Political Development

Damien Kingsbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134143672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book fills a growing gap in the literature on international development by addressing the debates about good governance and institution-building within the context of political development.

Political Development returns the key issues of human rights and democratization to the centre of the development debate and offers the reader an alternative to the conventional approach to, and definition of, the idea of 'development'. Discussing political development in its broadest context, it includes chapters on democracy, institution-building, the state, state failure, nation, human rights and political violence.

Damien Kingsbury, a leading expert on development and Southeast Asia, argues that 'good governance', in its common usage, is too narrowly defined and that good governance is not just about ensuring the integrity of a state's financial arrangements, but that it goes to the core social and political issues of transparency and accountability, implying a range of social structures defined as 'institutions'.

Providing new insights into political development, this comprehensive text can be used on advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses in international development, comparative politics, political theory and international relations.

1 An outline of political development

In any discussion about politics or the organization of society, rather than launching into preferred styles and methods, or policies and ideologies, it is perhaps more useful to first ask what is the desired outcome of these criteria. That is, what type of social organization is regarded as normatively preferable and how does that imply a particular orientation towards political progress? This then raises two further questions, these being what constitutes the “good” and, assuming that ends should not predominate to the exclusion of “means,” the processes and systems in which such “good” is manifested.

Regarding what constitutes “good,” there will, of course, be almost as many answers to such a question as there are people to answer it. Despite these many answers, there is also likely to be coherence around sets of values that embody common conceptions of the common good.¹ In this, “good,” or positive, can range in focus from particular personal benefit to the widest social benefit. The points at which the personal and the social converge or separate underpin most of what is understood about politics and the various political systems and processes by which we understand it.

If a case can be made for some basic principles concerning the widest possible articulation of such a “good” – and this assumes that there are available some universals predicated upon the common human condition – this then raises the necessity of identifying systems and processes that are consistent with, and conducive towards such a good. Such an approach does not necessarily imply a utilitarian answer to this type of question, even if aspects of utilitarianism help define a possible framework. What it does do, though, is take the idea of a first principle – the definition of a good – and seeks to manifest it through an appropriate process or processes, the existence of which constitute “good” in the act of becoming.

Within the context of this book, the principal of good can be identified as “freedom,” both freedom to fulfill human potential and freedom from limitations upon that potential. This general idea contains within it a broad, if not fixed, series of claims. Perhaps the most important constituent claim within the idea of freedom is that of “equality,” not in terms of any claim to absolute sameness, but in terms of the circumstances and opportunities for the realization of human potential within social contexts. That is, individuals might have more or less potential, but the basic conditions in which such individuals exist must make circumstances available to them which allow them to explore that potential, or not unduly limit them, concomitant without limiting the circumstances of others. Equality in this sense, then, means political and legal equality, in which the opportunity for a citizen to express political views is no more or less privileged than that of any other citizen, and that the rights of citizens are equally allowed and protected under a consistent and just rule of law.

That there is a tension within this idea which refers to the material aspects of equality, and the question of the relationship between such material circumstances and political equality. Within discussion about equality, there has been a claim – and in some cases a reality – that egalitarian processes imply limitations upon the freedom of some in order to support the freedom of others. This applies to pre-existing imbalances in power relations, but also to economic arrangements, in which economic advantage is viewed as providing a social and political advantage. The assumption, then, is that claims to equality necessarily imply some sort of limiting or social flattening process. However, this is a narrowly defined and simplistic understanding of equality. One view of the freedom-equality debate revolves around what has been characterized as the French-Anglo-American divide. In this, the French position is held to be that: “There can be no individual freedom short of some sort of deep seated equality that goes well beyond equality of rights to a kind of equality of opportunity and resources” (Spitz in Weinstock and Nadeau 2004: 54). The proposed dichotomy presents the Anglo-American view as being whatever is private is legitimate, and whatever is public requires apology and justification, However, Spitz recognizes that while this dichotomy exists, and is variously presented as existing on the part of particular interests, he claims that it is a fundamentally false dichotomy. “Mastering private domination through law,” he says, “and trying to regulate and compensate unjustified inequalities through public institutions in order to create a fair equality of opportunity is not specifically French, since it is at the very heart of liberal political philosophy” (Spitz in Weinstock and Nadeau 2004: 59). That is, where private power is not consented to, if democratic forms are to prevail, such non-consensual power must be equitably regulated. Public institutions must have a primary concern for the widest possible interest, in order to ensure that least advantaged sections of society are able to understand that such institutions do not just facilitate their domination (Spitz in Weinstock and Nadeau 2004: 57). That is, “when politics is nothing more than the art of negotiating compromises [of interest], it is no longer the rule of right but the rule of might” (Spitz in Weinstock and Nadeau 2004: 58). It is at this point that there is an intersection between what is “right” and what is “good,” which in turn provides a foundation for moral philosophy and consequent political ethics.

In this respect, in the fullness of its application, any equality which acts as a limitation upon freedom – which imposes a relationship that implies an imbalance of power – only describes a distortion of equality. This abstraction of a particular application of an equalizing principle can imply a loss of actual freedom through imposing the same requirements upon all. This “flattening” approach, however, does not address the substantive claims of equality, which apply in the first instance as the opposite quality of narrow power, or the delegitimization of unfair advantage. In its positive and more complete sense, equality is the foundation upon which freedom is constructed, and it is the negotiated tension between equality and freedom that provides the political space in which the debate over what constitutes political development takes place.

The first principles of “good” are, then, freedom based on equality, which can most suitably occur through a broadly participatory, representative and accountable process. The question then becomes how can this best be realized, and what conditions must prevail in order for this to happen. This then raises the further question of how this good relates to less favorable preexisting circumstances and what are the criteria needed to progress from one to the other.

This approach contains within it an explicit assumption and an implicit assumption. Explicitly, there is an assumption that many, perhaps most, people live in political circumstances that are less than ideal and that there is a common aspiration to live under a better set of social and material circumstances. That is, there is not just a possibility but a desire for “progress” and that progress exists, or can exist, not just as an idea but as a social reality (the corollary of this is that actively pushing for such progress is, by definition, “progressive”). It is important to note at this point that “progress” does not have a particular or permanently fixed definition and certainly cannot be solely allied with the modernist economic understanding of progress as industrialization, or perhaps even post-industrial economic development. Similarly, it does not imply a single deterministic outcome for social affairs. It means advancement in the state of human affairs, most important among which is how people organize their relations with each other and how they manifest and concentrate or share power.

Implicitly, there is an assumption that there is a method by which such progress can be achieved, and that this identifies a path or a confluence of paths, developing from the particular (or a number of particulars) to a normative universal. It is important here to note that discussion of “universals” does not imply a flattening or deadening quality or the suppression of difference (the imposition of power to achieve a minimalist sameness). Rather, it implies commonality, the capacity for shared experience and the potential for shared understanding of that experience. This might not apply in every circumstance, but it can apply in many circumstances, and, perhaps those that are most basic and hence important to the conditions of human life. Moreover, recognition of key universals does not logically imply a totality, much less an institutionalized totalizing capacity (totalitarianism). Indeed, taking into account certain specific conditions that might apply from place to place (although not allowing for an imposed cultural relativism),² it should normatively imply the opposite of totalitarianism, that shared universals are the principle counterpoint to totalitarianism. This occurs through a commonly shared understanding creating the social space necessary for the genuine and non-restrictive expression of the social particular, or the greatest possible freedom. This, then, is the process of “political development.”

Approaches to political development

As a term, “political development” was explicitly used in the 1960s as a means of describing the process of what might be called “political modernization” by then recently decolonized and other developing countries. In the period following decolonization, the primary concern of political analysts was to see the development of stable political communities that would more or less follow the path set by developed (and often formerly colonizing) countries. The purpose of this was generally twofold: to allow the stable material development and participation of these newer members of the international community, and, particularly from a Western perspective, to ensure that development occurred along politically acceptable (that is, non-communist) lines. Having asserted a claim to independence and often backed this with militant political activity, many newer states found there was a prevailing concern over “too much politics” and not enough capacity. From a perspective that was more favorably inclined towards the communist model, or aspects of it such as central economic planning, the view from developing countries was that these new political societies needed to establish structures in which to allow such planning and, it was hoped, consequent material development to take place. Viewed from an historical-functionalist perspective, Jaguaribe noted at the time that political development constituted “a shift from the former ethnocentric and static position, which tended to measure the development of any political system by its resemblance to a fixed standard – that of Western democracy, particularly in its current British or American versions. Political development is now regarded as the process of adjustment of a political system, at any historical stage of the overall development, to the functions required by this system as they arise from the economic, cultural, social, and political structural conditions” ( Jaguaribe 1968: 53, nb2).

If one could characterize the above approaches, they reflected “institutionalism” on one hand and “political economy” on the other. What both had in common was a primary focus on the state as the main instrument to manifest social political will, and the principle framework within to construct newly emergent “nations.” As largely legatees of the colonial experience, most postcolonial states employed the territorial boundaries set for them by their colonial masters, which in turn rarely took into consideration pre-existing ethnic or national boundaries. Rivers, by way of illustration, often became markers of territorial divisions, whereas in most pre-colonial societies they were the main means of transport within those societies. The idea of “nation,” therefore, did not always come naturally or easily to post-colonial states. It had also not come easily for the original formally demarcated states of Europe that were recognized under the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, although perhaps more so for those states that emerged as expressions of collective identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The concern, then, in the post-colonial period was around establishing a reliable basis for consistent social organization. Added to a natural, or naturalized, tendency for those who can achieve power to accrue it to themselves, particularly in societies that retained significant vestiges of pre-colonial political conceptualization, this led to the proliferation of strong state institutions vis-à-vis frequently weak political societies. One manifestation of this was a low level of political participation and consequently little democratization or accountability. As a further consequence, there were often high levels of corruption, incompetence and the employment of means of state repression against dissent from these establishing orders. In some cases, the strength of a particular state institution, such as the army, was at the cost of other, more socially focused institutions. This led to institutionalized violence against the state’s own citizens, and the quasi-permanent establishment of a predatory class. In this, the function of the citizens of the state was to provide the source of enrichment or aggrandizement for an elite of corrupt politicians, military officers and businessmen (or robber barons), all of which could be and often were and too often still are interchangeable.

Not surprisingly, this period produced little development of any type (although with a few notable exceptions), and saw a number of states actually go backwards in economic terms, with an overall widening of the gap between rich and poor states. In searching for an explanation(s) for this common “failure” of development, the World Bank and other observers and analysts began to focus on what they termed “governance,” which was initially intended to imply the application and observance of rules of financial conduct, but which has come to be broadened to include a wide range of state institutional responsibilities.

To ensure that good governance is implemented, and that states and their institutions comply with at least the requirements for relative honesty and some degree of efficiency, they must be held accountable. The “international community,” in this case meaning the IMF, World Bank and WTO, among other multilateral agencies, has some capacity to impose degrees of discipline and accountability on otherwise recalcitrant states and their governments. But real accountability, from those who are most intimately acquainted with its lack, derives from the citizens of such states. In order for citizens to exercise a requirement for accountability, they must be able to participate in the political process, to support programs that are in their interests (presumably including “good governance”) and to oppose those that are not. This in turn implies that citizens should have a guaranteed capacity to hold their government accountable, which means that they have the “right” to do so, and the specific supporting rights that buttress such a general political right.

This then, is the point at which the social “politics” comes back into the equation with institutions, or where agency or the interest and capacity of individuals is balanced against the state, the state’s institutions, and the collective or communal interests they claim to represent as legitimizing their political existence. Political development, in this sense, is both about redressing the imbalance between the state institutions and collective or communitarian interest and the constituent members of the state, as citizens, and their more direct concerns, interests and allegiances as individuals.

The balancing act implied in this must raise the further question of to whose benefit is this process about. In this respect, development generally and political development in particular should have some socially beneficial function, and that they should contribute towards the betterment of the lives of the people at which they are aimed. In Sen’s view, the goal of development, including political development, should be to enhance “freedom,” including freedoms “from” and freedoms “to.” If this is the goal and purpose of development, the issue of constraints on such “freedoms” arises. It has been said, in relation to human rights, that they cannot be guaranteed by their abrogation. That is, one cannot deny human rights or freedoms in the present on the pretext of allowing them at some later time.³ Assuming the validity of this claim, this means that the maximum possible allowance must be made for guarantees which secure freedoms “from” and freedoms “to.” This in turn puts political power back into the hands of the people on whose behalf it is supposed to be exercised – the political constituents, or citizens – to ensure the accountability of their political representatives that they are working as honestly and efficiently as possible in order to protect and enhance their collective and individual interests and rights.

In this sense, then, the gap in the debate about political development between the 1960s and the early twenty-first century indicates a gulf between two perspectives on political development; one institutional and collective or communitarian, the other rights-based and socially plural. As with “rights and responsibilities,” it is neither practical nor desirable to suggest that one could or should exist without being balanced by the other. To date, however, the balance has been in favor of the former rather than the latter. The tendency is that there was a brief respite from a communitarian focus, the economic challenges of “efficiency” and the security challenges of “terrorism,” state failure and a range of decreasingly important but none the less manipulated “fears.” These have worked to shift the balance further towards the communitarian position – the power of which, as human agency would have it, rests in the hands of a few. In all societies, however, this is both materially counterproductive and, perhaps more importantly, constrains those freedoms to which the full expression of the human condition aspires.

There is also another counter-point in this understanding of political development, which comes about as a consequence of the collapse of Sovietstyle communism and economic central planning in most places that it existed. On the one hand, the collapse of the Soviet system ushered in an era of creation of new independent states, in the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia and in the division of Czechoslovakia. This liberalization of the global political climate also spurred a number of local groups to assert claims to autonomy or independence, though generally, to date, with much less success, East Timor and Eritrea being the primary exceptions. On the other hand, in moving away from one-party political systems, the assumption was that where there was increasingly political competition this comprised democracy, as broadly understood in previously democratic countries. This begged the meaning of the term “democracy,” and the various degrees and types of democracy which might be available. But it did not stop a type of triumphalism from developing, particularly in the US, which perceived itself and was largely perceived by others, to be the “winner” of the cold war.

Ideologues such as Frances Fukuyama (1992) argued that the triumph of a particular interpretation of political liberalism, and what he (and others) claimed was its necessary economic corollary of economic neo-liberalism, constituted the “end of history.” In this, Fukuyama borrowed from Hegel the idea that there was an ideal end point in political development and it had been reached, at least in some places, and that this demonstrated a political finality. This “end of history” was predicated upon the legitimacy of state power was not lost on the capacity for increasingly unilateral US decision making, especially in relation to foreign policy. As the world’s sole superpower, the US perceived that it had both a responsibility and a right to act as the “global policeman.” Fukuyama’s ideology dove-tailed with that of Huntington (1993, 1996) who argued that the world was divided along lines demarcated by “civilizations,” in this way providing a pretext for US intervention in particular states characterized by cultural dissimilarity (particularly those characterized by Islam).

There are elements of Fukuyama’s claim that are supportable within a political development debate, notably his favor for what are distinctly American understandings of political liberalism. Where this book finds itself taking a different position to such an otherwise unilateral view of liberalism (and its claim of a necessary corollary with economic neo-liberalism) is on the claim that there is, or can be, an “end of history” (and an attendant “last man”). Since Fukuyama’s triumphal political self-congratulation, the paradigm to which he was referring – the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war – has markedly shifted. Since then, the world in general and the US in particular have discovered, or invented, a new global enemy: militant Islamism. The Western strategic environment which in the early 1990s seemed to find security was, within ten years, no longer secure. State budgets changed, priorities shifted, and new, often draconian laws that undermined conventional notions of the rule of law were passed within liberal democracies. Indeed, there was a common view that “the world changed” as a consequence of events on 11 September 2001, when two hijacked aircraft crashed into and destroyed the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and a third crashed into the Pentagon in Washington.

Both normatively and in historical fact, politics and the political evolution of humanity does not and cannot have an end point. Just as Hegel was in error to assume that the introduction of the Napoleonic Code in Prussia indicated an “end of history” for political development, so too any claim made in the present cannot by definition have the benefit of some future hindsight. It may be that we (or Fukuyama, or Hegel) cannot conceive of a future different that’s much less better than our own, if we happen to be so lucky as to live in what we regard as an ideal world. The majority of the world’s people are clearly not so fortunate, and this is a consequence not of their failure to achieve “our” ideal but because of a structural inability to do so. “We” have in large part built our own ideal on their misery, despite modernist and profoundly environmentally ignorant claims that economic growth can continue endlessly and will solve all problems.

In so far as we can imagine the future, as Marx tried to do, we may envisage a utopian end point. The problems here, though, are that one person’s utopia may be another person’s hell, that utopias are, by definition, not as accessible as the imagination that conceived them, and that in the struggle to bring forward this utopia (why delay if it is known to be out there waiting?) the costs of its attainment may be vastly greater than any putative rewards it may be able to offer. That is, the means of achieving utopia can, and to date has, fundamentally compromised its end.

Another view, then, and that which is presented here, is that there is no end to human politics, history or evolution, nor short of global annihilation can there be one. What is important is not that societies should aspire to, or fight for a particular end of political development, or jealously guard and maintain such an end to political development should they believe they have achieved it. What is important is that the focus be placed on the process of political development, and that the process itself be understood as defining the type of future into which it leads. This is not to suggest a fixation with the present, but a fulsome regard for the lessons of the past and a continuous and critical reappraisal of the present in order to facilitate its progress.

Political development and post-colonialism

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