Jr. An Explosive Combination, Amy Chua Jihad vs. McWorld, Benjamin R. Barber
Key Points to Consider • What is meant by the first, second, and third waves of democratization? Discuss the reversals that followed the first two. Where are most of the countries affected by the third wave located? What factors appear to have contributed to this recent expansion of dem-
ocratic rule? And what are some Signs that the third wave has come to a virtual standstill or even given way to a reverse wave? • What are some main problems and dilemmas of old and new democracies, as discussed by Thomas Carothers? • In what ways can market capitalism and liberal democracy be said to both support and subvert each other, according to Gabriel Almond? • How does the article with the subtitle, 'The Man in the Baghdad Cafe," cast doubt on some current cultural explanations in social
science? What does Benjamin Barber mean when he warns that democracy is threatened by globalism and tribalism?
Student Web Site
www.mhcls.com/online
Internet References
Further information regarding these Web sites may be found in this book's preface or online.
Commission on Global Governance http://www.sovereignty.netlplgovlgganalysis.htm IISDnet http://www-iisd.orgldefault.asp ISN International Relations and Security Network http://www.isn.elhz.ch United Nations Environment Program http://www.unep.ch!
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After these cautionary preliminaries, we can proceed to iden~ tify three recent developments that singly and together have had very important roles in changing the political world in which we live. One is the process of democratization, which has been sweeping much of the world. This refers to a widespread trend toward some form of popularly chosen, accessible, and accountable government. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, it often took the form of a search for representative, pluralist democracy in countries that were previously ruled by some kind of authoritarian oligarchy or dictatorship. A second trend has been the shift toward liberalization of the economy and greater reliance on private enterprise, the profit motive, and relatively free markets_ It involves a concurrent move away from strong regulation, central planning, and state ownership. It is not a particular economic model that is being advocated, but measures that supposedly will encourage economic growth. This trend has found supporters in some unexpected places. In Asian Communist-ruled countries, above all China, we have become used to seeing self-proclaimed revolutionary socialists introduce and encourage forms of capitalist practice in their formerly centrally planned economies. Ironically, a form of capitalism seems to have been established in China by courtesy of leaders who used to be its most fervent ideological opponents. In Russia, leading reformers were for a while also enthusiastic free marketers. More recently, similar changes have been brought to India. The enthusiasm of the neoliberal reformers was not shared by everyone, and much of it has waned or given way to disappointments as unwarranted promises or expectations of quick affluence failed to materialize. Above all, however, it has been shown that even if a market economy is more efficient than a centrally planned economy-and it probably is, ceteris paribus-it has not developed a good self defense in terms of social justice. For better or worse, capitalism is fundamentally associated with unequal rewards and economic insecurity. The third major trend could be called the revival and intensification of ethnic or cultural identity politics. This refers to a growing emphasis on some form of an exclusive group identity as the primary basis for political expression. In modern times, it has been common for a group to identify itself by its special ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other cultural traits and to make this identity the basis for a claim to special recognition and, sometimes, to rule by and for itself. This unit thus brings us back to democratization. Even if this development is often fragile and likely to be reversed in some countries, we need to remember how remarkable it was in the first place. Using very different criteria and data, skeptics on both Right and Left doubted for a long time whether representative government was sufficiently effective, attractive or even legitimate to spread or survive in the modern world.
The articles in this unit deal with three major political trends or patterns of development that can be observed in much of the contemporary world. It is important at the outset to stress that, with the possible exception of Benjamin Barber, none of the authors predict some form of global convergence in which all political systems would become alike in major respects. On closer examination, even Barber turns out to argue that a strong tendency toward global homogenization is offset by a concurrent tendency toward intensified group differentiation and fragmentation. Thus the trends or patterns discussed may be widespread but they are neither unidirectional nor universal. They are sjtu~ ationally defined, and may turn out to be temporary or partly reversible. Each has resulted in what could be called a countervailing trend. Moreover, the three trends (with counter-trends) do not always reinforce one another. Their different forms of development are the very stuff of comparative politics.
197
Samuel Huntington's widely discussed thesis concerning a recent wave of democratization underlies the article by Thomas Carothers. Huntington is both one of the best-known observers of this trend and a former skeptic concerning democracy's future prospects. But in the 1980s, before the collapse of the communist regimes in Europe, he had begun to identify a broad but not necessarily deep pattern of democratization. He traced its origins to the mid-1970s, when the three remaining dictatorships in Western Europe came to an almost simultaneous end (in Greece, Portugal, and Spain). In the following decade, democratization spread to most of Latin America. The countries of the Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe then followed. The trend also reached some states in East and South Asia like Taiwan or South Korea as well as some parts of Africa, above all South Africa. Mexico's presidential election of 2000, with its transfer of political power after more than seven decades of oneparty hegemony, can also be seen in this context. Like all but a few of the new democracies, Mexico falls into the category of "flawed democracies." The few that the democracy index ranks as "full" democracies are a motley group with no immediately obvious reason for success: Malta, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the Czech Republik, Mauritius, Slovenia, and Uruguay. All but Spain are small in population. In a widely adopted phrase, Huntington identified this widespread trend as the "third" in a series of successive Ilwaves" of democratization in modern history. The "first wave" had been slow to develop but long in its reach, beginning in the 1820s and lasting about one century. During this period the United States and 28 other countries established governments based on a broad franchise that eventually came to include women as well as men. Democratization was not only a drawnMout process in these countries, it was also a highly flawed and imperfect one: not a single system of government at the beginning of the twentieth century (with the possible exception of New Zealand) would have met today's stricter minimum standards of what constitutes a democracy. Soon after the end of the war "to make the world safe for democracy:' the long first wave came to a halt. In the first half of the 1920s, Mussolini's capture and consolidation of power in Italy began a period of severe democratic setbacks-a first "reverse wave," as it has been called-that lasted until the mid 1940s. During those two decades, the number of democracies in the world plunged from 29 by more than half. In the middle of World War II, there were only four full-fledged democratic states left in Europe-or five, if we include Finland. A "second wave" of democratization started with the Allied Victory in World War II and continued during the early post-war years. It lasted until the early 1960s and included the liberated countries in Western Europe that immediately restored their democratic institutions and practices-countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, France, and also Czechoslovakia. In addition, the major defeated powers, (Western) Germany and Japan, were steered toward democratic politics, while Italy moved on its own to be classified as a "flawed democracy:' There were democratic stirrings in several Latin American countries. Finally, in the process of decolonization, the newly independent countries often started out with a formal democratic framework-one that in many cases proved M
to be fragile and sometimes of very short duration. These new states, along with some countries in Latin America were the main settings for a series of authoritarian comebacks-the rela~ tively short second "reverse wave." Although it only lasted a little over a decade, some of the new authoritarian regimes (like Chile) held on quite a few years longer. During this period of setbacks, the total number of democracies fell from 36 to 30 and the number of non~democracies rose from 75 to 95, as various former colonies or newly minted democracies fell under authoritarian or dictatorial rule. Then, in the mid-1970s, the "third wave" of democratization began. It turned out to be more sweeping and universal than its predecessors. Already by the beginning of the 1990s, Huntington counted about 60 democracies in the world. Larry Diamond, another authority on the subject, reported in 2000 that 120 states out of a world total of 192 independent states (63 percent) met at least the minimum requirements for being classified as electoral democracies. The number was reduced to 71 (or 37 percent) when he applied the stricter standards of liberal democracy-basic civil rights and liberties, rule of law, political independence and neutrality of the judiciary, an open, pluralist society, and civilian control of the military. His count comes close to that of the "democracy index" made six years later and using a similar (not identical) set of Criteria: It lists 82 countries as democracies-28 as "full" and 54 as "flawed:' The change is in any case impressive, when one considers Robert Dahl's finding that only 22 countries can be identified as "older democracies,".in the sense of having a continuous political history as democracies since at least 1950. On the other hand, these findings lend support to the conclusion that democracy's advance has been at best a "two steps forward, one step back" kind of progress. Writing in 2004, Thomas Carothers finds that the "third wave" has come to a standstill, as formerly high expectations of democracy's fruils have turned to disappointment. Already some earlier "third wave" democratic advances in countries like the Sudan, Algeria, and Peru have been followed by authoritarian reversals. Haiti (like Nigeria) has gone through its own double wave. The prospects for democracy on that poverty-stricken Caribbean island do not seem bright. There are ominous signs of authoritarian revivals elsewhere in the world, as we are reminded by the "watch list" that comes with the democracy index. Meanwhile China, with more than one-fifth of the world's population, shows no signs of moving towards representative government. What are the general conditions that inhibit or encourage the spread and stabilization of democracy? Huntington and Diamond are among the scholars who have identified specific historical factors that contributed to the third wave. One important factor was the loss of legitimacy by both right- and left-wing authoritarian regimes that had been discredited by failure to pass some key test of performance. Another factor was the expansion in some developing countries of an urban middle class, with a strong interest in representative government and the rule of law. In Latin America, especially, the influence of a recently more liberal Catholic Church was important. There have also been various forms of external influence by the United States and the European Community, as they have tried, however tentatively, to
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A crucial question is whether the relative prosperity and social security associated with this kind of mixed economy can be maintained in a time of technological breakthroughs and global competition. In 1999, Gerhard Schroder and Tony Blair attempted an answer: the two European leaders reaffirmed their commitment to a "third way" and made a key distinction between "a market economy" and "a market society." Their outspoken support for the former was based on its demonstrated economic superiority, while their reservations about the latter were rooted in their conviction that a society should not be governed by the market's efficiency criteria alone. In supporting this distinction, Blair enjoyed the advantage of having inherited Thatcher's economic reforms as consolidated by John Major's government. He could thus concentrate on the second part of the agenda. In Germany, SchrOder inherited a socially generous system that could not be maintained without a major economic~minded reform. Mainstream economists greeted Schroder's reform project, Agenda 2010, as a step in the right direction, although some wondered whether it had come "too slow, too little, too late:' (Many supporters of the old welfare system reacted as though there had been no reform necessary at all or else that it had been "too quick, too much, too soon.") It remains to be seen whether the "grand coalition" government in Germany will be more persuasive than the "redgreen" government in persuading the electorate to bite the bullet. The third section deals with the revival of the ethnic and CUltural dimension in politics. Until recently, relatively few observers foresaw that this element would play such a divisive role in the contemporary world. There were forewarnings, such as the ethno-nationalist stirrings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, sometimes in peripheral areas of suc~ countries as Britain, Canada, or Spain. It also lay behind many of the conflicts in the newly independent countries of the developing world. But most Western observers-like their Soviet counterparts-seem to have been poorly prepared for the resurgence of politicized religious, ethniC, or other cultural forces. The politicization of religion in many parts of the world falls into this development of a "politics of identity:' In recent years, religious groups ',n parts of Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Southern Europe have set out on the political road in the name of their faith, As Max Weber warned in a classic lecture shortly before his death, it can be dangerous to seek "the salvation of souls" along the path of politics. The coexistence of people of divergent faiths is possible only because religious conviction need not fully determine or direct a person's or a group's politics. Where absolute and fervent convktions take over, they make it difficult to compromise pragmatically and live harmoniously with people who believe differently. Pluralist democracy requires an element of tolerance, which for many takes the form of a casual "live and let live" attitude. There is an important debate among political scientists concerning the sources and scope of politics based on ethnic, religious, and cultural differences. Samuel Huntington has concluded that the most important and dangerous future conflicts will be based on clashes of civilizations, above all those of the Christian and Muslim worlds. In his view, they will be far more
promote a human rights agenda. Finally, there is the "snowballing" or demonstration effect with the successful early transitions to democracy in countries like Spain or Portugal, which served as models for other countries in similar circumstances, Will the new democracies endure, stabilize, and become more democratic over time? There is clearly no guarantee, but Huntington's rule of thumb is that a democratic form of government can be considered to have become stable when a country has had at least two successive peaceful turnovers of power. Such a development may take a generation or longer to complete, even under fortunate circumstances. Many of the new democracies have little historical experience with a democratic way of life. Where there has been such an experience, it may have been spotty and not very positive. Like most other observers, Huntington sees extreme poverty as a principal obstacle to successful democratization. The stunted state of democratization in Muslim societies has drawn a lot of attention and calls for explanation, even if there are exceptions such as the admittedly flawed case ofTurkey. In his article that grew out of a speech given to a Soviet audio ence during the Gorbachev reform era, Gabriel Almond explored the complex and ambiguous connections between capitalism and democracy. His systematic discussion draws upon both theory and empirical studies. It shows that there are ways in which capitalism and democracy support each other, and ways in which they tend to undermine each other. Is it possible to have the best of both? Almond answers at length that there is a nonutopian manner in which capitalism and democracy can be reconciled, namely in democratic welfare capitalism. Almond's discussion can be linked to a theme emphasized by some contemporary political economists. They point out that the economic competition between capitalism and socialism is effectively over. The central question now is which form of market economy will be more successful and acceptable. A similar argument has been made by the French theorist, Michel Albert, who distinguished between the British-American or "AngloSaxon" and the continental "Rhineland" modelS of capitalism. The former is more individualistic, more likely to resist governmental intervention, and characterized by such traits as high employee turnovers and short-term profit-maximizing. It differs considerably from what the Germans call their "social market economy." The latter is more team-oriented, emphasizes COOPA eration between management and organized labor, and leaves a considerable role for government In the setting of general economic strategy, the training of an educated labor force, and the provision of social welfare services. These different conceptions of capitalism can be linked to different histories. While Britain and the United States experienced a head start in their industrial revolutions and felt no great need for deliberate government efforts to encourage growth, Germany and Japan both played the role of relative latecomers, who looked to government in their attempts to catch up. The emergence of a kind of "social capitalism" in other continental countries of Europe suggests that cultural and institutional factors also played major roles in this development. We should continue to expect very differently mixed market economies, because one economic model or size is unlikely ever to fit all.
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difficult to resolve than those rooted in socioeconomic or even ideological differences, because '~he soul" is somehow at stake. His critics argue that Huntington distorts the differences among
civilizations and trivializes the differences within civilizations. Chandra Muzaffar, a Malaysian commentator, goes further by contending that Huntington's thesis provides a rationalization for a Western goal of dominating the developing world. Others have painted out that ethnic conflicts are in fact often the result of political choices made by elites, implying that such conflicts are avoidable with better political choices. In her article, Amy Chua reminds us that markets have short-run impacts that can
have devastating consequences in multi~ethnic societies. This is the case whenever ethnic minorities turn out to be "market~ dominant" and become viewed as outside exploiters, as has
In his widely discussed article, Benjamin Barber brings a broad perspective to the discussion of identity politics in the contemporary world. He sees two major tendencies that threaten democracy. One is the force of globalism, brought about by modern technology, communications, and commerce. Its logical end station is what he calls a "McWorld," in which human diversity, individuality, and meaningful identity are erased. The second tendency works in the opposite direction: tribalism, which drives hUman beings to exacerbate their group differences and engage in holy wars or "jihads" against each other. Barber argues that globalism is at best indifferent to liberal democracy, while militant tribalism is deeply antithetical to it. He argues in favor of seek-
ing a confederal solution, based on democratic civil societies, which could provide human beings with a non militant, parochial communitarianism as well as a framework that suits the global market economy fairly well.
happened to Chinese minorities in South East Asia on a number
of occasions.
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Article 37
Democracy's Sobering State "Democracy still occupies the high ground in the world .... Yet, just a few years into the new century, the grand hope that it will prove the age of democracy's global triumph appears far more tenuous than it seemed just 10 or 15 years ago:' THOMAS CAROTHERS
W
hat Samuel Huntington called the "third wave" of
instability, rising conflict, and declining public belief in democratic institutions, Significant parts of East Asia, including China, North Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Laos. and Singapore, remain under authoritarian rule, with little sign of change in sight. Dozens of African countries have seen once-promising democratic openings deliver only weak pluralism at best, or destructive civil conflict at worst. And, the US occupation of Iraq notwithstanding, the Arab world remains a democracy-free zone-despite increased international pressure for reform and some mild efforts by Arab rulers to move a few steps away from long-established patterns of autocracy. Behind these signs of trouble in different regions lies a diverse set of factors that are coalescing in the first decade of this century to blunt democracy's global advance. No one of the factors is determinative in and of itself, but when combined they present a daunting new context. Understanding this context is vital to shaping an effective response,
democracy-the multitude of democratic open-
ings that began in southern Europe in the mid1970s and then spread during the next two decades throughout Latin America, Asia, the former Soviet bloc, and sub-Saharan Africa-has come to a standstill. According to Freedom House, an organization that tracks democratization around the world, there were 118 electoral democracies in 1996. Today, eight years later, there are 117. The relative proportions of countries that Freedom House rates as free, partly free, or not free have been largely static since the end of the 1990s.
Politics The World, 2005 Of course, good news about democracy around the globe can
still be found. Indonesians, for example, are making impressive strides in building democracy in the world's most populous Muslim country and have just inaugurated their first democratically elected president. A year ago Georgians threw off the decaying rule of President Eduard Shevardnadze and embarked on a bold effort to breathe new life into their country's shaky democratic experiment. South Africans recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of their postapartheid democracy, a democracy that is holding together despite myriad challenges. Tens of millions of Central and Eastern Europeans are now citizens of both democratic states and the European Union. And millions of Afghans took part in successful presidential elections in Afghanistan in October, More generally, key prodemocratic values, like government accountability and citizen empowerment, continue to spark interest and activism on every continent. And the community of people, organizations, a~d governments committed to advancing democracy's fortunes worldwide continues to grow, Still, the grand hopes that energized some of democracy's most ardent optimists in the heady peak years of the third wave have not been realized, The former Soviet Union has gone from democratic frontier to democratic wasteland in just over a decade. South America is facing a crisis of democracy marked by political
The Authoritarian Rebound The first factor inhibiting democratization is the persistence and even rejuvenation of authoritarian forces and structures in many countries that appeared, at least for a short time, to be experiencing democratic openings. Authoritarian forces were able to lie low or become dormant during the initial period of political change, even as dictatorial regimes fell. The apparent democratic transitions often turned out to be relatively shallow, despite their grand early moments and the high hopes they spawned. Dramatic first-time elections were held, new constitutions written, civil society unleashed, and government reforms announced, But the process of change in many cases did, not penetrate the resilient, adaptable institutions behind the day-to-day screen of pluralistic politics-institutions that often harbored authoritarian mindsets, legacies, and actors such as domestic security services, militaries, and crony-dominated, state-owned businesses, In an unfortunately large number of cases, nondemocratic forces have been able to reassert themselves, taking advantage of the often fractious or feckless character of fledgling democratic governments. The rising economic and personal insecurity that many nascent
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ANNUAL EDITIONS democracies have produced for average citizens has eased the task of resurgent authoritarians since these conditions render citizens susceptible to the argument that a strong hand can set daily life back on track. ;','"!;";-'-''';'''':'','',''':.''i:,,'i,'
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of authoritarian forces, quite a few others have managed to go from initial democratic openings to the establishment of reasonably open pluralistic systems. Many of these countries, however, afe facing a different challenge to the consolidation of democracy: they are not succeeding in providing better lives for their citizens socially or economically. The economic reform measures that many new democracies adopt, though helping to reduce government deficits and stabilize currencies, have often produced only tepid growth. Citizens of these countries face higher prices for basic goods, an increased threat of unemployment, and stagnant incomes. Moreover, they are often beset with heightened social problems, especially rising crime and a breakdown of the tradi tional social safety net. This overall problem, which has ~ome to be known as the problem of democratic performance, can be debilitating to struggling democracies, It may not be fair in some philosophical sense for people to judge democracy on the basis of the socioeconomic performance of a given weak democratic regime. Democracy is in a strict sense about political values, choices, and processes; it does not per se provide answers to economic and social problems, Yet, fair or not, this is what citizens of new democracies (and for that matter, established ones as well) do. And when the performance is poor over time, the effects can be negative. In many new democracies, citizens are seriously disenchanted with their governments. This disenchantment is turning into a larger loss of belief in democracy itself and, in some more aggravated cases, into instability and political conflict.
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There is a significant gap between the soaring rhetoric about freedom in the Middle East and actual Western policy in most of the region. This phenomenon has been vividly present in the former Soviet Union as wen as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. PostSoviet authoritarians have gained a grip throughout a region that in the early 1990s seemed to be opening itself to genuine political change. Pluralism is hanging on in a few former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova. But most have become mired again in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian rule. Russia's authoritarian slide under President Vladimir Putin has been especially damaging and dispiriting. Putin has methodically hollowed out or co-opted every major institution-including the national broadcast media, the Russian Duma, political parties, and regional governorships-that had achieved any real degree of independence. The systematic disassembling of his country's nascent democratic system has been a textbook case of dedemocratization that will be studied, unfortunately, by both political scientists and would-be autocrats for years to corne. With Russia's democratic experiment at least alive, albeit troubled, throughout the 1990s, the overall political direction of the region appeared to be still up for grabs, despite bad news out of Central Asia and the Caucasus. But Russia's recent turn, although not necessarily permanent, throws the weight of regional political life firmly in the wrong comer, where it is likely to stay for years. Adding to the disappointment of the post-Soviet political record is the fact that neither the United States nor Europe really has done much to try to slow or reverse the backsliding. Western governments are comfortable doing business with strongmen leaders as long as access to oil and gas continues uninterrupted, and because these leaders remain helpful on Western counterterrorism concerns. Although sub-Saharan Africa generally has made substantial progress toward greater political pluralism and openness in the past 15 years, a discouraging number of countries continue to suffer persistent authoritarian rule, especially in francophone Africa, but in other parts of the region as well, including Sudan, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, and Equatorial Guinea. In some cases, such as Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe, authoritarian rule has returned after what looked like an encouraging political opening. In most of the others, authoritarian leaders Of parties that may have learned to say a few of the right things about democracy in the early 1990s have reverted fully to type.
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The war on terrorism has hurt America's status as a model of democracy and weakened America's credibility as a prodemocratic actor.
South America has been sharply aft1icted with this problem, although the challenge of democratic performance has also dogged various countries in Central America, southeastern Europe, South Asia, and Southeast Asia as well. In South America, unlike in the former Soviet Union and some other regions, authoritarians were largely overcome or at least sent back to the barracks after democratic openings occurred. Almost all South American countries achieved flawed but real democratic systems, with most of the main institutional and procedural forms of democracy. Yet, in the past three or four years, the region has experienced what many South Americans and external observers increasingly view as a crisis of democracy. Argentina hit a frightening bump in'its political road in 2001 when an economic crisis (itself partly caused by deficiencies in the political system, above all low levels of elite accountability) produced a period of vertiginous political instability; during one three-week spell the country went through five presidents. Venezuela has been suffering serious political polarization and conflict since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, a populist strongman with dubious fidelity to democratic norms who survived a recall referendum this year. Peru is undergoing a period of deep political malaise, marked by a hollow party system and the collapse of support for President Alejandro Toledo, whose election in 2001 was heralded as a rebirth of Peruvian
The Performance Problem Although a troubling number of countries that were initially counted as part of the third wave have experienced a reassertion
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Article 37. Democracy's Sobering State democracy after the authoritarian reign of Alberto Fujimori. Bolivia and Ecuador have both experienced the ouster of presidents and the rise of serious new political fissures and tensions. Alongside these punishing developments are two longstanding political problems: the deeply corrupted dominant-power rule by the Colorado Party in Paraguay and the continuing civil war in Colombia. South America's democratic woes derive from many causes and vary in nature from place to place. They are discouraging precisely because they highlight that democracy can corrode in so many different ways. BuUhe problem of democratic performance-rooted in weak state institutions, entrenched, corrupted political elites, and poor systems of political representation and accountability-plays a role in much of the region. Fifteen to twenty years after the return of democracy, many South Americans do not feel that greater political freedom and choice have improved their lives very much, or at all, especially in tenns of economic well-being and personal security. Given the high expectations that many people in the region had for what the end of dictatorship would bring, frustration over poor democratic performance turns easily into bitterness. The result has been a rising tide of cynicism, anger, and hostile actions against political parties, legislatures, governments, and even democracy itself.
around the developing world than 10 years ago, both among ruling elites and average citizens. Magnifying this effect in the past several years are other authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam, that have also been turning in high growth rates. Indeed, of the ten fastest-growing economies in the developing world between 1999 and 2002, only one-Albania-was led by a (somewhat) democratic government. This trend can be explained in part by the high price of oil, which has buoyed the economies of a number of oil-rich autocracies. Nevertheless, the trend fuels the beBef in the developing world that a strong hand is best for development. And it undercuts the efforts of the international development commu~ nity to make the case for a democracy-development link.
The War on Terrorism A fourth complicating element for democracy in today's international context is the US war on terrorism. The ouster of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and of Saddam Hussein in Iraq have opened the possibility, still far from being realized, of establishing stable, peaceful, democratic rule in these countries. President George W. Bush has also made a declared push for democratic transformation of the Middle East a part of his antiterrorism campaign, although this has been problematic in implementation. Other elements of the war on terrorism, however, have hurt democracy's cause. The US government's strongly felt need for closer counterterrorism cooperation with governments in many parts of the world has led it to warm relations with various autocratic regimes, such as those in Pakistan and Uzbekistan, and to go easy on the democratic backsliding of others, such as Russia. In addition, the war on terrorism has hurt America's status as a model of democracy and weakened America's credibility as a prodemocratic actor. The world has watched closely, and often with disappointment, America's troubled effort to balance heightened law enforcement concerns with domestic politi~ cal and civil rights, above all for Muslim citizens or residents of the United States. And the abusive treatment of detainees in US-run prisons or detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo has badly tarnished America's standing as a defender of human rights. Americans may have largely moved on past the stories and images that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, but in many other parts of the world the negative emotions produced by those events are still strongly felt. A further negative consequence of the war on terrorism for global democracy has been the tendency of governments in the Middle East and many parts of Asia to use the antiterrorism banner as an excuse to crack down on political opponents, a tendency the United States has protested too little.
Doing Well Under Dictators A third factor contributing to a newly challenging environment for global democracy is the sense that quite a few authoritarian countries have been doing well economically in recent years, giving new life to the old idea that dictatorship is better than democracy at producing socioeconomic development. This idea was popular in the 1960s and 1970s, both in the West and in developing countries. In the West it was an article of faith among economists worried about populist-oriented policy making and a convenient excuse by diplomats for supporting friendly tyrants who were useful on security issues. In developing countries, ruling elites found it a handy justification for their repressive grip on power. The idea lost some steam in the 1980s, weakened by the accumulated socioeconomic failures of dictatorial regimes in many developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Across the 1990s the opposite idea gained considerable ground in international development circles-that democracy and economic development go hand in hand-or even more strongly, that democracy, with its presumably better systems of representation and accountable governance, actually facilitates economic development. The experience in the 1990s of much of the postcommunist world-where for a time progress on political reform and economic growth correlated strongly-added weight to the new view. China's extraordinary economic success has presented a serious problem for those arguing that democracy is necessary for development or that dictatorial regimes cannot produce sustained economic development. In the current context, in which citizens of many developing countries are dissatisfied with the socioeconomic performance of their new democratic regimes, China's continued very rapid growth and its increasing economic muscle on the world stage have made it an increasingly powerful example. Talk of the "China model" has become much more common
And Now for the Hard Part The most pressing as wel1 as complex and difficult issue concerning the advance of democracy over the next decade and beyond is the question of whether the Middle East can make any significant democratic progress. Policy makers in Washington and other Western capitals advance the idea that the arrival of democracy in the Middle East is necessary to eliminate the roots of radical Islamist terrorism. Although this proposition is badly
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ANNUAL EDITIONS oversimplified and potentially misleading as a policy credo, it has raised to an unprecedented degree the level of international attention paid to the Arab world's democratic deficit. The Bush administration's push for democracy in the Middle East has consisted of both a massive military~led effort to reconstruct Iraqi politics on a democratic template and an interrelated series of much less intrusive measures in the rest of the region, including new aid programs, multilevel diplomatic steps like the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, and some highlevel jawboning of Arab leaders by top US officials. The region's skeptical and recalcitrant response to the new push has demonstrated how hard a prodemocratic policy toward the Middle East will be in practice. The political reconstruction of Iraq has been much more difficult and costly (in financial, human, and diplomatic terms) than those in charge of the intervention ever thought it would be. Certainly, many of the political forces in post-Saddam Iraq support some kind of pluralistic outcome, yet the road to achieving it remains littered with daunting obstacles. And although Iraq is less repressive today than it was under Saddam, it has not yet proved a positive model for the region. Arabs largely view Iraq as a violent, chaotic, frightening place, one where thousands of Arabs have died as a direct or indirect result of a foreign invasion and occupation and whose political life is still controlled, deep down, by the United States. The new international attention to the absence of democracy in the Arab world, including the various US and European initiatives to encourage or stimulate positive movement, has helped engen~ der more discussion in Arab countries about the need for political reform and democracy. A few governments, most notably perhaps that of Morocco, have continued along paths of reform that have led to some real pluralism, albeit still within a monarchical framework. And some of the more authoritarian Arab governments, such as those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have announced minor new refonn steps, both to respond to these internal debates and to win some international favor. But in general the region remains stuck in deeply entrenched patterns of autocratic rule. Arab states are willing to engage in limited off-again, on-again political reforms, but more as a liberalizing strategy to avoid democracy rather than to achieve it. Arab ruling elites do not share the new Western view that democratic change is necessary to combat Islamist extremism. In fact, they hold the opposite view: that democracy would likely unleash radical forces that could be harmful to both the region and the West. Pressure from below for democratic change is weak at best throughout the region, despite the stepped~up activities of some civic groups and others speaking out on behalf of reform. Those who advocate for democracy (usually secular Western-oriented intellectuals) lack organized constituencies behind them. And the groups that do have mass-based constituencies-Islamist organizations-often do not frame their political objectives in tenns of democracy and are placed under strict limits by regimes nervous about any massbased processes of political change.
It is by no means impossible that the Arab world will over time make progress toward democracy, But the process is likely to be much slower than the current fervor for reform in Washington and other Western capitals might imply, not to mention more conflictive and unsettling to Western interests than the new policy credo suggests. Despite the rhetoric coming from the White House, in practice US and other Western policy makers are not at all sure that opening up Arab political systems to popular choice would actually serve Western economic and security interests overall. In some cases, dangerous instability or even civil conflict might result. Other' Arab societies might choose Islamist leaders who are not inclined to be helpful on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or other important issues. There is a significant gap between the soaring rhetoric about freedom in the Middle East and actual Western policy in most of the region. Policies more cautious in deeds than in words are likely to persist.
Getting Serious The state of democracy in the world is sobering. Democracy still occupies the high ground across the world both as the only political ideology to command widespread legitimacy and as the political system of most of the world's wealthy or powerful countries. Yet, only a few years into the new century, the grand hope that it will prove the age of democracy's global triumph appears far more tenuous than it seemed just 10 or 15 years ago. American policy makers detennined to make democracy promotion a major element of US foreign policy will have to do better than rely on attractive but superficial slogans like "freedom is on the march." It is necessary to move away from the rnindset that a democratic trend is advancing in the world and that US policy should aim to support it. The challenges now are more fundamental: how to stimulate democracy in regions where authoritarianism has bested the democratic trend, and how to support democracy where it is under siege because of poor performance. Responding to these challenges will require a greater willingness to pressure authoritarian leaders who offer short-term economic and security benefits to the United States but spell long-term trouble, especially in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. And it will require the United States to construct more effective partnerships with South America and other regions where democracy is under siege. Democracy promotion is a convenient, even easy rhetorical framework for a global policy, especially in the context of the war on terrorism. Making it work in practice is neither convenient nor easy, and the state of democracy in the world is only getting more complex and demanding with each passing year. is director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is coeditor with Marina Ottaway of Uncharted Journey: Democracy Promotion in the Middle East (Carnegie Endowment, forthcoming January 2005). THOMAS CAROTHERS
Reprinted from Current History, December 2004, pp. 412-416. Copyright © 2004 by Current History, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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Article 38
Capitalism and Democracy* GABRIEL
A. ALMOND
oseph Schumpeter, a great economist and social scientist of the last generation, whose career was almost equally divided between Central European and American universities, and who lived close to the crises of the 1930s and '40s, published a book in 1942 under the title, Capitalism, Social-
by this condition of political life at its birth. Typically, economists speak of the state and government instlUmentally, as a kind of
J
secondary service mechanism. I do not believe that politics can be treated in this purely instrumental and reductive way without losing our analytic grip on the social and historical process. The economy and the polity are the main problem solving mechanisms of human society. They each have their distinctive means, and they each have their "goods"
ism, and Democracy. The book has had great influence, and can be read today with profit. It was written in the aftergloom of the great depression, during the early triumphs of Fascism and Nazism in 1940 and 1941, when the future of capitalism, socialism, and democracy all were in doubt. Schumpeter projected a future of declining capitalism, and rising socialism. He thought that democracy under socialism might be no more impaired and problematic than it was under capitalism. He wrote a concluding chapter in the second edition which appeared in 1946, and which took into account the politicaleconomic situation at the end of the war, with the Soviet Union then astride a devastated Europe. In this last chapter he argues that we should not identify the future of socialism with that of the Soviet Union, that what we had observed and were observing in the frrst three decades of Soviet existence was not a necessary
or ends. They necessarily interact with each other, and transform each other in the process. Democracy in particular generates goals and programs. You cannot give people the suffrage, and let
them form organizations, run for office, and the like, without their developing all kinds of ideas as to how to improve things. And sometimes some of these ideas are adopted, implemented and are
productive, and improve our lives, although many economists are reluctant to concede this much to the state. My lecture deals with this interaction of politics and economics in the Western World in the course of the last couple of centuries, in the era during which capitalism and democracy emerged as the dominant problem solving institutions of modern civilization. I am going to discuss some of the theoretical and empirical literature dealing with the themes of the positive and negative interaction between capitalism and democracy. There are those who say that capitalism supports democracy, and those who say that capitalism subverts democracy. And there are those who say that democracy subverts capitalism, and those who say that it supports it. The relation between capitalism and democracy dominates the political theory of the last two centuries. All the logically possible points of view are represented in a rich literature. It is this ambivalence and dialectic, this tension between the two major problem solving sectors of modern society-the political and the economic-that is the topic of my lecture.
expression of socialism. There was a lot of Czarist Russia in the mix. If Schumpeter were writing today, I don't believe he would argue that socialism has a brighter future than capitalism. The relationship between the two has turned out to be a good deal more complex and intertwined than Schumpeter anticipated. But I am sure that he would still urge us to separate the future of socialism from that of Soviet and Eastern European Communism. Unlike Schumpeter I do not include Socialism in my title, since its future as a distinct ideology and program of action is unclear at best. Western Marxism and the moderate socialist movement~ seem to have settled for social democratic solutions, for adaptations of both capitalism and democracy producing acceptable mixes of market competition, political pluralism, participation, and welfare. I deal with these modifications of capitalism, as a consequence of the impact of democracy on capitalism in the last half century. At the time that Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, the world of government, politics and the state that he knewpre-Reform Act England, the French government of Louis XV and XVI-was riddled with special privileges, monopolies, interferences with trade. With my tongue only half way in my check I believe the discipline of economics may have been traumatized
Capitalism Supports Democracy Let me begin with the argument that capitalism is positively linked with democracy, shares its values and culture, and facilitates its development. This case has been made in historical, logical, and statistical terms. Albert Hirschman in his Rival Views of Market Society (1986) examines the values, manners and morals of capitalism. and
* Lecture presented at Seminar on the Market, sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Research Institute on International Change of Columbia University, Moscow, October 29-November 2. 205
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their effects on the larger society and culture as these have been described by the philosophers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. He shows how the interpretation of the impact of capitalism has changed from the enlightenment view of Montesquieu, Condorcet, Adam Smith and others, who stressed the doueeur of commerce, its Hgentling," civilizing effect on behavior and interpersonal relations, to that of the 19th and 20th century conservative and radical writers who described the culture of capitalism as crassly materialistic, destructively competitive, corrosive of morality, and hence self-destructive. This sharp almost 180degree shift in point of view among political theorists is partly explained by the transformation from the commerce and smallscale industry of early capitalism, to the smoke blackened industrial districts, the demonic and exploitive entrepreneurs, and exploited laboring classes of the second half of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately for our purposes, Hirschman doesn't deal explicitly with the capitalism-democracy connection, but rather with culture and with manners. His argument, however, implies an early positive connection and a later negative one. Joseph Schumpeterin Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) states flatly, "History clearly confirms ... (thatl ... modern democracy rose along with capitalism, and in causal connection with it ... modern democracy is a product of the capitalist process." He has a whole chapter entitled "The Civilization of Capitalism," democracy being a part of that civilization. Schumpeter also makes the point that democracy was historically supportive of capitalism. He states, " ... the bourgeoisie reshaped, and from its own point of view rationalized, the social and political structure that preceded its ascendancy ..." (that is to say, feudalism). "The democratic method was the political tool of that reconstruction." According to Schumpeter capitalism and democracy were mutually causal historically, mutually supportive parts of a rising modern civilization, although as we shall show below, he also recognized their antagonisms. Barrington Moore's historical investigation (1966) with its long title, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, argues that there have been three historical routes to industrial modernization. The first of these followed by Britain, France, and the United States, involved the subordination and transformation of the agricultural sector by the rising commercial bourgeoisie, producing the democratic capitalism of the 19th and 20th centuries. The second route followed by Germany and Japan, where the landed aristocracy was able to contain and dominate the rising commercial classes, produced an authoritarian and fascist version of industrial modernization, a system of capitalism encased in a feudal authoritarian framework, dominated by a military aristocracy, and an authoritarian monarchy. The third route, followed in Russia where the commercial bourgeoisie was too weak to give content and direction to the modernizing process, took the form of a revolutionary process drawing on the frustration and resources of the peasantry, and created a mobilized authoritarian Communist regime along with a statecontrolled industrialized economy. Successful capitalism dominating and transforming the rural agricultural sector, according to Barrington Moore, is the creator and sustainer of the emerging democracies of the nineteenth century.
Robert A. Dahl, the leading American democratic theorist, in the new edition of his book (1990) After the Revolution? Authority in a Good Society, has included a new chapter entitled "Democracy and Markets." In the opening paragraph of that chapter, he says:
It is an historical fact that modem democratic institutions ... have existed only in countries with predominantly privately owned. market-oriented economies, or capitalism if you prefer that name. It is also a fact that all "socialist" countries with predominantly state-owned centrally directed economic orders--command economies-have not enjoyed democratic governments, but have in fact been ruled by authoritarian dictatorships. It is also an historical fact that some "capitalist" countries have also been, and are, ruled by authoritarian dictatorships. To put it more formally, it looks to be the case that marketoriented economies are necessary (in the logical sense) to democratic institutions, though they are certainly not sufficient. And it looks to be the case that state-owned centrally directed economic orders are strictly associated with authoritarian regimes, though authoritarianism definitely does not require them. We have something very much like an historical experiment, so it would appear, that leaves these conclusions in no great doubt. (Dahl 1990) Peter Berger in his book The Capitalist Revolution (1986) presents four propositions on the relation between capitalism and democracy:
Capitalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition of democracy under modem conditions. If a capitalist economy is subjected to increasing degrees of state control, a point (not precisely specifiable at this time) will be reached at which democratic governance becomes impossible. If a socialist economy is opened up to increasing degrees of market forces, a point (not precisely specifiable at this time) will be reached at which democratic governance becomes a possibility. If capitalist development is successful in generating economic growth from which a sizable proportion of the population benefits, pressures toward democracy are likely to appear. This positive relationship between capitalism and democracy has also been sustained by statistical studies. The "Social Mobilization" theorists of the 1950s and 1960s which included Daniel Lerner (1958), Karl Deutsch (1961), S. M. Lipset (1959) among others, demonstrated a strong statistical association between GNP per capita and democratic political institutions. This is more than simple statistical association. There is a logic in the relation between level of economic development and democratic institutions. Level of economic development has been shown to be associated with education and literacy, exposure to mass media, and democratic psychological propensities such as subjective efficacy, participatory aspirations 206
Article 38. Capitalism and Democracy and skills. In a major investigation of the social psychology of industrialization and modernization, a research team led by the sociologist Alex Inkeles (1974) interviewed several thousand workers in the modern industrial and the traditional economic sectors of six countries of differing culture. Inkeles found empathetic, efficacious, participatory and activist propensities much more frequently among the modern industrial
rejection of the possibility of an autonomous, bourgeois democratic state has been left behind for most Western Marxists. In the thinking of Poulantzas, Offe, Bobbio, Habermas and others, the bourgeois democratic state is now viewed as a class struggle state, rather than an unambiguously bourgeois state. The working class has access to it; it can struggle for its interests, and can attain partial benefits from it. The state is now viewed as autonomous, or as relatively autonomous, and it can be reformed in a progressive direction by working class and other popular movements. The bourgeois democratic state can be moved in the direction of a socialist state by political action short of violence and institutional destruction. Schumpeter (1942) appreciated the tension between capitalism and democracy. While he saw a causal connection between competition in the economic and the political order, he points out ". . . that there are some deviations from the principle of democracy which link up with the presence of organized capitalist interests .... [T)he statement is true both from the standpoint of the classical and from the standpoint of our own theory of democracy. From the first standpoint, the result reads that the means at the disposal of private interests are often used in order to thwart the will of the people. From the second standpoint, the result reads that those private means are often used in order to interfere with the working of the mechanism of competitive leadership." He refers to some countries and situations in which " ... political life all but resolved itself into a struggle of pressure groups and in many cases practices that failed to conform to the spirit of the democratic method." But he rejects the notion that there cannot be political democracy in a capitalist society. For Schumpeter full democracy in the sense of the informed participation of all adults in the selection of political leaders and consequently the making of public policy, was an impossibility because of the number and complexity of the issues confronting modem electorates. The democracy which was realistically possible was one in which people could choose among competing leaders, and consequently exercise some direction over political decisions. This kind of democracy was possible in a capitalist society, though some of its propensities impaired its performance. Writing in the early years of World War II, when the future of democracy and of capitalism were uncertain, he leaves unresolved the questions of ", . , Whether or not democracy is one of those products of capitalism which are to die out with it ... " or " ... how well or ill capitalist society qualifies for the task of working the democratic method it evolved." Non-Marxist political theorists have contributed to this questioning of the reconcilability of capitalism and democracy. Robert A. Dahl, who makes the point that capitalism historically has been a necessary precondition of democracy, views contemporary democracy in the United States as seriously compromised, impaired by the inequality in resources among the citizens. But Dahl stresses the variety in distributive patterns, and in politico-economic relations among contemporary democracies. "The category of capitalist democracies" he writes, "includes an extraordinary variety .. , from nineteenth century, laissez faire, early industrial systems to twentieth century, highly regulated, social welfare, late or postindustrial systems. Even late twentieth century 'welfare state' orders vary all
workers! and to a much lesser extent in the traditional sector in each one of these countries regardless of cultural differences. The historical, the logical, and the statistical evidence for this positive relation between capitalism and democracy is quite
persuasive.
Capitalism Subverts Democracy But the opposite case is also made, that capitalism subverts or undermines democracy. Already in John Stuart Mill (1848) we encounter a view of existing systems of private property as unjust, and of the free market as destructively competitiveaesthetically and morally repugnant. The case he was making was a normative rather than a political one. He wanted a less competitive society, ultimately socialist, which would still respect individuality. He advocated limitations on the inheritance of property and the improvement of the property system so that everyone shared in its benefits, the limitation of population growth, and the improvement of the quality of the labor force through the provision of high quality education for all by the state. On the eve of the emergence of the modem democratic capitalist order John Staurt Mill wanted to control the excesses of both the market economy and the majoritarian polity, by the
education of consumers and producers, citizens and politicians, in the interest of producing morally improved free market and democratic orders. But in contrast to Marx, he did not thoroughly discount the possibilities of improving the capitalist and democratic order. Marx argued that as long as capitalism and private property existed there could be no genuine democracy, that democracy under capitalism was bourgeois democracy, which is to say not democracy at all. While it would be in the interest of the working classes to enter a coalition with the bourgeoisie in supporting this form of democracy in order to eliminate feudalism, this would be a tactical maneuver. Capitalist democracy could only result in the increasing exploitation of the working classes. Only the elimination of capitalism and private property could result in the emancipation of the working classes and the attainment of true democracy, Once socialism was attained the basic political problems of humanity would have been solved through the elimination of classes. Under socialism there would be no distinctive democratic organization, no need for institutions to resolve conflicts, since there would be no conflicts. There is not much democratic or political theory to be found in Marx's writings. The basic reality is the mode of economic production and the consequent class structure from which other institutions follow. For the followers of Marx up to the present day there continues to be a negative tension between capitalism, however refonned, and democracy, But the integral Marxist and Leninist
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the way from the Scandinavian systems, which are redistributive, heavily taxed, comprehensive in their social security, and neocorporatist in their collective bargaining arrangements to the faintly redistributive, moderately taxed, limited social security, weak collective bargaining systems of the United States and Japan" (1989). In Democracy and Its Critics (1989) Dahl argues that the normative growth of democracy to what he calls its "third transformation" (the first being the direct city-state democracy of classic times, and the second, the indirect, representative inegalitarian democracy of the contemporary world) will require democratization of the economic order. In other words, modern corporate capitalism needs to be transformed. Since government control and/or ownership of the economy would be destructive of the pluralism which is an essential requirement of democracy, his preferred solution to the problem of the mega-corporation is employee control of corporate industry. An economy so organized, according to Dahl, would improve the distribution of political resources without at the same time destroying the pluralism which democratic competition requires. To those who question the realism of Dahl's solution to the problem of inequality, he replies that history is full of surprises. Charles E. Lindblom in his book, Politics and Markets (1977), concludes his comparative analysis of the political economy of modern capitalism and socialism, with an essentially pessimistic conclusion about contemporary market-oriented democracy. He says We therefore come back to the corporation. It is possible that the rise of the corporation has offset or more than offset the decline of class as an instrument of indoctrination ... ., That it creates a new core of wealth and power for a newly constructed upper class, as well as an overpowering loud voice, is also reasonably clear. The executive of the large corporation is, on many counts, the contemporary counterpart to the landed' gentry of an earlier era, his voice amplified by the technology of mass communication .... [T]he major institutional barrier to fuller democracy may therefore be the autonomy of the private corporation. Lindblom concludes, "The large private corporation fits oddly into democratic theory and vision. Indeed it does not fit. There is then a widely shared agreement, from the Marxists and neo-Marxists, to Schumpeter, Dahl, Lindblom, and other liberal political theorists, that modern capitalism with the dominance of the large corporation, produces a defective or an impaired form of democracy.
Democracy Subverts Capitalism If we change our perspective now and look at the way democracy is said to affect capitalism, one of the dominant traditions of economics from Adam Smith until the present day stresses the importance for productivity and welfare of an economy that is relatively free of intervention by the state. In this doctrine of minimal government there is still a place for a framework of rules and services essential to the productive and efficient
performance of the economy. In part the government has to protect the market from itself. Left to their own devices, according to Smith, businessmen were prone to comer the market in order to exact the highest possible price. And according to Smith businessmen were prone to bribe public officials in order to gain special privileges, and legal monopolies. For Smith good capitalism was competitive capitalism, and good government provided just those goods and services which the market needed to flourish, could not itself provide, or would not provide. A good government according to Adam Smith was a minimal government, providing for the national defense, and domestic order. Particularly important for the economy were the rules pertaining to commercial life such as the regulation of weights and measures, setting and enforcing building standards, providing for the protection of persons and property, and the like. For Milton Friedman (1961, 1981), the leading contemporary advocate of the free market and free government, and of the interdependence of the two, the principal threat to the survival of capitalism and democracy is the assumption of the responsibility for welfare on the part of the modern democratic state. He lays down a set of functions appropriate to government in the positive interplay between economy and polity, and then enumerates many of the ways in which the modern welfare, regulatory state has deviated from these criteria. A good Friedmanesque, democratic government would be one " ... which maintained law and order, defended property rights, served as a means whereby we could modify property rights and other rules of the economic game, adjudicated disputes about the interpretation of the rules, enforced contracts, promoted competition, pf0vided a monetary framework, engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention, and which supplemented private charity and the private family in protecting the irresponsible, whether madman or child .... " Against this list of proper activities for a free government, Friedman pinpointed more than a dozen activities of contemporary democratic governments which might better be performed through the private sector, or not at all. These included setting and maintaining price supports, tariffs, impOlt and export quotas and controls, rents, interest rates, wage rates, and the like, regulating industries and banking, radio and television, licensing professions and occupations, providing social security and medical care programs, providing public housing, national parks, guaranteeing mortgages, and much else. Friedman concludes that this steady encroachment on the private sector has been slowly but surely converting our free government and market system into a collective monster, compromising both freedom and productivity in the outcome. The tax and expenditure revolts and regulatory rebellions of the 1980s have temporarily stemmed this trend, but the threat continues. HIt is the internal threat coming from men of good intentions and good will who wish to reform us. Impatient with the slowness of persuasion and example to achieve the great social changes they envision, they are anxious to use the power of the state to achieve their ends, and confident of their own ability to do so." The threat to political and economic freedom, according to Milton Friedman and others who argue the same position, 208
Article 38. Capitalism and Democracy make economies less efficient and dynamic and polities less governable. "The longer a society goes without an upheaval, the more powerful such organizations become and the more they slow down economic expansion. Societies in which these narrow interest groups have been destroyed, by war or revolution, for example, enjoy the greatest gains in growth." His prize cases are Britain on the one hand and Gennany and Japan on
arises out of democratic politics. It may only be defeated by
political action. In the last decades a school, or rather several schools, of economists and political scientists have turned the theoretical models of economics to use in analyzing political processes. Variously called public choice theorists, rational choice theorists, or positive political theorists, and employing such models as market exchange and bargaining, rational self interest, game theory, and the like, these theorists have produced a substantial litera-
the other. The logic of the argument implies that countries that
ture throwing new and often controversial light on democratic political phenomena such as elections, decisions of political
have had democratic freedom of organization without upheaval or invasion the longest will suffer the most
party leaders, interest group behavior, legislative and committee
from growth-repressing organizations and combinations.
decisions, bureaucratic, and judicial behavior, lobbying activity, and substantive public policy areas such as constitutional
This helps explain why Great Britain, the major nation
with the longest immunity from dictatorship, invasion,
arrangements, health and environment policy, regulatory policy, national security and foreign policy, and the like. Hardly a field of politics and public policy has been left untouched by this
and revolution, has had in this century a lower rate of growth than other large, developed democracies. Britain has precisely the powerful network of special interest organization that the argument developed here would
inventive and productive group of scholars. The institutions and names with which this movement is associated in the United States include Virginia State University, the University of Virginia, the George Mason University, the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago, the California Institute of Technology, the Carnegie Mellon University, among others. And the most prominent names are those of the leaders of the two principal schools: James Buchanan, the Nobel Laureate leader of the Virginia "Public Choice" school, and William Riker, the leader of the Rochester "Positive Theory" school. Other prominent scholars associated with this work are Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, Kenneth Shepsle and Morris Fiorina of Harvard, John Ferejohn of Stanford, Charles Plott of the California Institute of Technology, and many others. One writer summarizing the ideological bent of much of this work, but by no means all of it (William Mitchell of the University of Washington), describes it as fiscally conservative,
lead us to expect in a country with its record of military security and democratic stability. The number and power
of its trade unions need no description. The venerability and power of its professional associations is also striking. ... In short, with age British society has acquired so
many strong organizations and collusions that it suffers from an institutional sclerosis that slows its adaptation to changing circumstances and technologies. (Olson 1982) By contrast, post-World War II Germany and Japan started organizationally from scratch. The organizations that led them
to defeat were all dissolved, and under the occupation inclusive organizations like the general trade union movement and general organizations of the industrial and commercial community were first formed. These inclusive organizations had more regard for the general national interest and exercised some discipline on the narrower interest organizations. And both countries in the post-war decades experienced "miracles" of economic growth under democratic conditions.
sharing a conviction that the" ... private economy is far more robust, efficient, and perhaps, equitable than other economies,
and much more successful than political processes in efficiently
The Olson theory of the subversion of capitalism through
allocating resources .... " Much of what has been produced " ... by James Buchanan and the leaders of this school can best be described as contributions to a theory of the failure of political processes." These failures of political performance are said to be inherent properties of the democratic political pro-
the propensities of democratic societies to foster special interest groups has not gone without challenge. There can be little ques-
tion that there is logic in his argument But empirical research testing this pressure group hypothesis thus far has produced mixed findings. Olson has hopes that a public educated to the
cess. "Inequity, inefficiency, and coercion are the most general
harmful consequences of special interests to economic growth,
results of democratic policy formation." In a democracy the demand for publicly provided services seems to be insatiable. It ultimately turns into a special interest, "rent seeking" society. Their remedies take the form of proposed constitutional limits on spending power and checks and balances to limit legislative
full employment, coherent government, equal opportunity, and
social mobility will resist special interest behavior, and enact legislation imposing anti-trust, and anti-monopoly controls to mitigate and contain these threats. It is somewhat of an irony that the solution to this special interest disease of democ racy, according to Olson, is a democratic state with sufficient w
majorities.
regulatory authority to control the growth of special interest
One of the most visible products of this pessimistic eco-
nomic analysis of democratic politics is the book by Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (l982). He makes a strong argument for the negative democracy-capitalism connection. His thesis is that the behavior of individuals and firms in stable societies inevitably leads to the formation of dense net
organizations.
Democracy Fosters Capitalism My fourth theme, democracy as fostering and sustaining capitalism, is not as straightforward as the first three. Historically
w
works of collusive, cartelistic, and lobbying organizations that
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there can be little doubt that as the suffrage was extended in the last century, and as mass political parties developed, democratic development impinged significantly on capitalist institutions and practices. Since successful capitalism requires risk-taking entrepreneurs with access to investment capital, the democratic propensity for redistributive and regulative policy tends to reduce the incentives and the resources available for risk-taking and creativity. Thus it can be argued that propensities inevitably resulting from democratic politics, as Friedman, Olson and many others argue, tend to reduce productivity, and hence welfare. But precisely the opposite argument can be made on the basis of the historical experience of literally all of the advanced capitalist democracies in existence. All of them without exception are now welfare states with some form and degree of social insurance, health and welfare nets, and regulatory frameworks designed to mitigate the harmful impacts and shortfalls of capitalism. Indeed, the welfare state is accepted all across the political spectrum. Controversy takes place around the edges. One might make the argument that had capitalism not been modified in this welfare direction, it is doubtful that it would have survived, This history of the interplay between democracy and capitalism is clearly laid out in a major study involving European and American scholars, entitled The Development of Welfare States in Western Europe and America (Flora and Heidenheimer 1981). The book lays out the relationship between the development and spread of capitalist industry, democratization in the sense of an expanding suffrage and the emergence of trade unions and left-wing political parties, and the gradual introduction of the institutions and practices of the welfare state. The early adoption of the institutions of the welfare state in Bismarck Germany, Sweden, and Great Britain were all associated with the rise of trade unions and socialist parties in those countries. The decisions made by the upper and middle class leaders and political movements to introduce welfare measures such as accident, old age, and unemployment insurance, were strategic decisions. They were increasingly confronted by trade union movements with the capacity of bringing industrial production to a halt, and by political parties with growing parliamentary representation favoring fundamental modifications in, or the abolition of capitalism. As the calculations of the upper and middle class leaders led them to conclude that the costs of suppression exceeded the costs of concession, the various parts of the welfare state began to be put in place-accident, sickness, unemployment insurance, old age insurance, and the like. The problem of maintaining the loyalty of the working classes through two world wars resulted in additional concessions to working class demands: the filling out of the social security system, free public education to higher levels, family allowances, housing benefits, and the like. Social conditions, historical factors, political processes and decisions produced different versions of the welfare state. In the United States, manhood suffrage came quite early, the later bargaining process emphasized free land and free education to the secondary level, an equality of opportunity version of the welfare state. The Disraeli bargain in Britain resulted in relatively
early manhood suffrage and the full attainment of parliamentary government, while the Lloyd George bargain on the eve of World War I brought the beginnings of a welfare system to Britain. The Bismarck bargain in Germany produced an early welfare state, a postponement of electoral equality and parliamentary government. While there were all of these differences in historical encounters with democratization and "welfarization," the important outcome was that little more than a century after the process began all of the advanced capitalist democracies had similar versions of the welfare state, smaller in scale in the case of the United States and Japan, more substantial in Britain and the continental European countries. We can consequently make out a strong case for the argument that democracy has been supportive of capitalism in this strategic sense. Without this welfare adaptation it is doubtful that capitalism would have survived, or rather, its survival, "unwelfarized," would have required a substantial repressi ve apparatus. The choice then would seem to have been between democratic welfare capitalism, and repressive undemocratic capitalism, I am inclined to believe that capitalism as such thrives more with the democratic welfare adaptation than with the repressive one. It is in that sense that we can argue that there is a clear positive impact of democracy on capitalism. We have to recognize, in conclusion, that democracy and capitalism are both positively and negatively related, that they both support and subvert each other. My colleague, Moses Abramovitz, described this dialectic more surely than most in his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1980, on the eve of the "Reagan Revolution." Noting the decline in productivity in the American economy during the latter 1960s and '70s, and recognizing that this decline might in part be attributable to the "tax, transfer, and regulatory" tendencies of the welfare state, he observes, The rationale supporting the development of our mixed economy sees it as a pragmatic compromise between the competing virtues and defects of decentralized market capitalism and encompassing socialism. Its goal is to obtain a measure of distributive justice, security, and social guidance of economic life without losing too much of the allocative efficiency and dynamism of private enterprise and market organization, And it is a pragmatic compromise in another sense. It seeks to retain for most people that measure of personal protection from the state which private property and a private job market confer, while obtaining for the disadvantaged minority of people through the state that measure of support without which their lack of property or personal endowment would amount to a denial of individual freedom and capacity to function as full members of the community. (Abramovitz 1981) Democratic welfare capitalism produces that reconciliation of opposing and complementary elements which makes possible the survival, even enhancement of both of these sets of institutions, It is not a static accommodation, but rather one which fluctuates over time, with capitalism being compromised by the tax-transfer-regulatory action of the state at one point, and then 210
Article 38. Capitalism and Democracy Welfare States in Western Europe and America. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press. Friedman, Milton. 1981. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hirschman, Albert. 1986. Rival Views of Market Society. New York:
correcting in the direction of the reduction of the intervention of the state at another point, and with a learning process over time that may reduce the amplitude of the curves. The case for this resolution of the capitalism-democracy quandary is made quite movingly by Jacob Viner who is quoted in the concluding paragraph of Abramovitz's paper, " ... If ... I nevertheless conclude that I believe that the welfare state, like old Siwash, is really worth fighting for and even dying for as compared to any rival system, it is because, despite its imperfection in theory and practice, in the aggregate it provides more promise of preserving and enlarging human freedoms, temporal prosperity, the extinction of mass misery, and the dignity of man and his moral improvement than any other social system which has previously prevailed, which prevails elsewhere today or which outside Utopia, the mind of man has been able to provide a blueprint for" (Abramovitz 1981).
Viking. Inkeles, Alex, and David Smith. 1974. Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lerner, Daniel. 1958. The Passing o/Traditional Society. New York: Free Press. Lindblom, Charles E. 1977. Politics and Markets. New York: Basic
Books. Lipset, Seymour M. 1959. "Some Social Requisites of Democracy." American Political Science Review, 53 (September). Mill, John Stuart. 1848, 1965. Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mitchell, William. 1988. "Virginia, Rochester, and Bloomington: TwentywFive Years of Public Choice and Political Science." Public Choice, 56: 101-119. Moore, Barrington. 1966. The Social Origins o/Dictatorship and Democracy. New York: Beacon Press. Olson, Mancur. 1982. The Rise and Decline a/Nations. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1946. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper,
References Abramovitz, Moses. 1981. "Welfare Quandaries and Productivity Concerns." American Economic Review, March. Berger, Peter. 1986. The Capitalist Revolution. New York: Basic Books. Dahl, Robert A. 1989. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press. _ _. 1990. After the Revolution: Authority in a Good Society. New Haven: Yale University Press. Deutsch, Karl. 1961. "Social Mobilization and Political Development." American Political Science Review, 55 (Sept.). Flora, Peter, and Arnold Heidenheimer. 1981. The Development 0/
GABRIEL A. ALMOND, professor of political science emeritus at Stanford University, is a former president of the American Political Science Association.
From PS; Political Science and Politics, September 1991, pp. 467-474. Copyright © 1991 by American Political Science Association. Reprinted by permission.
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Article 39
Cultural Explanations The Man in the Baghdad Cafe Which "civilisation" you belong to matters less than you might think oering, it was said, growled that every time he heard the word culture he reached for his revolver. His hand would ache today. Since the end of the cold war, "culture" has been everywhere-not the opera-house or gallery kind, but the sort that claims to be the basic driving force behind human behaviour. All over the world, scholars and politicians seek to explain economics, politics and diplomacy in terms of "culture-areas" rather than, say, policies or ideas, economic interests, personalities orplain cock-ups. Perhaps the best-known example is the notion that "Asian values" explain the success of the tiger economies of SouthEast Asia. Other accounts have it that international conflict isor will be-caused by a clash of civilisations; or that different sorts of business organisation can be explained by how much people in different countries trust one [anlother. These four pages review the varying types of cultural explanation. They conclude that culture is so imprecise and changeable a phenomenon that it explains less than most people realise. To see how complex the issue is, begin by considering the telling image with which Bernard Lewis opens his history of the Middle East. A man sits at a table in a coffee house in some Middle Eastern city, "drinking a cup of coffee or tea, perhaps smoking a cigarette, reading a newspaper, playing a board game, and listening with half an ear to whatever is coming out of the radio or the television installed in the corner." Undoubtedly Arab, almost certainly Muslim, the man would clearly identify himself as a member of these cultural groups. He would also, if asked, be likely to say that "western culture" was alien, even hostile to them. Look closer, though, and the cultural contrasts blur. This coffee-house man probably wears western-style clothessneakers, jeans, a T-shirt. The chair and table at which he sits, the coffee he drinks, the tobacco he smokes, the newspaper he
of most Middle Easterners has been the impact of Europe, later of the West more generally, and the transformation-some would say dislocation-which it has brought." Mr Lewis has put his finger on the most important and least studied aspect of cultural identity: how it changes. It would be wise to keep that in mind during the upsurge of debate about culture that is likely to follow the publication of Samuel Huntington's new book, "The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order",
G
The Clash of Civilisations A professor of international politics at Harvard and the chairman of Harvard's Institute for Strategic Planning, Mr Huntington published in 1993, in Foreign Affairs, an essay which that quarterly's editors said generated more discussion than any since George Kennan's article (under the by-line "x") which argued in July 1947 for the need to contain the Soviet threat. Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state, called Mr Huntington's book-length version of the article "one of the most important books ... since the end of the cold war." The article, "The Clash of Civilisation?", belied the questionmark in its title by predicting wars of culture. "It is my hypothesis", Mr Huntington wrote, "that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great division among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." After the cold war, ideology seemed less important as an organising principle of foreign policy. Culture seemed a plausible candidate. to fill the gap. So future wars, Mr Huntington claimed, would occur "between nations and groups of different civilisations"-western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox and Latin American, perhaps African and Buddhist. Their disputes would "dominate global politics" and the battlelines of the future would follow the fault-lines between these cultures, No mincing words there, and equally few in his new book:
reads, all are western imports. The radio and television are western inventions. If OUf relaxing friend is a member of his nation's anny, he probably operates western or Soviet weapons and trains according to western standards; if he belongs to the government, both his bureaucratic surroundings and the constitutional trappings of his regime may owe their origins to western influence, The upshot, for Mr Lewis, is clear enough. "In modern times," he writes, "the dominating factor in the consciousness
Culture and cultural identities ... are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration and conflict in the post-cold war world ... Global politics is being reconfigured along cultural lines. 212
Article 39. Cultural Explanations Mr Huntington is only one of an increasing number of writers placing stress on the importance of cultural values and institutions in the confusion left in the wake of the cold war. He looked at the influence of culture on international conflict. Three other schools of thought find cultural influences at work in different ways.
countries see the same issue in different ways because of their differing cultural backgrounds. Their electorates or nations do, too. As a resuil, they claim, culture acts as an international barrier. As Ole Elgstrom puts it: "When a Japanese prime minister says that he will 'do his best' to implement a certain policy;' Americans applaud a victory but "what the prime minister really meant was 'no' ," There are dozens of examples of rnisperception in international relations, ranging from Japanese-American trade disputes to the misreading of Saddarn Hussein's intentions in the weeks before he attacked Kuwait.
• Culture and the economy. Perhaps the oldest school holds that cultural values and norms equip people-and, by extension, countries-either poorly or well for economic success. The archetypal modern pronouncement of this view was Max Weber's investigation of the Protestant work ethic. This, he claimed, was the reason why the Protestant parts of Germany and Switzerland were more successful economically than the Catholic areas. In the recent upsurge of interest in issues cultural, a handful of writers have returned to the theme.
What Are They Talking About? All of this is intriguing, and much of it is provocative. It has certainly provoked a host of arguments. For example, is Mr Huntington right to lump together all European countries into one culture. though they speak different languages, while separating Spain and Mexico, which speak the same one? Is the Catholic Philippines western or Asian? Or: if it is true (as Mr Fukuyama claims) that the ability to produce multinational firms is vital to economic success, why has "low-trust" China, which has few such companies, grown so fast? And why has yet-more successful "low-trust" South Korea been able to create big firms? This is nit-picking, of course. But such questions of detail matter because behind them lurks the first of two fundamental doubts that plague all these cultural explanations: how do you define what a culture is? In their attempts to define what cultures are (and hence what they are talking about), most "culture" writers rely partly on self definition: cultures are what people think of themselves as part of. In Mr Hungtington' s words, civilisation "is the broadest level of identification with which [a person] intensely identifies." The trouble is that relatively few people identify "intensely" with broad cultural groups. They tend to identify with something nan'ower: nations or ethnic groups. Europe is a case in point. A poll done last year for the European Commission found that half the people of Britain, Portugal and Greece thought of themselves in purely national terms; so did a third of the Gennans, Spaniards and Dutch. And this was in a part of the world where there is an institution-the EU itself--explicitly devoted to the encouragement of "Europeanness", The same poll found that in every EU country, 70% or more thought of themselves either purely in national terms, or primarily as part of a nation and only secondly as Europeans. Clearly, national loyalty can coexist with wider cultural identification. But, even then, the narrower loyalty can blunt the wider one because national characteristics often are-or at least are often thought to be-peculiar or unique. Seymour Martin Lipset, a sociologist who recently published a book about national characteristics in the United States, called it "American Exceptionalism". David Willetts, a British Conservative member of Parliament, recently claimed that the policies espoused by the opposition Labour Party would go against the grain of "English exceptionalism". And these are the two components of western culture supposedly most like one another.
It is "values and attitudes--culture", claims Lawrence Harrison, that are "mainly responsible for such phenomena as Latin America's persistent instability and inequity, Taiwan's and Korea's economic 'miracles', and the achievements of the Japanese." Thomas Sowell offers other examples in "Race and Culture: A World View". "A disdain for commerce and industry", he argues, "has ... been common for centuries among the Hispanic elite, both in Spain and in Latin America." Academics, though, have played a relatively small part in this debate: the best-known exponent of the thesis that "Asian values"-a kind of Confucian work ethic-aid economic development has been Singapore's fonner prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, • Culture as social blueprint. A second group of analysts has looked at the connections between cultural factors and political systems. Robert Putnam, another Harvard professor, traced Italy's social and political institutions to its "civic culture", or lack thereof. He claimed that, even today, the parts of Italy where democratic institutions are most fully developed are similar to the areas which first began to generate these institutions in the 14th century. His conclusion is that democracy is not something that can be put on like a coat; it is part of a country's social fabric and takes decades, even centuries, to develop. Francis Fukuyama, of George Mason University, takes a slightly different approach. In a recent book which is not about the end of history, he focuses on one particular social trait, "trust". "A nation's well-being, as wen as its ability to compete, is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in the society," he says. Mr Fukuyama argues that "low~trust" societies such as China, France and Itaiy-where close relations between people do not extend much beyond the family-are poor at generating large, complex social institutions like multinational corporations; so they are at a competitive disadvantage compared with "high-trust" nations such as Germany, Japan and the United States. • Culture and decision-making. The final group of scholars has looked at the way in which cultural assumptions act like blinkers, Politicians from different 213
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Figure 1 The World According to Huntington. Source', Adapted byThe Economist from ~The Clash of Civ'llisations and the Remaking of World Order" by Samuel Huntington
and the Renaissance. The scientific-rationalist aspect of Islam
In Islamic countries, the balance between cultural and national identification may be tilted towards the culture. But even here the sense of, say, Egyptian or Iraqi or Palestinian
could well come to the fore again. If you doubt it, consider the case of China and the "Confucian tradition" (a sort of proxy for Asian values). China has been at
nationhood remains strong. (Consider the competing national
various times the world's most prosperous country and also-one
feelings unleashed during the Iran-Iraq war.) In other cultures, national loyalty seems preeminent: in Mr Huntington's classification, Thailand, Tibet and Mongolia all count as "Buddhist". It is hard to imagine that a Thai, a Tibetan and a Mongolian really
of its poorest. It has had periods of great scientific innovation and times of technological backwardness and isolation. Accounts of the Confucian tradition have tracked this path. Nowadays, what seems important about the tradition is its encouragement of hard
have that much in common.
work, savings and investment for the future, plus its emphasis
So the test of subjective identification is hard to apply. That apart, the writers define a culture in the usual terms: language, religion, history, customs and institutions and so on. Such multiple definitions ring true. As Bernard Lewis's man in the Levantine cafe suggests, cultures are not singular things: they are bundles of characteristics. The trouble is that such characteristics are highly ambiguous. Some push one way, some another.
on co-operation towards a single end. All these features have been adduced to explain why the tradition has helped Asian growth. To Max Weber, however, the same tradition seemed entirely different. He argued that the Confucian insistence on obedience
to parental authority discouraged competition and innovation and hence inhibited economic success. And China is not the only country to have been systematically misdiagnosed in this way. In countries as varied as Japan, India, Ghana and South
Culture as Muddle
Korea, notions of cultural determination of economic perfor-
Islamic values, for instance, are routinely assumed to be the antithesis of modernising western ones. In Islam, tradition
mance have been proved routinely wrong (in 1945, India and Ghana were expected to do best of the four-partly because of their supposed cultural inheritance). If you take an extreme position, you could argue from this that cultures are so complicated that they can never be used to explain behaviour accurately. Even if you do not go that far, the
is good; departure from tradition is presumed to be bad until
proven otherwise. Yet, at the same time, Islam is also a monotheistic religion which encourages rationalism and science. Some historians have plausibly argued that it was the Islamic
universities of medieval Spain that kept science and rationalism
lesson must be that the same culture embraces such conflicting
alive during Europe's Dark Ages, and that Islam was a vital medieval link between the ancient world of Greece and Rome
features that it can produce wholly different effects at different
times.
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Article 39. Cultural Explanations Yet Cambodia was eerily similar to Sierra Leone: with random crime, mosquito-borne disease, a government army that was more like a mob and a countryside that was ungovernable.
That is hard enough for the schools of culture to get to grips with. But there is worse to come. For cultures never operate in isolation. When affecting how people behave, they are always part of a wider mix. That mix includes government policies, personal leadership, technological or economic change and so on. For anyone effect, there are always mUltiple causes. Which raises the second fundamental doubt about cultural ex.planations: how do you know whether it is culture-and not something else-that has caused some effect? You cannot. The problem of causation seems insoluble. The best you can do is work out whether, within the mix, culture is becoming more or less important.
His conclusion is that "The effect of culture was more a mystery to me near the end of my planetary journey than at its beginning." He might have gone further: the collapse of governments causes cultural turbulence just as much as cultural turbulence causes the collapse of governments.
Culture as Processed Data Then there is the "knowledge era". Here is a powerful and growing phenomenon. The culture writers do not claim anything different. Like the Industrial Revolution before it, the knowledge era-in which the creation, storage and use of knowledge becomes the basic economic activity-is generating huge change. Emphasising as it does rapid, even chaotic, transformation, it is anti-traditional and anti-authoritarian. Yet the cultural exponents still claim that, even in the knowledge era, culture remains a primary engine of change. They do so for two quite different reasons. Some claim that the new era has the makings of a world culture. There is a universal language, English. There are the beginnings of an international professional class that cuts across cultural and national boundaries: increasingly, bankers, computer programmers, executives, even military officers are said to have as much in common with their opposite numbers in other countries as with their next-door neighbors. As Mr Fukuyama wrote in his more famous book: the "unfolding of modern natural science ... guarantees an increasing homogenisation of all human societies." Others doubt that technology and the rest of it are producing a genuinely new world order. To them, all this is just modern western culture. Either way, the notion that modernity is set on a collision course with culture lies near the heatt of several of the culture writers' books. Summing them up is the title of Benjamin Barber's "Jihad versus McWorld". In other words, he argues that the main conflicts now and in future will be between tribal, local "cultural" values (Jihad) and a McWorld of technology and democracy. It would be pointless to deny that globalisation is causing large changes in every society. It is also clear that such influences act on different cultures differently, enforcing a ldnd of natural selection between those cultures which rise to the challenge and those which do not. But it is more doubtful that these powerful forces are primarily cultural or even western. Of course, they have a cultural component: the artefacts of American culture are usually the first things to come along in the wake of a new road, or new television networks. But the disruptive force itself is primarily economic and has been adopted as enthusiastically in Japan, Singapore and China as in America. The world market is not a cultural concept. Moreover, to suggest that trade, globalisation and the rest of it tend to cause conflict, and then leave the argument there, is not enough. When you boil the argument down, much of it seems to be saying that the more countties trade with each other,
Culture as Passenger Of the many alternative explanations for events, three stand out: the influence of ideas, of government and what might be called the "knowledge era" (shorthand for globalisation, the growth of service-based industries and so forth). Of these, the influence of ideas as a giant organising principle is clearly not what it was when the cold war divided the world between communists and capitalists. We are all capitalists now. To that extent, it is fair to say that the ideological part of the mix has become somewhat less important-though not, as a few people have suggested, insignificant. As for the government, it is a central thesis of the cultural writers that its influence is falling while that of culture is rising: cultures are in some ways replacing states. To quote Mr Huntington again 'Ipeoples and countries with similar cultures are coming together. Peoples and countries with different cultures are coming apart." In several respects, that is counter-intuitive. Governments still control what is usually the single most powerful force in any country, the army. And, in all but the poorest places, governments tax and spend a large chunk of GDP-indeed, a larger chunk, in most places, than 50 years ago. Hardly surprising. then, that governments influence cultures as much as the other way around. To take a couple of examples. Why does South Korea (a low-trust culture, remember) have so many internationally competitive large finns? The answer is that the government decided that it should. Or another case: since 1945 German politicians of every stripe have been insisting that they want to "save Germany from itself'-an attempt to assert political control over cultural identity. South Korea and Germany are examples of governments acting positively to create something new. But governments can act upon cultures negatively: ie, they can destroy a culture when they collapse. Robert Kaplan, of an American magazine Atlantic Monthly, begins his book, "The Ends of the Earth", in Sierra Leone: "1 had assumed that the random crime and social chaos of West Africa were the result of an already-fragile cultural base." Yet by the time he reaches Cambodia at the end of what he calls "a journey at the dawn of the 21st century" he is forced to reconsider that assumption: Here I was ... in a land where the written script was one thousand two hundred years old, and every surrounding
country was in some stage of impressive economic growth.
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ANNUAL EDITIONS the more likely they are to go to war, That seems implausible, Trade-indeed, any sort of link-is just as likely to reduce the potential for violent conflict as' to iricrease it. The same goes for the spread of democracy, another feature which is supposed to encourage civilisations to clash with each other. This might well cause ructions within countries. It might well provoke complaints from dictators about "outside interference". But serious
of what influences people's behaviour, culture's role may well be declining, rather than rising, squeezed between the greedy 'exparl:sion of the government on one side, and globalisation on the other,
The books mentioned in this article are: Benjamin Barber. Jihad versus McWorld (Random House; 1995; 400 pages; $12,95), Francis Fukuy~ma. The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press; 1992; 419 pages; $24,95, Hamish Hamilton; £20,) and Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (Free Press; 1995; 480 pages; $25, Hamish Hamilton; £25), Lawrence E. Harrison. Who Prospers? How Cultural Values Shape Economic and Political Success (Basic Books; 1992; 288 pages; $(4), Samuel Huntington. The Clash of Civilisations? .Foreign Affairs Vol. 72 (Summer 1993) and The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster; 1996; 367 pages;
international conflict is a different matter. And if democracy really did spread round the world, it might tend to reduce violence; wealthy ,democracies, at any rate, are usually reluctant to go to war (though poor or angrily nationalist ones may, as history has shown, be much less reluctant), In short, the "knowledge era" is spreading economic ideas, And these ideas have three cultural effects, not one, They make
cultures rub against each other, causing international friction. They also tie different cultures closer together, which offsets the
first effect. And they may well increase tensions within a culturearea as some groups accommodate themselves to the new world
$26),
while others turn their back on it And all this can be true at the
Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth (Random House; 1996; 475 pages; $2750, Papermac; £10), Bernard Lewis, The Middle East (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson; 1995; 433 pages; £20, Simon & Schuster; $2950), Seymour Martin Upset. American Exceptionalism (Norton; 1996; 352 pages; $27,50 and £19,95). Robert Putnam. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modem Italy (Princeton; 1993; 288 pages; $24,95 and £18,95), Thomas Sowell. Race and Culture: A World View (Basic Books; 1994; 331 pages; $14),
same time because cultures are so varied and ambiguous that they are capable of virtually any transformation, The conclusion must be that while culture will continue to exercise an important influence on both countries and individuals, it has not suddenly become more important than, say, governments or impersonal economic forces. Nor does it play the all-embracing defining role that ideology played during the cold war, Much of its influence is secondary, ie, it comes about partly as a reaction to the "knowledge era", And within the overall mix
From The Economist, November 9, 1996, pp. 23-26. Copyright © 1996 by The Economist Newspaper, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction prohibited. www.economist.com
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40
Globalization Is About Blending, Not Homogenizing Historical proof that globalization does not necessarily mean homogenization can be seen in Japan, a country that deliberately isolated itself from an earlier wave of globalization carried by 17th-century European seafarers. In the mid-19th century, it became the first Asian country to embrace globalization and to borrow successfully from the world without losing its uniqueness. JOSEPH
S.
NYE JR.
hen anti-globalization protesters took to the streets of Washington at the end of September. they blamed globalization for everything from hunger to the destruction of indigenous cultures. And globalization meant the United States. The critics call it Coca-Colonization. and French sheep farmer Jose Bove has become a cult figure since destroying a McDonald' s restaurant in 1999. Contrary to conventional
similar problems is not surprising, but it does not lead to homogeneity. In the first half of the 20th century, for example, there
the leading edge of the information revolution, there is a degree of Americanization at present, but it is likely to diminish over the course of the 21st century as technology spreads and local cultures modernize in their own ways. Historical proof that globalization does not necessarily mean homogenization can be seen in the case of Japan, a country that deliberately isolated itself from an earlier wave of globalization carried by 17th-century European seafarers. In the mid-19th century, it became the first Asian country to embrace globalization and to borrow successfully from the world without losing its uniqueness. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which marked the end of the feudal Tokugawa shogunate, Japan searched broadly for tools and innovations that would allow it to become a major power rather than a victim of Western imperialism. It sent young people to the West for education. Its delegations scoured the world for new ideas in science, technology and industry. In the political realm, Meiji reformers were well aware of Anglo-American ideas and institutions, but delib-
were some similarities among the industrial societies of Britain,
erately turned to German models because they were deemed
Gennany, America and Japan, but there were even more important differences. When China, India and Brazil complete their current processes of industrialization and modernization, we should not expect them to be replicas of Japan, Germany or the United States. Take the current information revolution. The United States is at the forefront of this great movement of change, so the uniform social and cultural habits produced by television viewing or Internet use, for instance, are often attributed to Americanization. But correlation is not causation. Imagine if another country had introduced computers and communications at a rapid rate in a world in which the United States did not exist. Major social and cultural changes still would have fol-
more suitable to a country with an emperor. The lesson that Japan has to teach the rest of the world is that even a century and a half of openness to global trends does not necessarily assure destruction of a country's separate cultural identity. Of course, there are American influences in contemporary Japan (and Japanese influences such as Sony and Pokemon in the United States). Thousands of Japanese youths are co-opting the music, dress and style of urban black America. But some of the groups they listen to dress up like samurai warriors on stage. As one singer explains, "We're trying to make a whole new culture and mix the music." One can applaud or deplore or simply be amused by such cultural transfers, but one should not doubt the persistence of Japan's cultural uniqueness.
W
wisdom, however, globalization is neither homogenizing nor
Americanizing the cultures of the world. To understand why not, we have to step back and put the current period in a larger historical perspective. Although they are related, the long-term historical trends of globalization and modernization are not the same. While modernization has produced some common traits, such as large cities, factories and
mass communications, local cultures have by no means been erased. The appearance of similar institutions in response to
lowed. Of course, since the United States does exist and is at
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Transnational corporations are changing poor countries but not homogenizing them. In the early stages of investment, a multinational company with access to the global resources of finance, technology and markets holds the high cards and often gets the best of the bargain with the poor country. But over time, as the poor country develops a skilled workforce, learns new technologies and opens its own channels to global finance and markets, it is often able to renegotiate the bargain and capture more of the benefits. When the multinational oil companies first went into the Persian Gulf, they claimed the lion's share of the oil profits; today, the local governments do. Of course, there has been some change in Saudi Arabia as its engineers and financiers have trained abroad. incomes have risen and a degree of urbanization has occurred. Yet after 60 years of investment from abroad, Saudi culture certainly does not look American.
he protesters' image of America homogenizing the world also reflects a mistakenly static view of culture. Efforts to portray cultures as unchanging more often reflect reactionary political strategies than descriptions of reality. The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa put it well when he said that arguments in favor of cultural identity and against globalization "betray a stagnant attitude toward cuiture that is not borne out by historical fact. Do we know of any cultures that have remained unchanged through time? To find any of them one has to travel to the small, primitive, magico~religious communities made up of people ... who, due to their primitive condition, become progressively more vulnerable to exploita-
T
tion and extermination." Vibrant cultures are constantly changing and borrowing from other cultures. And the borrowing is not always from the United States. For example, many more countries turned to Canada than to the United States as a model for constitution building in the aftermath of the Cold War. Canadian views of how to deal with hate crimes were more congenial to countries such as South Africa and the post-Communist states of Eastern Europe than America's First Amendment practices. Globalization is also a two-edged sword. In some areas, there has been not only a backlash against American cultural imports, but also an effort to change American culture itself. American policies on capital punishment may have majority support inside the United States, but they are regarded as egregious violations of human rights in much of Europe and have been the focus of transnational human rights campaigns. American attitudes toward climate change or genetic modification of food draw similar criticism. More subtly, the openness of the United States to the world's diasporas both enriches and changes American culture. Finally, there is some evidence that globalization and the information revolution may actually reinforce rather than reduce cultural diversity. Some French commentators have worried that in a world of Internet global marketing, there will no longer be room for a culture that cherishes some 250 different types of cheese. But the opposite is true: The Internet allows dispersed customers. to come together in a way that encourages niche markets, including hundreds of sites dedicated only to cheese. The Internet also allows people to establish a more diverse set of political communities. The use of the Welsh language in Britain and Gaelic in Ireland is greater today than it was 50 years ago. Britain, Belgium and Spain, among others in Europe, have devolved more power to local regions.
keptics might argue that transnational corporations will escape the fate of the giant oil companies because many are virtual companies that design and market products but farm out their manufacture to dozens of suppliers in poor countries. The big companies play small suppliers against each other, seeking ever lower labor costs. But as the technology of cheap communications allows nongovernmental organizations to conduct campaigns of "naming and shaming" that threaten the multinationals' market brands in rich countries, such corporations become vulnerable as well. As technical capabilities spread and more and more people hook up to global communications systems, the United States' economic and cultural preponderance may diminish. This in tum has mixed implications for American "soft" power, our ability to get others to do what we want by attraction rather than coercion. A little less dominance may mean a little less anxiety about Americanization, fewer complaints about American arrogance and a little less intensity in the anti-American backlash. We may have less control in the future, but we may find ourselves living in a world somewhat more congenial to our basic values of democracy, free markets and human rights.
S
JOSEPH NVE is dean of Harvard's
Kennedy School of Govemment and author of "The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone" (Oxford University Press).
From Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 20.2002. Copyright © 2002 by Joseph Nye. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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Article 41
An Explosive Combination Capitalism, democracy don't always go together as planned AMy CHUA that market capitalism and democracy could only coexist in fundamental tension with each another. It is one of history's great surprises that Western nations succeeded so spectacularly in integrating markets and democracy. Conditions in today's developing world, however, make the
n May 1998, Indonesian mobs swarmed the streets of Jakarta, looting and torching more than 5,000 ethnic Chinese shops and homes. One hundred and fifty Chinese women were gang-raped, and more than 2,000 people died. In the months that followed, anti-Chinese hate-mongering and violence spread throughout Indonesia's cities. The explosion of rage can be traced to an unlikely source: the rapid combination of democracy and free markets-the very prescription wealthy democracies have promoted for healing the ills of underdevelopment. How did things go so wrong? During the 1980s and 1990s, Indonesia's aggressive shift to unrestrained free-market policies allow the country's Chinese minority, just 3 percent of the population, to take control of 70
I
combination of markets and democracy much more volatile than was the case when Western nations embarked on their own paths to market democracy. One reason has to do with scale: The poor are vastly more numerous, and poverty far more entrenched, in the developing world today. Another has to do with process: Universal suffrage in developing countries is often implemented wholesale and abruptlya destabilizing approach that is quite removed from the gradual enfranchisement seen during Western democratization. But the most formidable problem the developing world faces is structural-and it's one that the West has little experience with. It's the phenomenon of the market-dominant minority, ethnic minorities who tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to an astounding extent, the impoverished "indigenous" majorities around them. They're the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa and the West Indies, Lebanese in West Africa, Kikuyu in Kenya, Ibo in Nigeria, Jews in post-Communist Russia, and whites in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Bolivia, to name just a few.
percent of the private economy. When Indonesians ousted President General Suharto in 1998, the country's poor majority rose up in a violent backlash against the Chinese minority and against markets. The democratic elections that abruptly followed 30 years of autocratic rule, while free and fair, were rife with ethnic scapegoating by indigenous politicians and calls for confiscation of Chinese wealth and a "People's Economy." Today, the Indonesian government sits on $58 billion worth of nationalized assets, almost all formerly owned by Chinese tycoons. These once-productive assets now lie stagnant, while unemployment and poverty deepen. What occurred in Indonesia is part of a pattern. It is the rule of unintended-but reasonably predicted--consequences. It is also a lesson for U.S. policy-makers in running postwar Iraq. The reality is that given the conditions that actually exist now in many post colonial countries-conditions created by
It is crucial to recognize that groups can be market-dominant for widely different reasons, ranging from superior entrepreneurialism to a history of apartheid or colonial oppression. If, for example, as with whites in South Africa, a minority uses force to relegate the indigenous majority to inferior education and inhumane conditions for over a century, then that minority is likely to be market-dominant, for reasons that have nothing to do with culture. In countries with a market-dominant minority, the rich are not just rich but belong to a resented "outsider" ethnic group. In free-market environments, these minorities, together with foreign investors (who are often their business partners), tend to accumulate starkly disproportionate wealth, fueling ethnic envy and resentment among the poor majorities.
history, colonialism, divide-and-conquer policies, corruption, autocracy-the combination of laissez-faire capitalism and unrestrained majority rule may well have catastrophic
consequences.
Roots of Resentment The notion that market democracy promotes peaceful prosperity has not always held sway. In the 18th and 19th centuries, most leading political philosophers and economists believed
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
When democratic reforms give voice to this previously silenced majority, opportunistic demagogues can swiftly marshal majoritarian animosity into powerful ethnonationalist movements that can subvert both markets and democracy. That's what happened in Indonesia and is happening around the world. The same dynamic-in which markets and democracy pit a poor, frustrated majority against a rich "outsider" minority-has produced retaliation, violence, and even mass slaughter of market-dominant minorities, from Croats in the former Yugoslavia to Tutsi in Rwanda.
A Stake in the Game How can Western nations advance capitalism and democracy in the developing world without encouraging conflagration and bloodshed? They must stop promoting unrestrained, bareknuckled capitalism (a form of markets that the West, itself, has repudiated) and unrestrained, overnight majority rule (a form of democracy Western nations have also repudiated). Instead of encouraging a caricature of free-market democracy, they should follow their own successful model and sponsor the gradual introduction of democratic reforms, tailored to
local circumstances. They also should cultivate stabilizing institutions and programs such as social safety nets, tax-and-transfer programs, antitrust laws, philanthropy, constitutionalism and property protections. Most crucially, they must find ways to give the poor majorities of the world an ownership stake in their countries' corporations and capital markets. In the United States, a solid majority of Americans, even members of the lower middle classes, own shares in major U.S. companies, often through pension funds, and thus have a stake in the U.S. market economy. This is not the case in the developing world, where corporations are typically owned by single families belonging to a market-dominant minority. In South Africa as of June 2002, for example, blacks, although making up 77 percent of the population, controlled only 2 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange's total capitalization. Continued global democratization seems inevitable. But in this climate, international businesses, Western investors and market-dominant minorities should heed the lessons from Jakarta. It is an act of enlightened self-interest to launch highly visible local corporate responsibility initiatives and innovative profit-sharing programs. Consider these models:
computers and textbooks into the poverty-stricken region. In Central America, a few Western companies have started to contribute to local infrastructure development and to offer stock options to local employees. In these ways, foreign investors and market-dominant minorities can give local populations a stake in their local economy and businesses. This is perhaps the best way to defuse tensions that, history tells us, can sabotage both markets and democracy, the very structures businesses need to thrive. The Bush administration might consider these lessons as it decides how to rebuild Iraq. Perhaps because of beliefs in the "melting pot" and America's own relatively successful-though halting and incompletehistory of ethnic assimilation, Americans don't always understand the significance of ethnicity, both in the United States and especially in other countries. Interestingly, British colonial governments were fastidiously conscious of ethnic divisions. Of course, their ethnic policies are a dangerous modeL When it was the British Empire's tllrn to deal with nation-building and ethnicity, the British engaged in divide-and-conquer policies, not only protecting but favoring ethnic minorities, and simultaneously aggravating ethnic resentments. ,':,:;m;;'c'''~'
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laissez-faire markets overnight democracy in Iraq could well favor different ethnic or religious groups in the short run, creating enormous instability. (;':', .. ,:,'~':,(,,' ':."'.,\<"i :';,;",:,
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As a result, when the British decamped, the time bombs often exploded, from Africa to India to Southeast Asia. This contrast can be seen in how the United States and Britain looked at the situation in postwar Iraq. At least before the war, the U.S. government's ethnic policy for Iraq was essentially to have no ethnic policy. Instead, U.s. officials seemed strangely confident that Iraq's ethnic, religious, and tribal divisions would dissipate in the face of democracy and market-generated wealth. But in countries as deeply divided as Iraq, every thingeven freedom and wealth-has ethnic and sectarian ramifications. Who will comprise the police? Who has experience in engineering and oil or the skills to run a stock exchange? Given Saddam Hussein's sadistically unfair and repressive regime, some groups-namely, the Sunni minority, particularly the Ba' athists-will almost certainly have a head start in terms of education, capital, and economic and managerial experience. Consequently, as is true in so many other non~ Western countries, laissez-faire markets and overnight democracy in Iraq could well favor different ethnic or religious groups in the short run, creating enormous instability.
• In East Africa, powerful families of Indian descent include Africans in top management positions in their companies and provide education, training, and wealthsharing schemes for their African employees In Russia, where anti-Semitism is rampant, the Jewish billionaire Roman Abramovich was recently elected governor of Chukotka after spending tens of millions of dollars of his personal fortune to airlift food, medicine,
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Article 41. An Explosive Combination
At the same time, because by analogy at the global level, the United States has come to be seen as a kind of global market-dominant minority-wielding wildly disproportionate power relative to our size and numbers--every move we make with respect to Iraq is being closely-and perhaps even unfairly-scrutinized. Despite Hussein's barbarous gulags, gross human-rights violations and repeated refusals to comply with U.N. requirements, international public opinion was overwhelmingly against the United States going to war with Iraq. It is important to see that this opposition to U.S. policies was closely bound up with deep feelings of resentment and fear of U.S. power and cynicism about American motives. Deep ethnic and religious divisions remain in Iraq, but ironically one theme unifying the Iraqi people at the moment is their intensifying opposition to American and British occupation. Many Americans are bewildered-outraged-at the depth and pervasiveness of anti-Americanism in the world today. "Why do so many people want to come here if we're so terrible?" frustrated Americans demand. "What would France be doing if it were the world's superpower?" "Why do they hate us?" These are reasonable points. But the fact of the matter is that because the United States is the world's sole superpower, we are going to be held to a
higher standard than everyone else-market-dominant minorities always are. For this reason, it is in the United States' own interest to avoid taking actions that suggest hypocrisy, look glaringly exploitative, or display lack of concern for the rest of the world, including of course the people of Iraq. It is easy to criticize the United States, just as it is easy to hide behind facile calls for "free-market democracy." With the international community watching, I prefer to view this moment as a critical opportunity for the United States to surprise a skeptical world. One thing, however, is clear: The United States cannot simply call for elections and universal suffrage and at the same time support an economic system that is seen as benefiting only a tiny, privileged minority-whether an ethnic or religions minority or U ,So and British companies. To do so would be a recipe for disaster. AMY CHUA is a professor of law at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and the author of World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (Doubleday, 2003). Portions of this article previously appeared in the Harvard Busi~ ness Review.
As seen in Orlando Sentinel, September 21, 2003, pp. Gl, G4. Copyright © 2003 by Harvard Business Schoo! PubliShing. Reprinted by permission.
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Article 42
Jihad vs. McWorld The two axial principles of our age-tribalism and globalism-clash at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy BENJAMIN
R.
BARBER
McWorld, or the Globalization of Politics
ust beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political figures-both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe-a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food-with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment. These two tendencies are sometimes visible in the same countries at the same instant: thus Yugoslavia, clamoring just recently to join the New Europe, is exploding into fragments; India is trying to live up to its reputation as the world's largest integral democracy while powerful new fundamentalist parties like the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janta Party, along with nationalist assassins, are imperiling its hard-won unity. States are breaking up or joining up: the Soviet Union has disappeared
J
Four imperatives make up the dynamic of McWorld: a market imperative, a resource imperative, an information-technology imperative, and an ecological imperative. By shrinking the world and diminishing the salience of national borders, these imperatives have in combination achieved a considerable victory over factiousness and particularism, and not least of all over their most virulent traditional form-nationalism. It is the realists who are now Europeans, the utopians who dream nostalgically of a resurgent England or Germany, perhaps even a resurgent Wales or Saxony. Yesterday'S wishful cry for one world has yielded to the reality of McWorld. The market imperative. Marxist and Leninist theories of imperialism assumed that the quest for ever-expanding markets would in time compel nation-based capitalist economies
to push against national boundaries in search of an international economic imperium. Whatever else has happened to the scientistic predictions of Marxism, in this domain they have proved farsighted. All national economies are now vulnerable to the inroads of larger, transnational markets within which trade is free, currencies are convertible, access to banking is open, and contracts are enforceable under law. In Europe, Asia, Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas such markets are eroding
almost overnight, its parts forming new unions with one another
national sovereignty and giving rise to entities-international
or with like-minded nationalities in neighboring states. The old interwar national state based on territory and political sovereignty looks to be a mere transitional development. The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one fe-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without. They have one thing in common: neither offers much hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern themselves democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad's centrifugal whirlwind against McWorld's centripetal black hole, the outcome is unlikely to be democratic-or so I will argue.
banks, trade associations, transnational lobbies like OPEC and Greenpeace, world news services like CNN and the BBC, and multinational corporations that increasingly lack a meaningful national identity-that neither reflect nor respect nationhood as
an organizing or regulative principle. The market imperative has also reinforced the quest for international peace and stability, requisites of an efficient international economy. Markets are enemies of parochialism, isolation, fractiousness, war. Market psychology attenuates the psychology of ideological and religious cleavages
and assumes a concord among producers and consumerscategories that ill fit narrowly conceived national or religious cultures. Shopping has little tolerance for blue laws, whether
222
Article 42. Jihad vs. McWorld dictated by pub-closing British paternalism, Sabbath-observing Jewish Orthodox fundamentalism, or no-Sunday-liquor-sales Massachusetts puritanism. In the context of common markets, international law cease-I) to be a vision of justice' and becomes a workaday framework for getting things done-enforcing contracts, ensuring that governments abide by deals, regulating trade and currency relations, and so forth. Common markets demand a common language, as wel1 as a common currency, and they produce common behav~ iors of the kind bred by cosmopolitan city life everywhere. Commercial pilots, computer programmers, international bankers, media specialists. oil riggers, entertainment celebrities, ecology experts, demographers, accountants, professors, athletes-these compose a new breed of men and women for whom religion, culture, and nationality can seem only marginal elements in a working identity. Although sociologists of everyday life will no doubt continue to distinguish a Japanese from an American mode, shopping has a common signature throughout the world. Cynics might even say that some of the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe have had as their true goal not liberty and the right to vote but well-paying jobs and the right to shop (although the vote is proving easier to acquire than consumer goods). The market imperative is, then, plenty powerful; but, notwithstanding some of the claims made for "democratic capitalism," it is not identical with the democratic imperative. The resource imperative. Democrats once dreamed of societies whose political autonomy rested firmly on economic independence. The Athenians idealized what they called autarky, and tried for a while to create a way of life simple and austere enough to make the polis genuinely self-sufficient. To be free meant to be independent of any other community or polis. Not even the Athenians were able to achieve autarky, however: human nature, it turns out, is dependency. By the time of Pericles, Athenian politics was inextricably bound up with a flowering empire held together by naval power and commerce-an empire that, even as it appeared to enhance Athenian might, ate away at Athenian independence and autarky. Master and slave, it turned out, were bound together by mutual insufficiency. The dream of autarky briefly engrossed nineteenth-century America as well, for the underpopulated, endlessly bountiful land, the cornucopia of natural resources, and the natural barriers of a continent walled in by two great seas led many to believe that America could be a world unto itself. Given this past, it has been harder for Americans than for most to accept the inevitability of interdependence. But the rapid depletion of resources even in a country like ours, where they once seemed inexhaustible, and the maldistribution of arable soil and mineral resources on the planet, leave even the wealthiest societies ever more resource-dependent and many other nations in permanently desperate straits. Every nation, it turns out, needs something another nation has; some nations have almost nothing they need. The in/ormation-technology imperative. Enlightenment science and the technologies derived from it are inherently universalizing. They entail a quest for descIiptive principles of
general application, a search for universal solutions to particular problems, and an unswerving embrace of objectivity and impartiality. Scientific progress embodies and depends on open communication, a common discourse rooted in rationality, collaboration, and an easy and regular flow and exchange of infonnation. Such ideals can be hypocritical covers for power-mongering by elites, and they may be shown to be wanting in many other ways, but they are entailed by the very idea of science and they make science and globalization practical allies. Business, banking, and commerce all depend on information flow and are facilitated by new communication technologies. The hardware of these technologies tends to be systemic and integrated-computer, television, cable, satellite, laser, fiber-optic, and microchip technologies combining to create a vast interactive communications and information network that can potentially give every person on earth access to every other person, and make every datum, every byte, available to every set of eyes. If the automobile was, as George Ball once said (when he gave his blessing to a Fiat factory in the Soviet Union during the Cold War), "an ideology on four wheels," then electronic telecommunication and information systems are an ideology at 186,000 miles per second-which makes for a very small planet in a very big hUrry. Individual cultures speak particular languages; commerce and science increasingly speak English; the whole world speaks logarithms and binary mathematics. Moreover, the pursuit of science and technology asks for, even compels, open societies. Sate11ite footprints do not respect national borders; telephone wires penetrate the most closed societies. With photocopying and then fax machines having infiltrated Soviet universities and samizdat literary circles in the eighties, and computer modems having multiplied like rabbits in communism's bureaucratic warrens thereafter, glasnost could not be far behind. In their social requisites, secrecy and science are enemies. The new technology's software is perhaps even more globalizing than its hardware. The information ann of international commerce's sprawling body reaches out and touches distinct nations and parochial cultures, and gives them a common face chiseled in Hollywood, on Madison Avenue, and in Silicon Valley. Throughout the 1980s one of the most-watched television programs in South Africa was The Cosby Show. The demise of apartheid was already in production. Exhibitors at the 1991 Cannes film festival expressed growing anxiety over the "homogenization" and "Americanization" of the global film industry when, for the third year rnnning, American films dominated the awards ceremonies. America has dominated the world's popular culture for much longer, and much more decisively. In November of 1991 Switzerland's once insular culture boasted best-seller lists featuring Terminator 2 as the No. I movie, Scarlett as the No. 1 book, and Prince's Diamonds and Pearls as the No. I record album. No wonder the Japanese are buying Hollywood film studios even faster than Americans are buying Japanese television sets. This kind of software supremacy may in the long term be far more important than
223
ANNUAL EDITIONS and, to an ever greater degree, sub national factions in permanent rebellion against uniformity and integration-even the kind represented by universal law and justice. The headlines feature these players regularly: they are cultures, not coun~ tries; parts, not wholes; sects, not religions; rebellious factions and dissenting minorities at war not just with globalism but with the traditional nation-state. Kurds, Basques, Puerto Ricans, Ossetians, East Timoreans, Quebecois, the Catholics of Northern Ireland, Abkhasians, Kurile Islander Japanese, the Zulus of Inkatha, Catalonians, Tamils, and, of course, Palestinians-people without countries, inhabiting nations not their own, seeking smaller worlds within borders that will seal them off from modernity. A powerful irony is at work here. Nationalism was once a force of integration and unification, a movement aimed at bringing together disparate clans, tribes, and cultural fragments under new, assimilationist flags. But as Ortega y Gasset noted more than sixty years ago, having won its victories, nationalism changed its strategy. In the 1920s, and again today, it is more often a reactionary and divisive force, pulverizing the very nations it once helped cement together. The force that creates nations is "inclusive," Ortega wrote in The Revolt of the Masses. "In periods of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania ...." This mania has left the post-Cold War world smothering with hot wars; the international scene is little more unified than it was at the end of the Great War, in Ortega's own time. There were more than thirty wars in progress last year, most of them ethnic, racial, tribal, or religious in character, and the list of unsafe regions doesn't seem to be getting any shorter. Some new world order! The aim of many of these small-scale wars is to redraw boundaries, to implode states and resecure parochial identities: to escape McWorld's dully insistent imperatives. The mood is that of Jihad: war not as an instrument of policy but as an emblem of identity, an expression of community, an end in itself. Even where there is no shooting war, there is fractiousness, secession, and the quest forever smaller communities. Add to the list of dangerous countries those at risk: In Switzerland and Spain, Jurassian and Basque separatists still argue the virtues of ancient identities, sometimes in the language of bombs. Hyperdisintegration in the former Soviet Union may well continue unabated-not just a Ukraine independent from the Soviet Union but a Bessarabian Ukraine independent from the Ukrainian republic; not just Russia severed from the defunct union but Tatarstan severed from Russia. Yugoslavia makes even the disunited, ex~Soviet, nonsocialist republics that were once the Soviet Union look integrated, its sectarian fatherlands springing up within factional motherlands like weeds within weeds within weeds. Kurdish independence would threaten the territorial integrity of four Middle Eastern nations. Well before the current cataclysm Soviet Georgia made a claim for autonomy from the Soviet Union, only to be faced with its Ossetians (164,000 in a republic of 5.5 million) demanding their own self-determination within Georgia. The Abkhasian minority in Georgia has followed suit. Even the good will established by
hardware superiority, because culture has become more potent than armaments. What is the power of the Pentagon compared with Disneyland? Can the Sixth Fleet keep up with CNN? McDonald's in Moscow and Coke in China will do more to create a global culture than military colonization ever could. It is less the goods than the brand names that do the work, for they convey life-style images that alter perception and challenge behavior. They make up the seductive software of McWorld's common (at times much too common) soul. Yet in all this high-tech commercial world there is nothing that looks particularly democratic. It lends itself to surveillance as well as liberty, to new forms of manipulation and covert control as well as new kinds of participation, to skewed, unjust market
outcomes as well as greater productivity. The consumer society and the open society are not quite synonymous. Capitalism and democracy have a relationship, but it is something less than a marriage. An efficient free market after all requires that consumers be free to vote their dollars on competing goods, not that citizens be free to vote their values and beliefs on competing political candidates and programs. The free market flourished
in junta-run Chile, in military-governed Taiwan and Korea, and, earlier, in a variety of autocratic European empires as well as their colonial possessions. The ecological imperative. The impact of globalization on ecology is a cliche even to world leaders who ignore it. We know well enough that the German forests can be destroyed by Swiss and Italians driving gas-guzzlers fueled by leaded gas. We also know that the planet can be asphyxiated by greenhouse gases because Brazilian farmers want to be part of the twentieth century and are burning down tropical rain forests to clear a little land to plough, and because Indonesians make a living out of converting their lush jungle into toothpicks for fastidious Japanese diners, upsetting the delicate oxygen balance and in effect puncturing our global lungs. Yet this ecological consciousness has meant not only greater awareness but also greater inequality, as modernized nations try to slam the door behind them, saying to developing nations, "The world cannot afford your modernization; ours has wrung it dry!" Each of the four imperatives just dted is transnational, transideological, and transcultural. Each applies impartially to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists; to democrats and totalitarians; to capitalists and socialists. The Enlightenment dream of a universal rational society has to a remarkable degree
been realized-but in a form that is commercialized, homogenized, depolitidzed, bureaucratized, and, of course, radically incomplete, for the movement toward McWorld is in competition with forces of global breakdown, national dissolution, and centrifugal corruption. These forces, working in the opposite direction, are the essence of what I call Jihad.
Jihad, or the lebanonization of the World OPEC, the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Red Cross, the multinational corporation ... there are scores of institutions that reflect globalization. But they often appear
as ineffective reactors to the world's real actors: national states 224
Article 42. Jihad Canada's once promising Meech Lake protocols is in danger, with Francophone Quebec again threatening the dissolution of the federation. In South Africa the emergence from apartheid was hardly achieved when friction between Inkatha's Zulus and the African National Congress's tribally identified members threatened to replace Europeans' racism with an indigenous tribal war. After thirty years of attempted integration using the colonial language (English) as a unifier, Nigeria is now playing with the idea of linguistic multiculturalism-which could mean the cultural breakup of the nation into hundreds of tribal fragments. Even Saddam Hussein has benefited from the threat of internal Jihad, having used renewed tribal and religious wmfare to tum last season's mortal enemies into reluctant allies of an Iraqi nationhood that he nearly destroyed. The passing of communism has tom away the thin veneer of internationalism (workers of the world unite!) to reveal ethnic prejudices that are not only ugly and deep-seated but increasingly murderous. Europe's old scourge, anti-Semitism, is back with a vengeance, but it is only one of many antagonisms. It appears all too easy to throw the historical gears into reverse and pass from a Communist dictatorship back into a tribal state. Among the tribes, religion is also a battlefield. ("Jihad" is a rich world whose generic meaning is "struggle"-usually the struggle of the soul to avert eviL Strictly applied to religious war, it is used only in reference to battles where the faith is under assault, or battles against a government that denies the practice of Islam. My use here is rhetorical, but does follow both journalistic practice and history.) Remember the Thirty Years War? Whatever forms of Enlightenment universalism might once have come to grace such historically related forms of monotheism as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in many of their modern incarnations they are parochial rather than cosmopolitan, angry rather than loving, proselytizing rather than ecumenical, zealous rather than rationalist, sectarian rather than deistic, ethnocentric rather than universalizing. As a result, like the new forms of hypernationalism, the new expressions of religious fundamentalism are fractious and pulverizing, never integrating. This is religion as the Crusaders knew it: a battle to the death for souls that if not saved will be forever lost. The atmospherics of Jihad have resulted in a breakdown of civility in the name of identity, of comity in the name of community. International relations have sometimes taken on the aspect of gang war-cultural turf battles featuring tribal factions that were supposed to be sublimated as integral parts of large national, economic, postcolonial, and constitutional entities.
VS.
McWorld
McWorld does manage to look pretty seductive in a world obsessed with Jihad. It delivers peace, prosperity. and relative unity-if at the cost of independence, community, and identity (which is generally based on difference). The primary political values required by the global market are order and tranquility, and freedom-as in the phrases "free trade," "free press," and "free love." Human rights are needed to a degree, but not citizenship or participation-and no more social justice and equality than are necessary to promote efficient economic production and consumption. Multinational corporations sometimes seem to prefer doing business with local oligarchs, inasmuch as they can take confidence from dealing with the boss on all crucial matters. Despots who slaughter their own populations are no problem, so long as they leave markets in place and refrain from making war on their neighbors (Saddam Hussein's fatal mistake). In trading partners, predictability is of more value than justice. The Eastern European revolutions that seemed to arise out of concern for global democratic values quickly deteriorated into a stampede in the general direction of free markets and their Ubiquitous, television-promoted shopping malls. East Germany's Neues Forum, that courageous gathering of intellectuals, students, and workers which overturned the Stalinist regime in Berlin in 1989, lasted only six months in Germany's mini-version of McWorld. Then it gave way to money and markets and monopolies from the West. By the time of the first all-German elections, it could scarcely manage to secure three percent of the vote. Elsewhere there is growing evidence that glasnost will go and perestroika-defined as privatization and an opening of markets to Western bidders-will stay. So understandably anxious are the new rulers of Eastern Europe and whatever entities are forged from the residues of the Soviet Union to gain access to credit and markets and technology-McWorld's flourishing new currencies-that they have shown themselves willing to trade away democratic prospects in pursuit of them: not just old totalitarian ideologies and command-economy production models but some possible indigenous experiments with a third way between capitalism and socialism, such as economic cooperatives and employee stock-ownership plans, both of which have their ardent supporters in the East. Jihad delivers a different set of virtues: a vibrant local identity, a sense of community, solidarity among kinsmen, neighbors, and countrymen, narrowly conceived. But it also guarantees parochialism and is grounded in exclusion. Solidarity is secured through war against outsiders. And solidarity often means obedience to a hierarchy in governance, fanaticism in beliefs, and the obliteration of individual selves in the name of the group. Deference to leaders and intolerance toward outsiders (and toward "enemies within") are hallmarks of tribalism-hardly the attitudes required for the cultivation of new democratic women and men capable of governing themselves. Where new democratic experiments have been conducted in retribalizing societies, in both Europe and the Third World, the result has often been anarchy, repression,
The Darkening Future of Democracy These rather melodramatic tableaux vivants do not tell the whole story, however. For all their defects, Jihad and McWorld have their attractions. Yet, to repeat and insist, the attractions are unrelated to democracy. Neither McWorld nor Jihad is remotely democratic in impulse. Neither needs democracy; neither promotes democracy.
225
ANNUAL EDITIONS
persecution, and the coming of new, noncommunist forms of
is indifferent to democracy, there is nonetheless a form of democratic government that suits global markets passably well-representative government in its federal or, better still,
very old kinds of despotism. During the past year, Havel's velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia was imperiled by partisans of "Czechland" and of Slovakia as independent entities. India seemed little less rent by Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, and Tamil infighting than it was immediately after the British pulled out, more than forty years ago. To the extent that either McWorld or Jihad has a natural politics, it has turned out to be more of an antipolitics. For McWorld, it is the antipolitics of globalism: bureaucratic, technocratic, and meritocratic, focused (as Marx predicted it would be) on the administration of things-with people, however, among the chief things to be administered. In its politico-economic imperatives McWorld has been guided by laissez-faire market principles that privilege efficiency, productivity, and beneficence at the expense of civic liberty and self-government. For Jihad, the antipolitics of tribalization has been explicitly antidemocratic: one-party dictatorship, government by military
confederal variation. With its concern for accountability, the protection of minorities, and the universal rule of law, a confederalized represen~ tative system would serve the political needs of McWorld as
well as oligarchic bureaucratism or meritocratic elitism is currently doing. As we are already beginning to see, many nations
may survive in the long term only as confederations that afford local regions smaller than "nations" extensive jurisdiction. Recommended reading for democrats of the twenty-first century is not the U.S. Constitution or the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen but the Articles of Confederation, that suddenly pertinent document that stitched together the thir-
teen American colonies into what then seemed a too loose confederation of independent states but now appears a new form of political realism, as veterans of Yeltsin's new Russia and the
junta, theocratic fundamentalism-often associated with a version of the Fiihrerprinzip that empowers an individual to rule
new Europe created at Maastricht will attest. By the same token, the participatory and direct form of
on behalf of a people. Even the government of India, struggling for decades to model democracy for a people who will soon number a billion, longs for great leaders; and for every Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, or Rajiv Gandhi taken from them by zealous assassins, the Indians appear to seek a replacement who will deliver them from the lengthy travail of their freedom.
democracy that engages citizens in civic activity and civic judgment and goes well beyond just voting and accountability-the system I have called "strong democracy"-suits the political
needs of decentralized communities as well as theocratic and nationalist party dictatorships have done. Local neighborhoods need not be democratic, but they can be. Real democracy has flourished in diminutive settings: the spiritofliberty, Tocqueville said, is local. Participatory democracy, if not naturally apposite
to tribalism, has an undeniable attractiveness under conditions
The Confederal Option
of parochialism.
How can democracy be secured and spread in a world whose
Democracy in any of these variations will, however, continue to be obstructed by the undemocratic and antidemocratic
primary tendencies are at best indifferent to it (McWorld) and at worst deeply antithetical to it (Jihad)? My guess is that globalization will eventually vanquish retribalization. The ethos of
trends toward uniformitarian globalism and intolerant retribalization which I have portrayed here. For democracy to persist
material "civilization" has not yet encountered an obstacle it
in our brave new McWorld. we will have to commit acts of
has been unable to thrust aside. Ortega may have grasped in the 1920s a clue to our own future in the coming millennium.
conscious political will-a possibility, but hardly a probabil-
ity. under these conditions. Political will requires much more
Everyone sees the need of a new principle of life. But as always happens in similar crises-some people attempt to save the situation by an artificial intensification of the very principle which has led to decay. This is the meaning of the "nationalist" outburst of recent years ... things have always gone that way. The last flare, the longest; the last sigh, the deepest. On the very eve of their disappearance there is an intensification of frontiers-military and economic.
than the quick fix of the transfer of institutions. Like technology
transfer, institution transfer rests on foolish assumptions about a uniform world of the kind that once fired the imagination of colonial administrators. Spread English justice to the colonies by exporting wigs. Let an East Indian trading company act as the
vanguard to Britain's free parliamentary institutions. Today's well-intentioned quick-fixers in the National Endowment for Democracy and the Kennedy School of Government, in the
unions and foundations and universities zealously nurturing
Jihad may be a last deep sigh before the eternal yawn of McWorld. On the other hand, Ortega was not exactly prescient; his prophecy of peace and internationalism came just before blitzkrieg, world war, and the Holocaust tore the old order to bits. Yet democracy is how we remonstrate with reality, the rebuke our aspirations offer to history. And if retrib-
contacts in Eastern Europe and the Third World, are hoping to democratize by long distance. Post Bulgaria a parliament by first-class mail. Fed Ex the Bill of Rights to Sri Lanka. Cable
alization is inhospitable to democracy, there is nonetheless a form of democratic government that can accommodate parochialism and communitarianism, one that can even save them
democratic civil society; imposing a free market may even have
Cambodia some common law. Yet Eastern Europe has already demonstrated that importing free political parties, parliaments, and presses cannot establish a the opposite effect. Democracy grows from the bottom up and cannot be imposed from the top down. Civil society has to be built from the inside out. The institutional superstructure comes last. Poland may become democratic, but then again it may heed
from their defects and make them more tolerant and participatory: decentralized participatory democracy. And if McWorld
226
Article 42. Jihad vs. McWorld the Pope, and prefer to found its politics on its Catholicism, with uncertain consequences for democracy, Bulgaria may become democratic, but it may prefer tribal war. The former Soviet Union may become a democratic confederation, or it may just grow into an anarchic and weak conglomeration of markets for other nations' goods and services. Democrats need to seek out indigenous democratic impulses. There is always a desire for self-government, always some expression of participation, accountability, consent, and representation, even in traditional hierarchical societies. These need to be identified, tapped, modified, and incorporated into new democratic practices with an indigenous flavor. The tortoises among the democratizers may ultimately outlive or outpace the hares, for they will have the time and patience to explore conditions along the way, and to adapt their gait to changing circumstances. Tragically, democracy in a hurry often looks something like France in 1794 or China in 1989. It certainly seems possible that the most attractive democratic ideal in the face of the brutal realities of Jihad and the dull realities of McWorld will be a confederal union of
semi-autonomous communities smaller than nation-states, tied together into regional economic associations and markets larger than nation-states-participatory and self-determining in local matters at the bottom, representative and accountable at the top. The nation-state would playa diminished role, and sovereignty would lose some of its political potency. The Green movement adagc "Think globally, act locally" would actually come to describe the conduct of politics. This vision reflects only an ideal, however-one that is not terribly likely to be realized. Freedom, Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote, is a food easy to eat but hard to digest. Still, democracy has always played itself out against the odds. And dcmocracy remains both a form of coherence as binding as McWorld and a secular faith potentially as inspiring as lihad.
R. BARBER is the Whitman Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. Barber's most recent books are Strong Democracy (1984), The Conquest of Politics (1988), and An Aristocracy of
BENJAMIN
Everyone.
From The Atlantic Momhly, March 1992, pp. 53-55, 58-63. Copyright © 1992 by Benjamin R. Barber. Reprinted by permission of the author.
227
Index A administrative review process, 103 "Agenda 2010;' 51, 199 al Qaeda, 193; and communication techniques, 194; and recruiting film, 193 al-Jazeera, 194, 195; and Tony Blair, 195
anti-Americanism: in Cuba, 171; in Europe, 110, 111, 112; in Iraq, 221; three reports on, 112-114; in Russia, 146, 156; and values, 112; and U.S. policies, 112 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (1972),154; and U.S. abandonment, 156 anti-semitism, in Europe, 225 Argentina, 162, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174,202 Ash, Timothy Garton, 110-111,130 Asian values, and tiger economies, 212 autarky, 223
authoritarianism: rebound of: in postSoviet Russia, 202; and sub-Saharan Africa, 202-203
B Baden-Wurtemberg, education in, 52-53 Barroso, Jose Manuel, 133, 134, 135, 137 Belarus, 146, 154, 155,156,158 Berger, Peter, 206 bin Laden, Osama, 193-195; education of, 194; and sophisticated
communication, 194 Blair, Tony, 26, 27,106; response to bin Laden tapes by, 195; and Gordon Brown, 34; and George W. Bush, 34; and EU, 38; and Iraq, 34, 37,63; and Labor Party, 33-35; style of, 32; and term limits, 37; and "third way," 199 Bolivia, 169, 170, 171,172,173, 203,219 Bove,Joe,217 Brazil, modern politics of, 106, 161, 162, 169,170,171,172,173,190,217 Brown, Gordon, 33-35; and Tony Blair, 34; and George W. Bush, 35; EU and, 133, 134 Bush, George W: and Tony Blair, 34; and Gordon Brown, 35; and India, 187
c Calderon, Felipe, 164, 165, 167 Cameron, David, 33, 34, 35, 37 campaign costs, in U.S., 119-120 capitalism, market, and democracy: advancing, 220-221; and process, 219; and scale, 219; tension between, 219
Capitalism, SOCialism, and Democracy (Schumpeter), 205, 206 capitalism: democracy supported by, 205-207; democracy subverted by, 207-208 Castro, 170, 172, 173 Chavez, Hugo, 169, 172, 173, 174,202 Chile, 106, 161, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173,174,198,224 China: and civil liberties, 181-182; and new Company Law, 183; "dual track" system and, 180-181; economic reform in, 180-181; and foreign investment, 182-183; and India, 188, 189,190, 191;andlaborlaw, 182; and legal reform in, 181-183; and
military presence' in Indian Ocean, 188; and revisions to text books, 185-186 Chirac, Jacques: political blunders of, 40;41,44,45 Christian Democrats (CDU)(Germany), 46-47,50,51,55,73 CIS, 146 citizenship, 27, 54,91, 94, 95, 97, 98', 100, 120 civil liberties: basis for assessing, 21-22; in China, 181, 183; and measuring democracy, 15, 16-19, among new EU member, 21; in Muslim world, 83; protection of, 104; and referenda, 108; and U.S. rating, 19; and watchlist of nations, 20 "civil society," 74,75,98,99, 101, 131, 142,162,179,201,226 Clinton, Bill, and Russia, 155 coalitions, compared by type of government, 119 cold war, new, 153-159; and NATO, 155, 156, 157; and U.S. triumphalism, 155 constitutional courts, 103-105 Cuba, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174
cultural determination of economic performance, 214-215
228
culture: and decision-making, 213; defined, 213; and economy, 213; and identification with, 213-214; and knowledge era, 215-216; as social blueprint, 213 Czech Republic, 140
D da Silva, Luiz Inacio Lula, 169, 172 Dahl, Robert, 15, 90-95, 96, 98, 99, 162,206,207,208 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 74, 91, 98 deGaulle, Charles, 106 democracy: and citizenship, 96; and competition, 97; concepts not unique to, 100-101; and contingent consent, 99; defined, 96; and majority rule, 97; and minority rights, 97; and essential procedures, 98-99; and public opinion, 67-69; and representation, 98; and bounded uncertainty, 99
democracy, representative: and citizen participation, 92-93; and inclusive citizenship, 95; and elections, 94; and fostering of capitalism, 209210; and free expression, 94; and independent associations, 94;and independent information, 94; and political institutions, 90-91,92; and subversion of capitalism, 208-209; and suffrage, 91,92 democratic performance, 202, 203;
compared to authoritarian countries, 203; in South America, 202-203; and radicallslamist terrorism, 203-204; and the war on terrorism, 203
democratic societies, differences among, 99-100 Deng Xiaoping, 180, 181,186
E Ecole Nationale d' Administration (ENA), 44-45 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index 2006,16-19; basis of, 21-25 elections, competitiveness, 118 "electoral democracy," defined, 15, 81 electoral system, single member plurality (SMP), 26-27, 36-;38; and Scotland, 27
Index European Union constitution: and democracy, 131-132; and France, 39,41-42; and Great Britain, 30, 38; and future governance, 133-134, 135-138; and interest groups, 75; and military, 130; and NATO, 39,130;
and powers reserved to member states, 129, 130; referendums on, 30, 39,40,42,129,130,131,132,133, 135,136; reforms in, 130-131; and social policy, 130; and Turkey, 111, 126, 132, 133, 137 EU-8,139-141 European "gang of eight;' 110
European Convention on Human Rights, 29 European-American relations, 109-111, 112, 113; and Iraq, 110; and military power, 110; and economies, 110111; and Turkey, 111
globalization, 217, 218, 222-227 Good Friday Agreement, 28 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 155, 156, 159 government, and culture, 215 Great Britain: civil liberties in, 19,26, 27; constitutional change in, 26-32: devolution and, 26, 27, 28; electoral participation in, 36, 37; and electoral system, 26-27, 29-30; and European Convention on Human Rights, 29; and European Union, 30; freedom of information in, 29; and future, 31-32; and House of Lords, 29; and "New Labor" reform agenda, 26, 27; and authority of Parliament, 26; and reforms adopted, 27-28; and referenda, 31, 106; surveillance in, 29; and "West Lothian" question, 28 Greens (Germany), 47; 50, 54, 56, 73
postal savings system, 62-63; and trade practices, 59; and relations with United States, 59-61 Jena, 56-57; and start-ups, 56-57 Jenaplan schools, 57 Jiang Zemin, 186 jihad, and contemporary religious war, 225; attributes of, 225-226; democracy and, 226-227; antipolitics of, 226 "judicial review;' 103-105; and United States, 103, 104
Kagan, Robert, 109-111, 112 Khodorkovsky, Mikhail, 150 Kirchner, Nestor, 172 Koizumi, Junichiro, 61, 62, 63 KremPEC, 151
H F Fox, Vicinte, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 172, 173 France, 39-43; political discontent in, 41; and European Union constitution, 39; and interest groups, 75; and "immigrants," 41; and Iraq war, 42; post-World War II governance models, 40; post-World War II, 39; and referendums, 40; and structural change, 42-43; and Third Republic, 39; unemployment in, 41; vision of Europe of, 41-42 Frankfurt, 49, 54, 55 Free Democrats (Germany), 50, 55 Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA),172 Freedom House, 15, 25, 83, 86, 201 Friedman, Milton, 208, 210
Hu Jintao, 186 Hungary, and politics, 140 Huntington, Samuel, 83, 85, 88, 111, 201,212,213,214,215
"hyperpluralism;' 74
lives, Toomas Hendrik, 140 impeachment, 115, 116, 119 India: and China, 188, 189, 190, 191; and demographic trends, 190; 191; and economic growth, 190; and English language, 191; and military, 187,188-189; and nuclear devices, 187,188,189,190; and U.S. nuclear technology assistance, 189-190; and U.S. relations, 187, 188 Indonesia, and anti-Chinese violence, 219
industria! modernization, three routes
G Germany: and birth rates, 54, 55, 57;
and citizenship criteria, 54-57; governing coalition in, 46-47, 50; education in, 52-53, 57; federal structure of, 46, 51,58; "guest-worker model," 54; immigration and, 54-55; and interest groups, 46, 51,75; and trade unions, 58; and Turks, 54-55 global politics, and cultural lines, 212-213 Globalization Index, 88 globalization of politics: and ecological
imperative, 224; and informationtechnology imperative, 223-224; and market imperative, 222-223; and
resource imperative, 223
to, 206 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), 164,165,166,167,171,172 interest groups, 74-76, 91, 94, 98, 99, 119,209 International Atomic Energy Agency, 189,190 international legal order, new, elements of,174 I ran, and theocracy, 85
Islam, scientific-rationalist aspect of,214
J Japan: and China, 63; economic miracle of, 59; and interest groups, 62, 75,
229
L Labor Party, in Great Britain, 33-35, 36-38; reform agenda, 26-32 Lander,50,51,52,53,54,58 Latin America: and Cuba, 170; origins of leftist politics in, 170-171; shifting to left by, 169-170; and societal flaws, 170 "Law of Failures;' 147 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 40-41 Liberal Democratic Party (Japan), 62 Lindblom, Charles E., 208 "Usbon process;' 130,136
M MaastrichtTreaty, 30, 39, 106, 135 majority rule, 15, 19, 97, 100, 107 market-dominant minority, 219-220 Marx, Karl, 76, 207, 226 Mcworld: anti-politics of, 226; attributes of, 225; and credit and technology, 225; democracy and, 226-227. See also globalization of politics Meiji Restoration of 1868, 217 Merkel, Angela, 43, 46-47, 49, 50; and EU, 133, 133, 134; and Russia, 146
Mexican government: distrust of, 164-166; and immigration policy with United States, 167-168; and NAFTA, 168; poverty program of, 166; and reforms, 166-167 minority government, 13, 28, 139; and Lithuania, 140 minority rights, 76, 97, 119, 121, 122 Mitterrand, Francois, 40 Moore, Barrington, 206
Index Morales, Evo, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 203,219 Muslims: and democracy, 83-89; and opinion of United States, 112-113
Putin, Vladimir, 142, 143, 144, 145, 153; goals of, 149; and 011, 150-151; and property rights, 151-152; and Russia's image, 152; and democracy, 152
III
R
NAFTA, 127, 164, 168 National Front, 40 nationalism, as divisive force, 224-225 NATO: and Europe, 39, 130; and Russia, 147,154,155,156,157,158 Nembe, Nigeria, 175-176, 178-179 New Europe, 146,222 Nigeria, 175-179; election fraud in, 176; election violence in, 175-176; and Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force, 178; oil rustling in, 176, 177; dying political order of, 177-179; and repression by military, 177; oil and, 175-177 Northern Ireland, 28
Reagan, Ronald, 72, 116, 118, 155,210 referendum: and case against, 107-108; in Great Britain, 26, 27, 28; in France, 106, and European Union, 30, 39, 40,42,129,130,131,132,135,136; types of, 106-107; utilization of, 107; and United States, 107-108 Referendums Around the World (Butler and Ranney), 107 regime forms, 96 "Revolution of the Carnations," 96 Rice, Condoleezza, 83,187, 195; on China, 187; and India, 187, 188 Rival Views of Market Society (Hirschman), 205-206 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 93 Russia: and 2007-2008 election cycle, 144; and China, 201; and CIS policy, 146-147; and demodernization and depopulation, 153; and demographic trends, 190; and economic growth, 190; and geopolitical rivalry with U.S., 189; disintegration of essential infrastructures, 153; and NATO, 147,154,155,156,157,158; and of nuclear devices, 153; and oligarchy, 142,149,150; and 011 prices, 144-145; and petrodollars, 154; and patron-client relationship with society, 142; and party politics, 143; as hybrid society, 142-148; and political stability, 153, and fusion of power and business, 143; and Public Chamber, 142; and Putin reforms, 142; and siloviki, 143; and former satellites, 154, 155, 224; and questions of stability, 153; and control; and state
nuclear arms race, in Asia, 191
o Obrador, Adres Manuel Lopez, 169, 173,174; and presidential campaign, 164, 165, 166, 167 "oligarchs," 144,150,151,154,156,158 Olson, Mancur, 74, 75, 76, 209 ORA,28-29
p Parti Communiste Francais (PCF), 40 Party of the Democrative Revolution (PRD),164 Perry, Commodore, 59, 60 Poland, and politics, 139-140
policies
VS.
values in international
opinion, 112-114 political: accountability, 115, 116, 118, 119; freedom, defined, 15, 19, 101,203 political parties: decline of, 70-73,117; evolution of, 91
politics and economics, relationships between, 205-211 "politics of retirement;' 37, 38 "polyarchy;' 92, 95, 96, 98; eight components of, 15 Polytechnique, 44-45 Programme for International Student Assessrnent (PISA), 52-53 proportional representation, 121-122 Proposition 13, 108 Public Chamber, 142 public realm, 96-97
Schumpeter, Joseph, 205, 206, 207, 208,211 Scotiand,26,27,28 Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 147,158 Singh, Manmohan, 187, 188 Sinn Fein, 28 Slovakia, and politic, 140 SMP system. See electoral system, single member plurality. Social Democrats (SPD)(Germany), 46-47,50,51,54,70,73 "social mobilization;' 206-207 Stuttgart, 40, 52, 53, 55 suffrage, 91, 92
Switzerland, referendums in, 72, 107, 108
T Thatcher, Margaret, 33,66,72, 161 '1hird wave" of democracy, 201 Treaty of Rome, 131 Turkey, 17; and democracy, 85; and gender equality, 89; and EU, 111,126,133,137; and United States, 112
u U.S. policy toward Russia, 154, 155; and military encirclement, 154, 155, 156 U.S. government: campaigns for office, 119-120; impeachment and, 115, 116, 119; political accountability and, 117-119; four core problems of, 115; voter turnout and, 120-121; truslin, 118 Ukraine: and EU, 137, 139; and Russia, 145, 146, 147 United States, and citizen values, 113-114; and civil liberties, 19 Uruguay, modern politics of, 161, 169, 171,198
bureaucratic corporation, 143, 142-143; and U.S.-backed "color revolution;' 154; public opinion in, 145, 147; and United States, 147, 154-156; and four threats to hybrid society, 144-145; and U.S. encirclement of, 189; and "Weimar scenario," 154; and World Trade Organization, 155
s "safe seats," 118, 119 Schroeder, Gehrhard, 46, 51, 54, 72, 135, 199
230
v values, Western and Muslim compared, 84-89 Venezuela, 86, 145, 157, 169, 172, 173,202 voter turnout, by type of democracy, 120-121 Vulcans, 187
w war, as emblem of identity, 224, 225 Warren, Earl, 104
Index Welfare system, 210 women: in public office, 77-82; 86--87, 89; and economic development and attitudes toward, 88-89 World Trade Organization, 155, 174 world values survey (University of Michigan), 113
World Values Survey, 84-89; and age, 87; democracy: and culture, 83, 85; and gender equality, 87
constitutional courts, 103; and U.S. policy toward Russia, 154, 155, 158 Yukos, 150, 151
z
y Yeltsin, Boris, 142, 143--144; and
231
zoku giin, 75
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