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Lisa Anderson (editor)
1999
12. Fortuitous Byproducts
Democracy... was sought as a means to some other end or it came as a fortuitous by-product of the struggle.
—Dankwart A. Rustow 1
At a moment when the institutions of competitive, electoral democracy appeared irrelevant in the developing world, Dankwart A. Rustow, in near splendid isolation, laid out what gives rise to and sustains the democratic process. His genetic theory provided for historical contingencies, accidents, and inadvertent decisions as the precursors to democratic transitions. He saw no necessary or sufficient socioeconomic or cultural preconditions of democracy. He stressed political stalemate and the acceptance of second-best solutions by bitterly opposed sides. Once underway, the transition required sustaining mechanisms quite different from what launched it. He was quite aware of the possibility of reversals, as his Turkish case exemplified. He posed as a background condition the need for national identity, with which I disagree and which I think weakened his argument. Nevertheless, his article stands as a prescient and well-specified rejection of the proposition of entrenched autocrats and ethnocentric social scientists: “This country ain’t ready for democracy.”
Rustow staked out a well-defined position in what might be called the contingency school in explaining the initiation and institutionalization of democracy. The opposing, structuralist school emphasizes socioeconomic and occasionally cultural preconditions for democracy. These schools are not warring camps, nor are their positions mutually exclusive. One emphasizes a combination of social structural variables—broad-based middle classes, private entrepreneurial groups, widespread literacy, and sustaining civic values—while the other stresses a kind of compromise between contending groups that have repeatedly failed to impose their will upon one another. Rustow first defined the latter position, and I propose to treat it here.
I will examine five paths toward democratic transition: jump-starting the process in systems with no cultural predispositions and socioeconomic prerequisites for or historical experiences with democracy; extrication from stalemated winner-take-all struggles; bargaining and accountability between taxpayers and governments; bargaining for legal space in authoritarian systems; and inducing transitions by powerful third parties. In each, the transition is the byproduct of some other process. It is therefore unintended and fortuitous. It must be stressed that not every path will automatically lead to a transition or that, once started, the transition will continue.
Rustow’s enquiry did not concern how democracies came into existence as much as what conditions might sustain them. He made the crucial point that what brings them about may have little to do with what sustains or undoes them. Rustow distanced himself from the socioeconomic functionalism of Seymour Martin Lipset and Philips Cutright and offered instead a “genetic” explanation that separates cause from correlate. Both structure and the highly contingent nature of political competition must be interwoven.
Many of the current theories about democracy seem to imply that to promote democracy you must first foster democrats—perhaps by preachment, propaganda, education, or perhaps as an automatic byproduct of growing prosperity. Instead we should allow for the possibility that circumstances may force, trick, lure, or cajole nondemocrats into democratic behavior and that their beliefs may adjust in due course by some process of rationalization or adaptation. 2
If Rustow is right, democratic processes may be initiated in many social and political contexts. It does not follow that all contexts are equally hospitable to democratic transitions or that the values cherished by the protagonists are irrelevant. However, most analyses that stress prerequisites are potentially misleading.
Rustow excluded from his analysis democracies “where a major impetus came from abroad,” such as occupied Germany or Japan. He posited a sine qua non, what he calls a “background condition,” that “the vast majority of citizens in a democracy-to-be must have no doubt or mental reservations as to which political community they belong to.” 3 Neither the exclusionary principle nor the background condition, it seems to me, is theoretically grounded. In fact, if we disregard them, as I will argue we should, the overall logic of Rustow’s argument is strengthened.
Applying his own rules of thumb, Rustow came up with twenty-three democracies in 1969, thirteen of them in Europe. 4 Among the less developed countries he cited Chile, Ceylon, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Lebanon, the Philippines, Turkey, Uruguay, and Venezuela. 5 This latter subset for the most part strayed from the democratic path within a few years of the appearance of his article. Few scholars at the time saw any indications of imminent democratization.
My own research has focused primarily on the Middle East. Since the mid 1950s there have been only four democracies in the region. Turkey, one of the cases examined in Rustow’s article, began a transition in 1950, stumbled back into military authoritarianism in 1960, then relaunched its transition in 1965. But in the year Rustow’s article appeared, the military intervened again. Lebanon was a second democracy. Its civil war in 1958 brought General Chehab to power, and it seemed that Lebanon might pursue a Nasserist path. It did not; beginning in 1975, it entered into sixteen years of civil war. The Sudan, in sociostructural terms the least likely venue for a democratic transition, oscillated between elected civilian governments and military rule until, in 1969, Ja’afar Nimeiri ushered in a military regime that lasted until 1985. Finally, Israel established a democracy that functioned mainly for its Jewish citizens.
None of these experiments was emulated by its neighbors. For the Arab regimes Turkey, as the successor state to the old Ottoman masters, could not provide a palatable model. (In fact, some of the Turkish officers who engineered the takeover of 1960, like Alparslan Türkeş, accepted the label of Nasserist.) The archenemy, Israel, could not safely be emulated. And Lebanon was always regarded by its own citizens, by its national charter, and by its neighbors as sui generis. The Sudanese experiment was peripheral to the Arab heartland and basically ignored.
Even prowestern monarchs disowned their own tepid liberal experiments. The Jordanian and Kuwaiti parliaments were periodically dissolved in the late 1950s and 1960s; the Moroccan parliament was suspended in 1965; and the Libyan monarchy, which had undertaken no liberalization, was overthrown by praetorians in 1969. In the mid 1970s the shah of Iran substituted a one-party regime for a wholly contrived two-party system that had been in place since 1957.
Democracy, or its more frequent absence, did not preoccupy analysts at the time. Rather, authoritarianism, even in its most benign form of “guided democracy” (a term first coined by General Ayub Khan of Pakistan), was taken as given. The questions that were addressed concerned the origins, nature, and goals of various authoritarian experiments. The compelling explanations of what was going on were to be found in the somewhat admiring theses of Manfred Halpern on the new middle class and its military vanguard and in the ambivalent if not tortured commentaries of Marxists such as Samir Amin (Hassad Riad) and Anouar Abdel-Malek. Like Rustow, they too were concerned with transitions, but of a different variety, to revolutionary or guided democracy and socialist modernization. 6 A more conservative observer, Samuel P. Huntington, stated flatly that “the problem is not to hold elections but to create organizations.” 7 Thus, Rustow’s analysis flew in the face of a scholarly consensus that coincided with the authoritarian agendas of the very leaders under scrutiny.
Rustow stressed that democracy primarily concerns procedure rather than substance. 8 The same analysts referred to above, and many others as well, stood this proposition on its head or at least on its side. They contended that democracy can be achieved only if the masses are lifted out of poverty, the bureaucracy made rational, the exploiters driven from politics and the economy, and all territories liberated. They thoroughly subordinated procedure to substantive goals. This consensus led many of us to belittle the role of codified political procedures and institutions, because constitutions, charters, and plebiscitary elections were such patent charades. More important, we tended to view the protagonists of conflict within Middle Eastern societies (ethnic groups, sects, class actors) as obstacles to the substantive goals of populist authoritarian regimes (whether or not we approved of them), not as potential catalysts of democratic transitions.
The Middle East did not appear unique in these respects. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru fell to military authoritarians by the mid 1970s. Marcos put the Philippines under emergency rule; Pakistan moved from the civilian authoritarianism of Zulfikar Bhutto to the military authoritarianism of Zia al-Haq; newly liberated Bangladesh followed the same path; and even India, the bastion against all odds of democratic procedure, succumbed to the Emergency of 1975–77. The Turkish military ended the decade by once again deposing an elected, civilian government.
The accentuation of authoritarianism in the 1970s, especially in countries that had experienced considerable growth, demanded an explanation. With some overlap in their approaches, Guillermo O’Donnell in his work on bureaucratic authoritarianism and Cardoso and Faletto in their work on dependency shaped the research of the 1970s. 9 Once again, Rustow’s article was regarded at best as an interesting curiosity.
Twenty years later I took up some of the same issues. I began to study how the post-1983 civilian, elected governments of Turkey could sustain formal democracy and implement painful structural adjustment reforms. 10 Then I addressed what had become known as Middle Eastern “exceptionalism.” Many countries initiated democratic transitions by the end of the 1980s. 11 But the Middle East hardly changed. Turkey reestablished democratic civilian rule in 1983; Lebanon did so after the Taif Accords of 1990 under the watchful eye of authoritarian Syria; the Sudan briefly experienced elected civilian government between 1986 and 1989; and Israel maintained its democratic procedures without interruption. Jordan held elections in 1989; Algeria held and then aborted them in 1991; and the two Yemens groped toward unification and national elections that led to civil war and the reestablishment of military rule. Kuwait, after Operation Desert Storm, restored its parliament, responsible to the 40,000 males of proven Kuwaiti ancestry who constitute the electorate. No democratic wave swept the twenty-three states in the region.
Against this backdrop I tried to discern how democracy might be nurtured in an unfriendly environment. The theses I advanced are in large measure inspired by Rustow’s article and Adam Przeworski’s book, Democracy and the Market. 12 I focused on a region that had never known democracy, had descended from empire, nurtures militarism, and is steeped in the “authoritarian” values of Islam. How could it ever welcome democratic transitions? The answer is “easily,” not just for the reasons advanced by Rustow, but also for several others.
Rustow posited, once his background condition of national identity was satisfied, a three-phased transition, lasting probably a generation or more. The “preparatory” phase arises from a long inconclusive struggle among nondemocratic factions (often, as in Sweden, class actors). Stalemate leads to acceptance of second-best solutions within a grudging “democratic” compromise. In the “decision” phase nondemocratic leaders decide to continue to play the game. Finally, in the “habituation” phase citizens themselves begin to absorb and respect the rules of the second best solution. Rustow’s model makes no reference to levels of development, middle classes, or culture as necessary factors in the transition.
In his study of political and economic liberalization in Latin America and eastern Europe, Adam Przeworski followed an analogous line of reasoning. He treated democracy as a series of negotiated equilibria. 13 He said virtually nothing about socioeconomic preconditions and enabling political cultures. Rather, Przeworski stresses the rational pursuit of strategic advantage by diverse interests. “When is it rational for the conflicting interests voluntarily to constrain their future ability to exploit political advantage by devolving some of their power to institutions?” 14
Przeworski outlines two crucial phases in transitions with, in some instances, important disjunctures between them. In the “extrication” phase forces opposed to the authoritarian status quo ally, and in the “constitution” phase they seek those institutional equilibria that will keep everyone voluntarily in the game. In the latter phase the initial alliance tends to break down as different interests among the winners maneuver for strategic advantage. As in Rustow’s analysis, there is no linear progression from extrication to constitution; indeed, there is the strong possibility that the transition will be aborted. In sum, successful transitions occur when bargained equilibria lead to the establishment of institutional arrangements from which no significant actors have any incentive to defect. This process is highly contingent.
Jump-Starting
Can civic-democratic values be nurtured in the bosom of autocracy? Rustow states that “consensus on fundamentals is an implausible precondition” of democracy. 15 Walter Murphy captured the dilemma eloquently.
To survive and prosper, constitutional democracy needs, perhaps more than any other kind of political system, leaders who have both patience and wisdom, virtues that have never been in great supply. Constitutional democracy also needs a political culture that simultaneously encourages citizens to respect the rights of fellow citizens even as they push their own interests and hold their representatives accountable for advancing those interests-a culture whose force cannot diminish when private citizens become public officials. That such a political culture will pre-exist constitutional democracy is unlikely, making it necessary for the polity to pull itself up by its own boot straps by helping to create the very milieu in which it can flourish. Turning that paradox into a fait accompli is likely to require generations. 16
One must entertain the possibility that a civic culture can be nurtured in the bosom of autocracy. Was that not the English pattern, which Rustow rejects because the transition was too prolonged? Democratic values, one might hypothesize, are most intensely and explicitly held where they are most denied. Conversely, they may be taken for granted or even debased where the democratic game is sustained purely in terms of the differential rewards it bestows on citizens. 17
Outside of Europe, democratic experiments are recent, somewhat at odds with local cultures, frequently elite-driven, and increasingly reactive to external threats and inducements. Without judging the nature or the outcome of its transition, I want to outline the process of jump-starting in Uganda since 1986.
Uganda has not enjoyed a competitive democracy since it achieved independence. It has exhibited a number of features that might qualify it for a Rustowian stalemate: marked class differences, especially in the control of rural resources, a strong north-south cleavage, a deep Catholic-Protestant split, and rivalries among the remnants of older ethnolingual kingdoms. 18 All of these cleavages manifest themselves in a predominantly rural society with high rates of adult illiteracy.
The north lies above the Kyoga Nile that cuts Uganda virtually in two. Uganda’s two most notorious dictators, Milton Obote and Idi Amin, were both northerners. The bone they could never quite swallow was the old southern kingdom of the Baganda. It could be subjugated, but it would not disappear. Neither the plebiscitary authoritarianism of Obote nor the erratic military dictatorship of Amin could produce a winner-takes-all solution.
In his second coming, Obote was carried to power by the Tanzanian armed forces which overthrew Amin. In 1980 he held widely boycotted elections. A young radical southerner, Yoweri Museveni, participated, lost in his own home district, then “went to bush” to combat Obote’s regime. Most of the guerrilla warfare took place in the Luwero triangle, a Baganda region proximate to Kampala. The Baganda supported Museveni against their archenemy, Obote, and their region was laid waste in the course of the fighting.
In 1986 Museveni triumphed and took power. It is said that if he had any external model in mind for a new political system, it was Libya’s jamahirria (loosely, “republic of the masses”). But Museveni reads rapports de force accurately and well. Tanzania, where he had lived and studied for years, was already in its post-Nyerere phase of structural adjustment and timid political liberalization. Its brand of single-party African socialism was no longer viable. The Ugandan economy was likewise in shambles, and only access to western capital could revive it. Museveni undid Idi Amin’s most popular move, the 1972 expulsion of the “Asians” (Indians). They were allowed to return to Uganda and reclaim their properties and businesses.
Museveni’s moves toward political liberalization were much more cautious. External donors, especially the United States, and the experiences of other African states brought pressure upon him to democratize. He faced the dilemma of transforming his National Resistance Army into a well-organized political movement. The only rivals to what became the National Resistance Movement (NRM) were the older established parties, the United Peoples Congress of Obote (now in exile in Zambia) and the Democrat Party.
Museveni needed time to build his organization. A new constitution was drafted and vetted from late 1988 to 1995. His opponents claimed that the lengthy process was rigged, that the drafting was carefully manipulated by the NRM, and that the constitutional commission that took the draft out to the hustings consisted mainly of people loyal to the NRM. 19 A constituent assembly was elected in March 1994 and approved and adopted the draft constitution, which came into effect on September 22, 1995. Presidential and parliamentary elections followed in spring 1996.
The constitution stipulated in its controversial articles 269–271 that for four years after the election of the parliament the country would be governed by a “movement” regime and that candidates in elections could not run under party banners. Indeed, the elections to the constituent assembly were held under the same rule. Nevertheless, 68 of the 284 delegates had thinly veiled party affiliations. The debate over Articles 269–71 effectively divided the country into “movementists” and “multipartyists.” The U.S. ambassador and others warned that, once a movementist legislature and presidency came into place, the democratic game would be over. Museveni won an overwhelming victory in the May 1996 presidential elections. In contrast to Ambassador Southwick’s forebodings, Museveni has gone on record that multipartyism will descend rapidly into tribalism and parties must wait until there is a large middle class. 20
So far the story is fairly simple: an unwilling democrat buys time and fends off foreign donors in order to set up a “single-movement” regime. However, Museveni made an important concession and an inadvertent error.
The concession was made to the Baganda, many of whom thought that their support of the NRA during the guerrilla war would earn them federal status in post-Obote Uganda. Museveni and the NRM have rejected formal federalism but recognized the old Buganda kingdom, and a new king has been enthroned. The kingdoms of Bunyoro, Toro, and Ankole followed suit. 21 Although the so-called “federos” were left thirsting for more, Museveni conceded a new legal space for and quasi-legitimation of an important set of political actors. Political parties, which the constitution recognizes with severe strictures, enjoy a similar position.
The error lay in the long vetting process of the constitution. The constitutional commission, through subgroups of its members, toured the country to educate citizens on the merits of the draft text. Sessions were intended to be and initially were top-down, didactic affairs in which silent audiences were marched through the arcana of constitutional law. They were organized by the local national resistance committees which were viewed as extensions of the NRM. This lengthy process allowed Museveni to consolidate the NRM, and the subgroups revisited many locales. The top-down preachings turned into real town meetings. Exchange of views, often heated, replaced quiescence. The ostensible purpose of the exercise was actually achieved: average citizens learned a lot about constitutional issues.
Some Ugandans feel that in the space of four years political culture, at least in some regions and for some strata, was fundamentally transformed. Deference toward the representatives of political power gave way to skepticism and criticism. In the constituent assembly elections of March 1994 half the candidates of the National Resistance Committees were defeated, with two-thirds losing in the north. 22 Citizens became concerned with understanding their rights.
Thus, a country without the socioeconomic, class, or cultural prerequisites of democracy may be an example of jump-starting a transition. Its leadership does not consist of enlightened democrats; it has little social capital; and a significant part of the bourgeoisie is not even regarded as fully Ugandan. Nevertheless, strategic maneuvering by incumbents and challengers has yielded Rustowian byproducts.
Stalemate
Unresolved social conflict and stalemate is crucial to Rustow’s genetic model of transition. However, he does little to operationalize stalemate. We must, at a minimum, identify three variables: the nature of the protagonists (classes, interest groups, ethnies, and the military) and the issues, the duration of the stalemate (the fatigue factor), and the intensity of the struggle. If the stalemate is violent and prolonged, an authoritarian solution might be more likely than a democratic transition. Museveni is right when he suggests that struggles over interests are more susceptible to peaceful resolution than those over religious values or blood. Yet South Africa has begun a democratic transition after decades of bloody, unresolved struggle involving race, religion, and class. Neither of the main actors, the ANC and De Klerk’s National Party, entered into their initial bargain steeped in democratic habits.
In the Middle East two well-defined stalemate situations, one partially resolved and the other unresolved, exist in Lebanon and Algeria. Lebanon’s informal national pact of 1946 led to the establishment of a parliamentary democracy founded on a paper-thin balance between Christians and Muslims. Christians were to be represented in a ratio of 6:5 over Muslims (on the basis of the proportions identified in the 1932 census). There were further de facto representational subdivisions within the two major confessions. This pact was rooted in distrust, not accommodation; the two main protagonists held guns at each other’s temples.
Nonetheless, a bumpy habituation phase began. But before more benign interconfessional feelings could take root, Christian president Camille Chamoun sought to prolong his mandate unconstitutionally, thereby provoking a civil war. Christian general Fouad Chehab took over the presidency, with the support of the Eisenhower administration. A decade of strong economic growth followed and papered over the underlying cracks in the political and social edifice. 23
The trigger was pulled in 1975, after an abrupt influx of Palestinian refugees and armed PLO fighters from Jordan, most of whom were Muslim, at the beginning of the decade. They were embraced by the local Sunni Muslim community, Palestinians who had been in the country since 1948, and local Arab nationalists and communists. Maronite Christians felt their survival was at stake and fired the first rounds in what was to become a sixteen-year civil war. It is estimated that over 150,000 of the country’s three million inhabitants were killed.
In 1990 a truce and new pact were brokered by Saudi Arabia, Syria, and representatives of the Arab League in Taif, Saudi Arabia. The only changes made in the 1946 pact evened the Muslim/Christian ratio to 50:50 and reduced the powers of the presidency while strengthening those of the confessionally apportioned cabinet. All significant political decisions had to be vetted with the Syrians, who maintained their military occupation of the eastern Beka’a valley. They will surely not leave before Israel closes down its security zone in southern Lebanon, and maybe not even then. In 1995 the Syrian dictator, Hafiz al-’Assad, decided to renew the mandate of Christian president Elias Hrawi in violation of the constitution. The assembly dutifully voted the necessary constitutional change.
It would be heroically optimistic to claim that Lebanon is on the brink of the decision phase, no less reentering the habituation phase. But it is not impossible, despite the fact that Rustow’s background condition has always been missing. Until recently Lebanon has had no firm sense of national identity. The national pact of 1946 explicitly recognized this fact and outlined a confessional truce in which Christians would foreswear help from their traditional Christian allies in Europe, mainly France, if the Muslims would not seek to integrate Lebanon into the greater Arab, Muslim nation. If Lebanese national identity is stronger now than it was in 1946, it is because of the combined occupations of Syria and Israel. In particular, many Lebanese prior to the occupation had seen themselves as Syrian.
In Algeria the situation is similar to Poland prior to the collapse of the Communist regime, when Solidarity was pitted against General Jaruzelski. In Algeria the stalemated protagonists are the Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS) and President Lamine Zeroual and the remnants of the Front for National Liberation (FLN), Algeria’s single legal party prior to 1989.
Algeria’s aborted democratic transition began in 1989, before a stalemate but after years of economic austerity and the bloody riots of October 1988. The president, Chedli Benjedid, was a product of the revolutionary war against France (1954–62) and a stalwart of the FLN who had been in office since 1979. He decided to liberalize the single-party system out of expediency. 24 The riots laid bare the regime’s lack of legitimacy, but economic austerity could not be avoided. A political opening offered Benjedid a way to dissociate himself from the FLN and present himself as president of all the people. No one predicted that within a year a legalized Islamic party, the FIS, would sweep municipal and regional elections and stand poised in January 1992 to take control of the national legislative assembly. Before the second round of the parliamentary elections could be held, the Algerian military intervened, called off the elections, deposed Benjedid, dissolved the FIS, and clapped its leadership in jail.
Since 1991 a near civil war has raged in Algeria between the FIS and successive presidents put up by the military. Twenty-five to fifty thousand may have died in the last five years. In fall 1995 President Zeroual, who had initially been appointed by the military junta, ran for president against four others, including a moderate Islamic leader. The FIS and the even more militant Armed Islamic Group (GIA) called for a boycott of the elections. Nevertheless, an estimated 70 percent of the electorate voted, uncoerced, and gave a major mandate to Zeroual.
Once again, we find an arena bereft of leaders or movements with any democratic credentials. The major challenger is driven by religious zealotry, while incumbents stubbornly cling to power because to give it up appears too dangerous. Can a democratic transition be cobbled out of this stalemate? The elections of 1995 give cause for hope. They appear to have registered the fatigue of the electorate with the violence but, more significantly, a substantial distancing from the FIS. The leadership of the FIS has received the message and, in good second best fashion, is seeking a compromise with Zeroual. It is hard to imagine any compromise that would not entail new legislative elections in which the FIS would be allowed to participate so long as it pledged to honor the constitution.
As a final note, it can be argued that the military intervention of 1992 sent a message, as yet not revoked, that the FIS would not be allowed to win an election outright. Incumbents have delivered similar messages to Islamic challengers in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, the Palestinian entity, and, more ambiguously, Turkey. 25
In terms of Przeworski’s argument, Muslim organizations should not voluntarily adhere to the rules of the game if they have no prospect of benefiting from them. However, this factor should not preclude Muslim organizations from playing the democratic game. Participation may earn them some shreds of power, a local power base in specific districts, and some access to patronage. Nonparticipation will be read, rightly or wrongly, as hostility to the regime and to the legal political process and will trigger official repression and violence. Moreover, much like the “Eurocommunists” after 1956, playing the game may appear the lesser of evils. In the absence of revolution, proletarian or Islamic, terminal marginalization may be the only alternative to playing the game.
Stalemate remains empirically and theoretically ill-defined. Violent stalemates without accommodative or democratic outcomes have been common, and peaceful, proto-democratic resolution may be extremely fragile, as the civil war between north and south Yemen, after democratic elections, illustrates. Dahl posited that “polyarchy” cannot accommodate two or more relatively large factions who view the victory of the other as a fundamental threat to “highly ranked values” and cited the U.S. civil war as the result of such a situation. 26 It would seem impossible for the current stalemate in Rwanda to yield a democratic outcome. After the near-genocide of the Tutsi and Hutu fears of a commensurate Tutsi reprisal, a regime based on one person, one vote would yield an overwhelming Hutu victory (85 percent of the population is Hutu and would vote as Hutus) with which no Tutsi could abide.
Extraction Contracts and Democratic Public Goods
The consequences of economic mismanagement and changes in the international economy fall as heavily on nondemocrats as on democrats. 27 Since the early 1980s the majority of less developed countries have had to implement structural adjustment programs and reorganize their public finances. To contain or reduce public deficits, expenditures have been slashed and taxes raised. Consumer and producer subsidies have been cut. Some countries unwilling to cut public outlays, such as Turkey, have resorted to the inflation tax to transfer resources from citizens to the government.
The manner in which and the level at which governments tax their citizenries significantly affect the kind and level of governmental accountability. We may hypothesize that institutional forms of accountability and representation emerge from tacit or explicit bargaining between the government and various interests it seeks to tax. This hypothesis is venerable but very difficult to confirm parsimoniously. 28 The hypothesized process may also be initiated in a nondemocratic setting in which the protagonists are oblivious to the democratic implications of their bargaining.
Taxed populations can hold the taxing authority to account in many ways. Only a few involve explicit or formal political action. Goran Hyden documented how Tanzanian peasants, gouged by government marketing boards that sought to maximize production of commercial and export crops, fled into subsistence agriculture or smuggling. Over time, as commercial production declined along with export earnings, the Tanzanian government had to make price concessions (that is, reverse the agricultural terms of trade) to lure the peasantry back into market crops. 29 This sort of accountability involved no formal political expression of peasant grievances or change in the single-party political system.
In highly regulated, quasi-planned economies with administered prices many economic actors exited the formal economy and entered the informal sector. There frustrated entrepreneurs could make real profits, civil servants could supplement their low wages, and goods could be found at a price without queuing. As more and more economic activity escaped the direct controls of the government, less and less national product was subject to taxation. Repression of informal activities seldom worked, so with time governments began to deregulate and legalize activities that had heretofore been proscribed or strangled. Like Tanzanian peasants, those in the informal sector also sent a message to the government that brought about policy change. But it did not, at least initially, bring about institutional or political change.
A third example is capital flight. Individual, somewhat anonymous economic actors decide that their money is not safe in their home country. They may, of course, simply follow the lead of nonnational, institutional investors. The stock of flight capital held by Middle Easterners outside the Middle East may be on the order of $600 billion. 30 It will take policy and institutional reform to lure it back. Capital flight involves no formal political expression of collective interest and no institutionalized bargaining. 31 If greater accountability ensues, it comes as a by-produced public good.
The level of accountability should be lowest where taxes are light and indirect. Several observers of Middle Eastern politics, myself included, have partially attributed the viability of authoritarianism to the region’s access to unusually high levels of external rents. 32 The major stream of rents has been generated by petroleum exports, which have in turn generated rents in the form of remittances to labor–exporting countries in the region. Throughout the Cold War a number of states received substantial strategic rents from one or the other of the great powers or from militarily vulnerable oil exporters in the region. Rents allowed governments to lessen the tax burden on their citizens and to maintain extensive welfare and subsidy programs to neutralize economic discontent. Formal mechanisms of accountability atrophied or, as in Iraq, disappeared altogether.
Political analysts, therefore, welcomed the era of adjustment and austerity because, it was hoped, authoritarian leaders would finally have to forge organic, even if adversarial, relations with the citizenry. Cost-of-living riots in fact prompted some political liberalization in the Sudan (1985–86), Jordan (1989), and Algeria (1988). Several governments had to experiment with new taxes to increase public revenues and reduce deficits. Ironically, as political scientists looked hopefully for signs of greater reliance on direct taxes on incomes and profits—because the bite is felt individually or by firms—economists backed by the donors advocated increased indirect taxes, especially the VAT, because their bite is felt less directly and is therefore easier to collect. 33 The economists’ logic of maximizing public revenues ran and runs counter to the political scientists’ logic of increasing accountability.
Perhaps the distinction between direct and indirect taxes is not all that crucial. Tanzanian peasants were acutely aware of the indirect tax on their produce brought about by the administered pricing system, and it is likely that consumers and wage earners will not be oblivious to consumption or inflation taxes. They have certainly reacted strongly to reductions in consumer subsidies. However, the prevailing economic orthodoxy makes it virtually certain that the economic transition will be accompanied by worsening income distribution and inequality. Income will no longer be redistributed through taxation. 34 Poor administration and powerful upper-income groups will defeat any attempts at redistributive taxation; the costs of collection will probably outweigh the yield. 35 Greater inequality could preclude democratic transition. As Zehra Arat argues, a democratic system cannot be maintained without affirming socioeconomic rights and reducing inequality. 36
Business groups and investors may have a particularly important role to play in the preparatory phase. Business interests are not innately democratic. However, in many less developed countries they were denied political legitimacy and frequently smothered by an expanding state sector. Out of self-interest they sought ways to relax state controls. In the era of austerity and curtailed public expenditures they have become crucial to the investment programs that alone can bring about growth. They have acquired new bargaining power vis-à-vis the government, and, as with the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) in Mexico, have become independent political actors as well. 37
In most instances they bargain to protect or advance their business activities. In the past bargaining often involved individual deal-cutting and opportunities for rent-seeking negotiated with the public authorities. Those habits will die hard for both parties; once business interests have won some concessions they may seek to freeze the process and collect their rents. Moreover, Przeworski and Limongi assert that business has no rational, interest-based preference for democracy. 38 The autocrat’s commitment to protect private property is no less credible than the democrat’s. 39
The Turkish Businessmen’s and Industrialists’ Association (Tüsiad) is paradigmatic. It has existed since 1971 but has been politically docile. During Turkey’s major structural crisis of 1979, it issued a stinging critique of the government’s economic policies, which was published in the major newspapers. It also supported the military intervention of 1980. It preferred an end to the killing and insecurity even if Turkey’s democracy had to be suspended. But it set a precedent of corporately criticizing the government and established the practice of regular appearances by government officials before Tüsiad’s membership to explain policy and seek advice.
A kind of public good—the obligation of the government to deal directly with significant economic interests in society—has thus been created. Further, it will be difficult to deny similar rights to other interests except on a purely arbitrary basis. In many ways this move sounds like what Schmitter called “social corporatism,” which some have seen as the backbone of some of Europe’s most successful democracies. 40
Taxation and representation have been linked in western democratic theory since its inception. The linkages, or lines of causality, are murky. Many cultures and civilizations have exhibited high levels of extraction and high levels of autocracy for centuries, if not millennia. The most common response of the taxed has been to find some form of exit from the system. The twentieth century affords similar opportunities, but mainly for the privileged. These interests may be the inadvertent vanguard of broader citizen engagement with revenue-hungry governments.
Legal Space
As part of the preparatory phase, or even of a prepreparatory phase, various groups in society must carve out for themselves legally recognized space, that is, they must become juridical entities. In Europe these spaces were first occupied by the church, municipalities, universities, estates, and eventually the press. Autocrats conceded and legalized the space.
In less developed countries the groups seeking legal recognition are likely to be more heterogeneous and, to the liberal mind, more troubling. In this context I challenge Rustow’s background condition. An intuitive sense of belonging to a specific community may help initiate the preparatory phase, but the converse need not and should not hold. For example, Lebanon’s fragile democracy has been rooted in and dependent on confused identities and national disunity. This argument can be extended to Ethiopia.
The forging of an Ethiopian nation has in many ways been similar to the historical process of “nation-building” in France, Spain, Iran, and many other countries. A dominant culture and language, embedded in a religious establishment and residing in a geographic core, was imposed, sometimes violently, on a heterogeneous periphery, whose elites over time bought into the hegemonic project. 41 In the last 130 years, the Amhara of the central Ethiopian highlands slowly built modern, geographic Ethiopia and through the church and the imperial administration spread its language and political control throughout a land the size of France and Spain combined. The history of recent conquest and partial cultural assimilation is well-known. 42 The process is anything but complete and since 1991 has been brought to a halt.
Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia in 1995–96, led the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front to power in 1991, in alliance with the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front and the Oromo Liberation Front. Meles had been a member of the radical Ethiopian Students’ Movement that initially supported the military, Marxist dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Meriam in 1974. A common slogan of both the students and Mengistu and his junta (the Derg) was self-determination for the peoples of Ethiopia. The Derg and the students soon parted company, and the military cracked down brutally on their erstwhile allies. The regime thenceforward dealt ruthlessly, albeit ineffectively, with ethnic challenges. The two main theaters were Eritrea and Tigray. Eventually the radical insurrectionary fronts in these two areas, with the help of neighboring Sudan, tilted the military balance against Mengistu. 43 In 1991 the TPLF and its allies seized Addis Ababa.
From 1991 until the adoption of a new constitution in 1995 the new regime, known as the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front, declared that the right of self-determination must be enshrined in the constitution and that the constitution must establish Ethiopia as a federal state based on ethnic regions. In 1993 the “province” of Eritrea opted for independence by referendum. By acquiescing in Eritrean independence the EPRDF moved beyond mere slogans. The 1995 constitution lays out the procedures if a region wants to secede.
Underlying this bold experiment is the belief that Ethiopia will hold together only if its parts have the legal right to leave. To the dismay of Amhara elites, the new regime has declared 130 years of nation-building a form of cultural imperialism that has failed and cannot be revived in its former hegemonic framework. In May 1995 Ethiopia held legislative elections under international supervision, based on the new ethnolingual regions of the country. A number of parties boycotted the elections, especially the Oromo Liberation Front and the All Amhara Peoples Organization. Turnout was nonetheless high, and the voting peaceful. However, international observers refrained from describing the process as free and fair.
For many Ethiopians the process now underway is not democratization but rather the consolidation of a new Tigrean autocracy. This assessment is not unreasonable, given Meles’s background as radical student and guerrilla fighter. However, the EPRDF has set up a legal order that could make autocracy extremely difficult. The federal system grants certain taxing powers and the right to undertake certain economic activities to the regions without approval from the center. There is not yet much wealth to tax in Ethiopia, but we should not prejudge the future.
It therefore behooves “transitologists” to pay close attention to those forces that challenge national unity and identity and thereby extract legal recognition from the central authorities. India’s federal system and democracy have followed this pattern since 1947, and the existence of “fissiparous tendencies” has made the democratic process imperative (except, unfortunately, in Kashmir). Between 1972 and 1983 the southern Sudan employed legal regional autonomy to keep its black, non-Arab, non-Muslim populations within the union. In 1970–75 the Ba’athi dictatorship in Iraq granted regional autonomy to the northern Kurdish region. Creative stalemates may thus result from the absence of a sense of national identity. The prime actors in this case will almost always be defined by sect, language, or blood, rather than by class or interest.
Induced Transitions
Rustow explicitly excluded from his universe of democracies those countries made democratic by military occupiers (Japan and Germany) and those made democratic by immigrants from preexisting democracies (the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Israel). We are now in an era in which powerful democracies seek to leverage democracy out of economically weak societies. I suspect that Rustow in 1969–70 would have been uncomfortable with this phenomenon (he generally dismissed “impulses from abroad”) but it existed even then. Franco’s Spain had been excluded from membership in both NATO and the Common Market because of its political system.
The OECD countries and some multilateral organizations have practiced several forms of conditionality in the last decade or so. Positive inducements offer accession to trading blocks or most favored nation status if countries improve their human rights record or expand the political rights of their citizens. Negative pressure threatens to suspend assistance or apply sanctions if a country aborts a democratic process or systematically abuses human rights. Bratton and van de Walle found such negative inducements in sub-Saharan Africa to be negatively correlated with political liberalization. 44
Positive inducements may aid and abet, if not initiate, a transition. In Cambodia the United Nations tried to act as godfather to a democratic transition at the cost of $2.6 billion. The experiment has been anything but successful. 45 It remains to be seen if U.N. inducements will work in Angola.
Perhaps the best example of the power of positive, external inducements can be found in Turkey, a country that figured prominently in Rustow’s analysis. Since the 1960s Turkey has been a candidate for membership in the European Union. It thus opened itself up to close scrutiny by its potential European partners. The Turkish military was aware that its repeated interventions into civilian politics did not enhance Turkey’s application. After civilian government was restored in 1983, European countries pressured Turkey to revise its constitution to allow broader freedoms of political organization (the constitution forbade the formation of parties on the basis of religion, language, or region), to introduce stricter legal guarantees of human rights, and to rectify the denial of Kurdish rights.
The pressures have been inexorable. Turkish leaders have been on the defensive for years. Sixteen articles of the constitution have been amended by the grand national assembly, and to gain accession to an EU customs union article 8 of the antiterror law was likewise amended.
This kind of arm-twisting could lead to a backlash in Turkey, perhaps orchestrated by the Islamic Welfare party. Turkey could abandon its quest for full membership in the EU, reverse its democratic experiment, and turn to the Arab and Central Asian countries for trading partners. However, Turkey may have already entered Rustow’s habituation phase. Moreover, its trade with Europe is on the order of $20 billion and cannot be easily reoriented. The EU’s inducements will keep the debate over democratic institutions, tolerated forms of representation, and minority rights very much alive and center stage.
Conclusion
Social structural, historical, and cultural factors may all be important in initiating and continuing democratic transitions. However, as Rustow first argued, they are not necessary and therefore not sufficient. Whatever the environment and preexisting conditions, nondemocratic actors, with nowhere else to turn, may seek negotiated, second-best solutions to contingent dilemmas that thrust them unwittingly on the path to democratic practice.
Endnotes
Note 1: Dankwart A. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics, 2 (April 1970), 351. Back.
Note 2: Ibid., pp. 344–45. Back.
Note 4: Rustow excluded Japan and Germany for reasons already mentioned (but included Italy), as well as the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel because their democracies came in the baggage of immigrants. Great Britain was excluded because Rustow was interested in relatively rapid transitions. Back.
Note 5: He excluded Greece, which fell under military dictatorship in 1967, and Mexico, because it had not enjoyed three or more consecutive, popular, contested elections. Presumably, Peru was excluded because of the 1969 military takeover, but Rustow does not mention it. Back.
Note 6: Anouar Abdel-Malek, Egypt: Military Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1968); Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Hassan Riad, L’Egypte Nasserienne (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964). Back.
Note 7: Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 7. Back.
Note 9: Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Guillermo O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1973). In fairness to O’Donnell, by the late 1970s he was already writing about the internal contradictions in the bureaucratic-authoritarian state. See Guillermo O’Donnell, “Tensions in the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian State and the Question of Democracy,” in David Collier, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 285–318. Back.
Note 10: John Waterbury, “Export-Led Growth and the Center-Right Coalition in Turkey,” Comparative Politics 24 (January 1992), pp. 127–46. Back.
Note 11: Michael Bratton and Nicholas van de Walle, Will Africa Democratize? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), record that in 1989 there were forty-two unambiguously authoritarian regimes in sub-Saharan Africa; by 1992 forty had taken measures to restore political rights. Only Liberia and the Sudan failed to do so. Granting political rights is not tantamount to democratization, but there was far more liberalization in sub-Saharan Africa than in the Middle East. Back.
Note 12: Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); John Waterbury, “Democracy without Democrats? The Potential for Political Liberalization in the Middle East,” in Ghassan Salame, ed., Democracy without Democrats? (London: I. B. Taurus, 1994), pp. 23–47. Back.
Note 13: Przeworski, p. 73. Also, Adam Przeworski, “Democracy as a Contingent Outcome of Conflicts,” in Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 69. Back.
Note 14: Ibid., pp. 37–38. Back.
Note 15: Philippe Schmitter, “Transitology and Consolidology: Proto-Sciences of Democratization?,” unpublished ms., Stanford University, September 1994; Rustow, p. 362. Back.
Note 16: Walter Murphy, “Civil Law, Common Law, and Constitutional Democracy,” Louisiana Law Review 91 (1991), pp. 100–14, as cited in Stephen Marks, “The New Cambodian Constitution: From Civil War to a Fragile Democracy,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 26 (1994), p. 109. Back.
Note 17: Or as Dahl pithily put it: “In a rough sense, the essence of competitive politics is bribery of the electorate by politicians.” Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 68. Back.
Note 18: See Phares Mutibwa, Uganda since Independence (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1992); Mahmoud Mamdani, Critical Reflections on the NRM (Kampala: Monitor Publications, 1995). Back.
Note 19: Akiiki Mujaju, “Towards an NRM Constitution in Uganda,” Political Science Seminar, Maketere University, Kampala, November 7, 1995. Back.
Note 20: Ibid., p. 31; and John Balzar, “Profile of Yoweri Museveni,” Los Angeles Times, June 27, 1995, p. 5. Unlike earlier populist cum corporatist leaders, Museveni is willing to live with conflict. In the Los Angeles Times he is quoted as follows: “We need to reach the point where there is competition between interests, not identities. Today you have Buganda against Acholi. That is very unhealthy. But once you have employees struggling against employers, ah! There is no way an employer will want to massacre all his employees. There will be struggle, yes, but neither side wants to get rid of the other.” Back.
Note 21: Apolo Nsibambi, “The Restoration of Traditional Rulers,” in Holger B. Hansen and Michael Twaddle, eds., From Chaos to Order: The Politics of Constitution-Making in Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1995?), pp. 11–60. Back.
Note 22: Judy Geist, “Political Significance of the Constituent Assembly Elections,” in Hansen and Twaddle, eds., pp. 90, 113, notes the high level of registration and voter turnout. Back.
Note 23: See Michael Hudson, Lebanon: Precarious Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). Back.
Note 24: See Severine Labat, Les islamistes algériens (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 98. Back.
Note 25: At the time of writing, Turkey’s Islamic Welfare (Refah) Party formed a coalition government with the True Path Party of Tansu Ciller. It is not clear whether this coalition can survive, but the Welfare Party cannot, and will not be allowed by the Turkish military, to govern alone. Back.
Note 26: Dahl, A Preface, p. 98. Back.
Note 27: See Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, “Political Regimes and Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 7 (Summer 1993), p. 63. Back.
Note 28: See John Waterbury, “The Political Economy of Authoritarianism and Democracy: From Social Contracts to Extraction Contracts,” in John Entelis, ed., Islam, Democracy, and the State in North Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Back.
Note 29: Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Back.
Note 30: See Alan Richards and John Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East (Boulder: Westview, 1996), p. 224. The estimate originates with the IMF. Back.
Note 31: On the relative bargaining strenghts of “liquid” and fixed capital, see Robert Bates and Da-Hsiang Lien, “A Note on Taxation, Development and Representative Government,” Politics and Society, 1 (1985); and Robert Bates, “A Political Scientist Looks at Tax Reform,” in Malcolm Gillis, eds., Tax Reform in Developing Countries (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 473–91. Back.
Note 32: See Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, eds., The Rentier State (London: Croom Helm, 1987). Back.
Note 33: Waterbury, “The Political Economy of Authoritarianism and Democracy.” Back.
Note 34: John F. Due, Indirect Taxation in Developing Economies (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); and Richard Goode, “Tax Advice to Developing Countries: An Historical Survey,” World Development 21 (1993), pp. 37–53. Back.
Note 35: Roy Bahl, “The Political Economy of Jamaican Tax Reform,” in Gillis, ed., pp. 115–76. Back.
Note 36: Zehra Arat, Democracy and Human Rights in Developing Countries (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991), p. 103. Back.
Note 37: Bratton and van de Walle, Will Africa Democratize?, found in their multivariate analysis of political protest and liberalization in sub-Saharan Africa that the number of business associations in a country was positively associated with levels of protest. See also Nancy Bermeo with Jose Garcia-Duran, “Spain: Dual Transition Implemented by Two Parties,” in Stephan Haggard and Steven Webb, eds., Voting for Reform: Democracy, Political Liberalization, and Economic Adjustment (New York: World Bank/Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 88–127. Back.
Note 38: Przeworski and Limongi “Political Regimes and Economic Growth.” Back.
Note 39: It could be argued that it is easier to bribe a single autocrat than an entire legislature. Also, democratization is usually accompanied by a strengthening of the judiciary, the right of appeal, and responsibility of elected officials to the electorate and thus offers greater protections. One of Uganda’s leading Asian businessmen, Mayur Madhvani, stated that, while he considered himself apolitical, he advocated multiparty democracy. “You see, if there are no checks and balances, things can go wrong, so it is important that other parties also function and prove through their manifestos that they have something to offer.” Interview, The Monitor (Kampala), Feb. 23–26, 1996. See Andrei Shleifer, “Establishing Property Rights,” Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1994), p. 97. Back.
Note 40: John Freeman, Democracy and the Markets: The Politics of Mixed Economics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Back.
Note 41: See David Laitin, “The National Uprisings in the Soviet Union,” World Politics 44 (October 1991), pp. 139–77. Back.
Note 42: See Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press, 1994); and Richard Pankhurst, A Social History of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 1990). Back.
Note 43: Mengistu supported the Southern People’s Liberation Army in the Sudan, which since 1983 waged war against the government in Khartoum. Under Colonel Omar al-Bashir and the National Islamic Front of Hassan Turabi in 1989, the Sudanese government helped Ethiopians opposed to the Derg. Back.
Note 44: Bratton and van de Walle, Will Africa Democratize? Back.
Note 45: Marks, The Economist, Nov. 25, 1995, p. 35. Back.
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