Democracy and Civil Society in the Third World

Politics and New Political Movements

Jeffrey Haynes

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745616476
  9780745616469
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745666969
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides an accessible account of popular political, social and economic movements in the Third World. Focusing on poor and marginalized groups within developing countries, it shows how these groups have been stimulated into action by recent demands for political and economic change.

Haynes describes the growing interest in democratic change in the Third World during the 1980s and 1990s, and argues that demands for democracy, human rights and economic change were a widespread catalyst for the emergence of hundreds of thousands of popular movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Sometimes these took the form of demands for more political representation and greater economic development; others were concerned with environmental protection, the broad position of women and the establishment of Islamic states and societies.

Haynes argues that these emerging popular organizations are best regarded as building blocks of civil society that, in time, will enhance the democratic nature of many political environments in the Third World.

The book will be welcomed by students and researchers in development studies, politics and sociology.

1

Introduction

It appears that many Third World¹ peoples are once again at the beginning of an era of significant political and economic changes. Not since nationalist political movements led demands for independence during the closing period of European colonialism has popular demand for political and economic transformation been so deep or widespread. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s nationalist movements in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean demanded and attained an end to colonial rule and the establishment of independent countries. Most Latin American nations had gone through the same process over a hundred years earlier.

There was considerable optimism at the new countries’ economic and political prospects which seems, with hindsight, in many cases misplaced: many were small, economically underdeveloped and beset by potential or existing ethnic and/or religious schisms. For Huntington (1968), such cultural mistrust between peoples feeling no affinity with each other yet forced to coexist in states with inflexible boundaries normally leads to an incapacity to build strong, durable political structures. What was crucial were skilful governments to establish and then preside over prolonged progress. It was nearly always a prerequisite for colonial handovers of power for Third World nationalist politicians to adopt the trappings and outward forms of Western models of democracy. However, some did not necessarily feel a close affinity with a form of politics that had rarely been encouraged during colonial rule; no doubt for some leaders the acquisition of power itself was by far the most significant reward. Yet the wielding of that power was frequently problematic: ethnic and religious unrest, military insurgencies and coups d’état, combined with the difficulty of achieving often elusive economic development, served to derail many Third World governments’ progress towards political liberation and socioeconomic improvement.

Governments of Third World countries faced two main problems, one social and political, the other economic. First, how to establish and then maintain control over their citizens – that is, how to build nation-states from often disparate congeries of people, thrown together for the most part through the whims of imperial administrators. As already noted, such a goal was often difficult due to societal polarization. Second, it is no doubt easier for many citizens to be satisfied with their governments if they are perceived to be presiding over acceptable levels of economic growth, relatively equitably shared. Yet the fact is that the vast majority of Third World countries emerged at a time when the global economic system was already established. How could they hope to prosper in an economic system not of their making and whose ‘rules’ they could not change? Some – a few – managed it by skill, care and flexibility; many others did not.

Third World governments have not only had to deal with an often hostile, or at least uncertain, international economic environment. They have also had to try to win the trust of their citizens by policies perceived to be in the ‘national interest’. Many governments have found both sets of tasks beyond their capabilities. The result has been that initial loyalty and belief in government’s efficacy has often drained away, replaced by popular cynicism regarding the state’s competence and probity. In short, it is highly probable that many Third World peoples no longer regard their governments as the champion of society’s collective interests at home and abroad, a set of institutions working for the common good. Instead, governments may well be widely perceived as vehicles for the self-interest of tiny elites and their ethnic, religious or class allies.

What many Third World peoples lack – and, in many cases, fiercely desire – is both development² and democracy. Despite a great deal of expressed concern about development and the problems of the rural and urban poor, the position of the lower stratum is in many places steadily worsening (UNDP 1996: 1). ‘Development’ is often more rhetoric than reality and on present indications – with a concentration of economic power and a generally narrow base of the political system – there seems little chance of matters improving in the short term. Despite the spread of elections to Latin America, Africa and Asia in recent times, there is generally little discernible diminution in the power of the urban-based elite and its rural allies.

None the less, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in the Third World – in both rural and urban areas and displaying different degrees of militancy – are attempting to articulate and pursue what they see as their interests through collective effort. While they are involved in a range of activities, economic development and the sociopolitical empowerment³ of subordinate groups – the poor, the young, women, religious and ethnic minorities – are frequent aims. Despite great diversity, what such endeavours have in common is that they are often beyond the control of the state or institutionalized political parties. For the great majority (Islamist groups in the Middle East, discussed in chapter 7, are a notable exception) there is no primary focus on the capture of state power. In short, the growth of ordinary people’s development and empowerment groups – which I will label ‘action’ groups, for reasons to be explained shortly is a popular Third World response to growing poverty and lack of power.

This book is concerned with an examination of what happens when ordinary people in the Third World band together in an attempt to deal with a range of material and existential problems. Are there any parallels in the political history of social and economic change in the West, or earlier, in the Third World? Are such movements and groups simply defensive reactions to rapid change, where the subordinate are especially damaged? Sometimes these movements take on apparently strange forms – the religions of the oppressed – and of course their forms and particulars may be unique, but are there fundamental deeper principles that we can recognize from comparable times elsewhere? What particular variations and features do the action groups demonstrate? Is this how civil society gets to be born? Are the Third World action groups discussed in this book contributing to the slow emergence of the democratic process? These hypotheses, provide an introduction to the chapters and cases which follow. In the book’s conclusion I attempt to provide some answers.

By locating the struggles of subordinate people in the growth of civil societies, the aim is to understand better how the latter grow in significance in the contemporary Third World. Yet we must not overlook the fact that a range of institutionalized groups within civil society – such as trade unions, professional associations, student groups and religious bodies – may have different aspirations and goals from those of subordinate people’s action groups. How action groups and their institutionalized counterparts interact – and with what results – is an important question which is unfortunately beyond the scope of this book.

But the fact that the point is a relevant one analytically is suggested by what is happening in India. India is a country with a huge number of action groups and a vibrant civil society, yet the former may well ‘oppose an exploitative section within the [civil] society, whether conceived of as upper castes … urban-industrial sections or whatever’ (Omvedt 1994: 40). The point is that while action groups’ aims are not always identical with those of some of the institutional organizations, it does not mean that action groups are not contributing to the growth of a richer, denser civil society. At this point five questions need addressing:

1 Why use the term ‘action’ groups?

2 How many action groups are there?

3 Were are they to be found?

4 What is the organizational variety among action groups?

5 Why are the action groups politically significant?

Third World Action Groups

Why use the term ‘action’ groups?

There are a range of terms to refer to non-institutionalized socioeconomic and political bodies in the Third World, including grassroots, popular and local groups, associations and organizations. Having pondered over what to call the bodies examined in this book, I have settled on action group.⁴ I am aware that this term is not without its problems and limitations, but it seems to me that these are fewer than with other possible forms of nomenclature. I rejected ‘popular’ groups because the adjective has a socioeconomic class connotation which I do not wish to imply. However, this is not to suggest that action groups are somehow ‘classless’. In fact, they usually attract those lacking in power, especially the poor, women, young people, and ethnic and religious minorities.

Some action groups have links with foreign nongovernmental organizations – and outlooks which reflect this. Thus, the adjectives ‘local’ or ‘grassroots’, suggesting an orientation exclusively concerned with narrow, parochial issues, is often inappropriate. A process of elimination leads me to use the term ‘action’ group for the following reasons. First, the groups I focus on are characterized by a desire to achieve goals through their own activities and deeds – that is, by their own actions and activities – sometimes with the help of domestic or foreign allies. Second, members see themselves as part of a group because they are related in some palpable way – by poverty, gender, religious beliefs, ethnicity or whatever. Third, they often consciously link their personal struggles to the creation of a more democratic and just society – that is, they regard themselves, perhaps implicitly, as building blocks of civil society and democratic polities. Yet the term ‘action’ group cannot hope to convey a precise meaning because not all groups so labelled pursue identical goals involving the same kinds of people. On the contrary, they are in some respects very different, albeit concerned with how to increase development and/or empowerment for their members. The action groups examined in the chapters of this book are always ‘channels for promoting economic and social development, [or] contributing to democratization of the economy, society and polity’ (Uphoff 1993: 618).

There is a growing literature devoted to such groups – analysing them, prescribing what they should do to achieve their goals – and to many case studies (Camilleri and Falk 1992; Stiefel and Wolfe 1994). It is not possible here to provide a comprehensive insight into and review of this literature; the works cited in the bibliography nevertheless offer those who want them entry points.

To sum up: the argument is that many ordinary Third World peoples are mobilizing in pursuit of a range of developmental, social and political goals. The common background is generally grim economic performances and demands for democratic space, providing their raison d’être. Third World action groups, I believe, are at the cutting edge of a democratic revolution whose central themes are liberty, equality and autonomy. This is a major claim, one requiring justification – which I hope to provide in the chapters of the book – that action groups are at the forefront of efforts to democratize Third World societies.

How many action groups are there?

Many have noted that there is an ‘organizational explosion’ in many parts of the Third World, ‘fueled … by escalating demands from below’ (Fisher 1993: 29). It is widely believed that the collective size of action groups’ memberships has ‘proliferated rapidly in recent years’ (Ergas 1986: 323). Yet, their precise number is impossible to determine – no one has counted them. None the less, Durning (1989: 55) has plausibly calculated that there are hundreds of thousands of extant action groups at any one time, with an average collective membership of over 100 million people.

Where are the action groups?

Whereas, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, action groups are common in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, two groups of countries have relatively few: the Asian communist states and the Middle Eastern Muslim nations. There are very few in China, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam because these are polities where the state has achieved a high degree of dominance over its citizens; as a result, social impetus for collective organization – outside of official institutional channels – is weak. Second, there are politically important Islamist groups in the Muslim countries of the Middle East, but few action groups of other kinds.⁵ Why should this be? Apart from the fact that, like the Asian communist countries, strong states are common in the Middle East, Fisher argues that Quranic ‘culture emphasizes the duty of the individual to assist Islamic charities, not the importance of organizing for social change’ (1993: 25). Yet probably the most zealous advocates of sociopolitical change in the Middle East and North Africa are the Islamist organizations, especially Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in Israel’s Occupied Territories. The point is that such groups emerge because, where democracy is forbidden and civil society extremely embryonic, many Muslims – especially the young and alienated – consider that an Islamic state is the only way to achieve a satisfactory social and political arrangement.

Organizational variety among the action groups

Action groups proliferate by the thousand in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Not all are new, but since the early 1970s traditional development organizations have been augmented by new action groups stimulated by various factors, including declining macroeconomic conditions, environmental degradation, a lack of democracy or, especially in the case of women, status as second-class citizens.

There has also been international encouragement for action group formation. The concept of ‘popular participation’ entered the vocabulary of many development experts, endorsed in various United Nations declarations and resolutions, during the 1980s. This dovetailed with demands, enunciated by critics of the state on both the left and the right, for wide-ranging reforms of the state’s activities. Leftist critics called for the empowerment of societal groups and organizations, and a reduction of the state’s power (A. Scott 1990). Right-wingers, riding on the crest of the wave which produced the Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl governments, claimed that there was an objective need to move to what they called an ‘enabling’ state, that is, one which focused on maximum political and administrative decentralization, privatization of state-owned assets and the freeing of the ‘market’ from excessive bureaucratic meddling. In short, what many on the left and the right exhibited was a hostility to big, remote government, to overbureaucratization, and to the apparent inability of ordinary people to influence politics except – momentarily – by voting in periodic national elections once every four or five years (Held 1987, 1993; Beck 1994; Crook and Manor 1995).

It is not apparent to what extent such arguments reflected what was already happening or whether they helped to stimulate demands. What seems plausible is that both international and domestic factors encouraged action group formation in the Third World. A rich body of experience of subordinate people’s mobilization has evolved in pursuit of three broad aims: alleviating poverty, achieving greater social justice, preserving the environment. Increasing poverty and inequality, landlessness and unemployment, coupled with a growing centralization of power, are a feature of many Third World countries – hence the demands for more democracy. There is a wide array of organizational forms among action groups. Whereas some are in embryonic, experimental stages, others have been around for one or two decades, or even longer, allowing them to develop into groups of significant proportions with clear objectives, programmes and organizational structures. Such mobilization may be large, medium or small in scale. Some of the resulting activities amount to movements involving considerable numbers of people over a wide geographical area. At the other end of the spectrum are grassroots experiments confined to a particular locality or a few villages. At this point in their development it would be premature to highlight sharp distinctions or give precise definitions: the position is rather fluid. In sum, there is a great deal of variety: some action groups are autonomous, community-level organizations; some operate at national level with links to government for technical and financial support; others interact with like-minded transnational bodies elsewhere in the world. In many cases, support from international sources promotes local organization (Fisher 1993: 29). Often strong organizational initiatives are based on partnerships between local people and technically trained professionals. All that can be stated with certainty is that, in the late 1990s, Third World action groups are mobilizing people for change; where it will lead to is not yet clear. I will return to this issue in the book’s conclusion.

Why are the action groups politically significant?

One of the main reasons for action groups’ formation is a defensive reaction to increasingly intolerable conditions. Responses involve a varied mix of activities, scales of operation, world-views and operational methodologies. But all the groups I examine in the chapters of this book have in common attempts to empower the poor and vulnerable in some way(s). Some start with protests against the existing social, economic or political system, others start with small development activities. In short, what the action groups examined in this book share is that

1 They are nearly always defensive in orientation;

2 The great majority are concerned with strategies for the long-term defence of sources of livelihood or enhancing the sociopolitical position of subordinate groups;

3 Most are in the short term unable to attain their goals, often because powerful interest groups prevent them.

But why is this important for politics in the Third World? Part of the reason for the contemporary growth of action groups is simply that for many ordinary people in the Third World material conditions are getting worse and governments appear to be able to do little to improve the situation. Under such circumstances it makes sense for ordinary people to organize themselves to try to improve things. The growing polarization of income distribution in many Third World societies is reflected in an array of statistics: 1 per cent of the world’s people controls 60 per cent of its resources; 80 per cent of human beings struggle for 15 per cent of its resources (Vidal 1996). While a handful of Third World countries has seen a ‘dramatic surge in economic growth’ since 1980, dozens more have been hard hit by economic decline, reducing the incomes of over 1.5 billion people (UNDP 1996: 1). Half the world’s rural poor – more than a billion people, heavily concentrated in the Third World – have insufficient land to provide for themselves (Harrison 1993: 317). Then there is increasing environmental degradation and destruction, forcing the poorest to compete for declining resources. Put together, these developments amount to the emergence of a new global dispossessed class. This hints at the political importance of some action groups: they challenge the status quo, sometimes forcefully, consistently and with real determination.

Demands for democracy have also encouraged action group formation. Gurr (1993: 184) argues that mobilization for protest was higher in the Third World in the 1980s than in earlier decades. Why should this be? Part of the answer may be that the political climate produced by demands for democracy helps provide the ‘space’ for action groups openly to organize, mobilize and demand change. Yet, as I shall argue in chapter 4, the inauguration of what I call ‘formal’ democracies – involving regular elections yet with power remaining in more or less the same hands – helps to stimulate the formation of action groups, especially among groups (for example, indigenous peoples in Latin America or women nearly everywhere) who perceive that they do not benefit from such a form of democracy.

While some subordinate groups may feel they do not gain much from formal democracy, it is ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Action Groups in Regional Focus
• 3. Macroeconomic Decline and Action Groups
• 4. Democracy and Indigenous Peoples
• 5. Environmental Protection
• 6. Women and Empowerment
• 7. Islamist Action Groups
• 8. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Page