Pathways to Democracy

The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions

James Frank Hollifield, Calvin C. Jillson, James Frank Hollifield, Calvin C. Jillson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136687044
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A global examination that includes nations in Latin America, Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Africa, Pathways to Democracy investigates the implications of the various paths that nations take to democracy and the political and economic programs needed to stabilize new democracies. From military to authoritarian to communist oligarchies, the essays reveal that democratic transitions were instigated by divisions within the ruling elite, challenges came from groups and interests outside the elite, and poor economic performance followed in its wake. An extensive look at what the United States can do through its foreign policy to promote and invest in democratization is included. An introduction to democratization that is comprehensive and global in scope. Includes comprehensive focus on U.S. foreign policy

Part I

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Introduction

Introduction:
The Democratic Transformations—Lessons and Prospects

IN THE LATE twentieth century, people are freer to govern themselves and to seek their own economic interests than ever before. Communism has collapsed and authoritarian regimes are on the defensive. With the occasional glaring exceptions, the world is at peace—a liberal and democratic peace based not so much on the balance of power as upon the dual dynamic of markets and rights, supported by an interdependent system of liberal states and a variety of international organizations and institutions. Markets have expanded both domestically and internationally, stimulated by the revolution in information technologies and supported by a highly integrated system of international trade and finance. Exchange of goods, services, capital, people, and ideas has increased across the board, and the wealth of nations is more than ever tied to capital and to a complex international division of labor. Yet many worry that economic tribulations in Asia, Russia, and Latin America might weaken or even threaten these nascent democracies.

As we approach the end of the millennium, trends in world politics and economics give us cause for optimism and concern. While the latter half of the twentieth century has surely been characterized by impressive gains for democratic politics and free markets around the world, these gains are insecure. To get beyond broad generalizations about the triumph of markets and democracy (here defined as the ability of people to choose or change their government)¹ and the end of history, we have set two objectives for this book. First we seek to describe and compare the pathways to democracy taken in different regions of the world (Latin America, Asia, East Central Europe, and Africa). Among the questions we ask within this comparative framework are: How did the transitions to democracy begin? What were the necessary preconditions? And to what extent were the transitions influenced by domestic or international forces? Our second objective is to look generally at what can be done to stabilize and consolidate the new democracies, and more specifically at what established democracies and the international community can do actively to promote and invest in democratization.²

Even though recent transitions to democracy have had a profound impact on world politics, this is not the first democratic transformation, and hopefully it will not be the last. In some sense, the recent transitions are but the latest chapter in the history of the Enlightenment; and we can see many of the themes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (rationalism, liberalism, and humanitarianism) repeating themselves. To discover what is different about the most recent democratic transformation, we must look back at earlier episodes of democratization with an eye to understanding how our thinking about political and economic development has changed. We must also compare and explore the pathways to democracy taken by the newly democratic states.

We assume that the latest democratic transformation, like earlier ones, has its origins primarily in politics (changing relations of authority) and economics (changing relations of exchange). The common features of this transformation emerge clearly from the case studies in this volume. They are (1) a renewed emphasis on the rights of individuals, which find their most basic expression in free and fair elections; (2) free markets, which require competition, the rule of law, and a free flow of information; and (3) the resurgence of civil society (a dynamic realm of associations and groups that are autonomous from the state) in various parts of the globe.³ But if we look back in time, we see two failures of modernization in the 1930s and 1960s, which led to the breakdown of democracies. Here we review the first two waves of democratization to glean some lessons from earlier failures of modernization and to gain a better understanding of the current transformation.

Modernization and the First End of History

The end of the nineteenth century saw the completion of a dual revolution in politics and economics. The liberal ideals of popular government and selfregulating markets had taken root in Europe and America, spurred on by the forces of political revolution in America (1776) and France (1789), and by the Industrial Revolution, which began in England and spread rapidly around the globe.⁴ The Jacksonian reforms of the 1820s and 1830s in the United States, together with the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 in England, vastly increased suffrage for men. The triumph of the North in the American Civil War (1865) put an end to slavery in the American South, and with it, a whole social and economic system based on exploitation and human bondage collapsed. In Britain, the power of landed elites and the crown was further reduced by the Parliament Act of 1911, which drastically reduced the power of the House of Lords. The vindication of Captain Dreyfus in Third Republic France (1906) marked an important turning point in the consolidation of liberal and republican principles of government, such as the rule of law, due process, and equal protection. A little over two decades later, women were enfranchised in the United States (1920) and in Britain (1928).

Also by the end of the nineteenth century, capitalism appeared triumphant in Europe, North America, and (thanks to the Meiji reforms that began in 1868) Japan. The Industrial Revolution transformed the old feudal and agricultural societies of Western Europe. Per capita income soared, and factories and towns sprang up virtually overnight. Scientific and technological change unleashed forces of invention and production on a scale unseen before in human history. Prometheus was truly unbound,⁵ and the predictions of Parson Malthus a century earlier (1798) that poverty and starvation were unavoidable—because the means of subsistence could never keep pace with population increases—seemed almost laughable. The Scottish political economist, Adam Smith, who advanced the theory of the self-regulating market and gave us in The Wealth of Nations (1776) the doctrine of laissez-faire, seemed a much better philosopher for la belle époque and the age of capital.

What Samuel Huntington has called the first wave of democracy,⁶ which lasted roughly from the 1820s to 1914, established a close historical correlation between economic and political development. The West European experience spawned the modernization theory of development. In this perspective, economic development will lead to an increasingly complex, that is modern, division of labor, including a separation of the public from the private sphere and of the church from the state, rising levels of income and education, and a new democratic or civic culture with rule of law and the requisite institutions of popular government, especially political parties that compete for votes in fair and open elections.⁷

Just as the Prussian philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, saw the end of history in the modern state, as it was developing in Prussia and the Europe of his day (1770-1831), so the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama has discerned a new end of history in the triumph of liberal and capitalist democracy over communism and authoritarianism at the end of the twentieth century. ⁸ But the “great transformation” of the nineteenth century, which brought with it radical individualism and new forms of alienation, also provoked what Karl Polanyi called a “self-protective reaction” from society, leading to new forms of regulation and collectivism, which would find their fullest expression in nationalism and socialism.⁹ One of the principal lessons of the first experience of modernization is that the progress of democracy and markets is not smooth, and there is always a risk of nationalist and xenophobic reactions when the economy goes bad. Recent events in Russia and Asia remind us that progress is more commonly the ungainly advance of two steps forward, one back, rather than a steady upward ascent.

Nationalism and the First Failure of Modernization

In the early 1900s, a powerful critique of liberalism and modernization had coalesced around the works of Karl Marx, specifically Das Kapital (1867), in which he advanced the theory of dialectical materialism. Like the English liberals—John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill—Marx was heavily influenced by Enlightenment thought. Marx also perceived an end to history. But unlike the liberals, who saw history proceeding in a more-or-less linear fashion, he believed that history advanced dialectically, driven by technological and economic change. Rather than ever-increasing wealth, a peaceful and cooperative civil society, and political democracy, he predicted that economic modernization would lead to class struggle, pitting workers against the owners of capital, leading to greater poverty, conflict, the breakdown of civil society, revolution, and eventually the emergence of a classless, communist society.

The Russian philosopher and revolutionary V. I. Lenin later (1916–1917) extended Marx's argument to include an analysis of the world economy and international system, especially imperialism, which Lenin saw as the highest stage of capitalism because of its ability to project a fundamentally European system of social and economic organization into the four corners of the globe, thereby solving some of the fundamental crises and contradictions of capitalism. Lenin argued that imperialism, by opening new markets and new outlets for productive investment, would provide only a temporary reprieve from revolution. In his view, it was just a matter of time before a strongly organized and disciplined communist party, backed by military force, would lead the working class in its worldwide struggle against capitalism.

But neither Marx nor the English liberals were able to foresee that nationalism would become the most powerful form of politics in the twentieth century. It was nationalism and the Great War (1914–1918), not class struggle, which put an end to the first wave of democratization and opened the way in 1917 for Lenin and the Bolshevik Party to seize power in Russia. World War I, the October Revolution, and the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany set the stage for a protracted struggle between what Barrington Moore called the three routes to modernity: (1) capitalist and parliamentary democracy, or the liberal route, growing out of the “bourgeois revolutions” in England, France, and the United States; (2) the capitalist and fascist route, accompanied by nationalist and militarist “revolutions from above,” orchestrated initially by semifeudal elites in Germany and Japan; and (3) the communist route, having its “main but not exclusive origins among peasants” in Russia and China.¹⁰ In this formulation, Moore amended the Marxist theory of class struggle to take account of twentieth-century realities: he kept the importance of the bourgeoisie as a force for the development of capitalist democracy, but added “lord and peasant” as equally powerful forces in shaping political outcomes, specifically dictatorship and democracy.

Moore's theory seems to account well for what happened in the first half of the twentieth century. In countries with a strong bourgeoisie or middle class (like England and the United States), capitalist democracy survived and flourished, with the obvious exception of the Great Depression; whereas in countries that were late to develop, where traditional elites maintained their grip on power and the middle class was politically and economically weak (like Germany and Japan), the outcome was militaristic nationalism and fascist dictatorship.¹¹ Finally, in predominantly peasant societies (like Russia and China), which experienced a forced march to modernization, politics evolved rapidly and brutally into communist dictatorships.

But Moore's theory of revolution and his typology of regime types have a number of obvious weaknesses that make them less useful for understanding what has happened in the second half of the twentieth century, especially during the second (1950s and 1960s) and third (1970s to 1990s) waves of democratization. Chief among these weaknesses, as Theda Skocpol has noted, are the failure to account for the importance of changing international contexts and the lack of serious attention given to the state (and institutions more generally) as an autonomous force for change.¹² To this list let us add two more: no attention is given to the importance of civil (or political) society as a force for continuity and change, and class-based or structural theories of social change have difficulty explaining the widely different patterns of legitimacy that emerge from specific historical and cultural circumstances in the non- Western world. The theories of Marx, Lenin, and Moore are profoundly Eurocentric.¹³

The Second Wave: Decolonization and the Second Failure of Modernization

The second wave of democratization began in the aftermath of World War II with decolonization and the extension of democratic forms of government into cultures and societies that, in most cases, had weak civil societies and no previous history of popular government or market economics. Nevertheless, it seemed that in 1945 the victors would win the war and the peace, avoiding the mistakes of 1919, having a chance to fulfill Woodrow Wilson's dream of making the world “safe for democracy,” and with fewer illusions about what this would take in terms of self-sacrifice and a willingness to project American power.¹⁴

However, within a few short years after the end of World War II, the international system shifted from a multilateral system based on Great Power Politics—where each of the European powers competed for territory and markets in Africa, Asia, and the Americas—to a bipolar system, based on a nuclear balance of terror, with only two superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union) competing for influence and dominance, each within its own sphere of influence.¹⁵ During the Cold War, all regions of the globe, including Europe, became a field of competition between the superpowers, and many former colonies (would-be democracies) in Africa and Asia literally became battlefields.

In retrospect, the second wave of democratization had a much less auspicious beginning than the first. Democracies established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the benefit of the Enlightenment and two to three centuries of economic and social development. They had time, from a position of strength in the global economy, to find their democratic feet. By contrast, the newly democratizing states of Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s were sucked into the maelstrom of the Cold War and caught in a situation of “dependencia."¹⁶ The economic fate and the legitimacy of many developing states seemed to be in the hands of American or European powers (bankers, multinational corporations, and the like) or their proxies—the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These international institutions had been created after World War II to help stabilize the international political economy by providing loans for economic development (in the case of the World Bank) and liquidity for economic adjustment and balance of payments problems (in the case of the IMF). By the same token, the Soviet Union had its client states in East Central Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These states, especially in Central Europe, would become totally dependent on the USSR for their political and economic survival.

In many developing states, democracy quickly became a sham, as corrupt rulers siphoned wealth—including loans from the World Bank and the IMF—out of their countries and into unnumbered, offshore bank accounts. The economies of developing states deteriorated and collapsed, usually accompanied by balance of payments crises and hyperinflation. More often than not, the military (re)asserted itself as the only semilegitimate force for order in these changing societies.¹⁷ The watchwords of political development and underdevelopment during the 1960s and 1970s were depen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I
• Part II The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions
• Part III The End of Authoritarianism in South and Central America
• Part IV The Successes and Failures of the Developmental State in Asia
• Part V The Challenge of Consolidation in Russia and Eastern Europe
• Part VI The Colonial Legacy and Sponsored Transitions in Africa
• Part VII Conclusion
• About the Contributors
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index