Political Development of Western Europe

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Introduction

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In late-century Africa, things fell apart. By way of illustra-tion, consider Figure 1.1, which lists civil wars in African
countries from 1970 to 1995, as judged by the World Bank.

As time passes, the list grow

Angola, Chad, Namibia,

Nigeria, and Sudan enter the 1970s war-torn; in the mid-1970s,

Sudan exits the list, but Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe join

it; by 1980, Zimbabwe departs from the ranks of the war-torn,

but is replaced by Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda. The

pattern – a few dropping off, a larger number entering in –

continues into the early 1990s. Only one country that was con-

flict ridden in 1990 becomes peaceful by 1992, while eleven

others crowd into the ranks of Africa’s failed states.

Humanitarians, policymakers, and scholars: Each de-

mands to know why political order gave way to political con-

flict in late-century Africa. Stunned by the images and realities

of political disorder, I join them in search of answers. In so

doing, I – a political scientist – turn to theories of the state and

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year 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 9

Burundi

Chad

Congo

Djibouti

Ethiopia

Kenya

Liberia

Mali

Mozambique
Namibia

Nigeria
Rwanda

Senegal

Sierra Leone
Somalia
Sudan

Uganda

Congo

Zimbabwe

Figure 1.1. Civil wars, Africa 1970–1995. Source: World Bank (Sambanis 2002).

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Introduction

locate the sources of political disorder midst the factors that

lead states to break down.

I anchor this book in the work of Weber (1958) and view

coercion as the distinctive property of politics. As will become

clear in the next chapter, I depart from Weber – and his “struc-

turalist” descendants1 – by turning to the theory of games.

Driven by the realities of Africa, I view political order as

problematic: In light of the evidence Africa offers, political

order cannot be treated as a given. Rather, I argue, it results

when rulers – whom I characterize as “specialists in violence” –

choose to employ the means of coercion to protect the creation

of wealth rather than to prey upon it and when private citizens

choose to set weapons aside and to devote their time instead

to the production of wealth and to the enjoyment of leisure.

When these choices constitute an equilibrium, then, I say,

political order forms a state

To address the collapse of political order in late-century

Africa, I therefore return to theory – the theory of the state – and

to theorizing – the theory of games. I do so because proceeding

in this fashion points out the conditions under which political

order can persist – or fail. I devote Chapter 2 to an informal

1 Evans, P., T. Skocpol, and D. Rueschmeyer (1985), Bringing the State Back
In, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press provides perhaps the
best-known example.

2 I am drawing on Bates, R. H., A. Greif, et al. (2002), “Organizing Violence,”
Journal of Conflict Resolution 46(5): 599–628.

3 The ambiguous phrasing is intended.

5
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Introduction

derivation of those conditions. In the remaining chapters, I

turn from deduction to empirics and explore the extent to

which these conditions were to be found, or were absent, in

late-century Africa. The evidence leads me to conclude that

in the 1980s and 1990s, each of three key variables departed

from the levels necessary to induce governments and citizens

to choose in ways that would yield political order.

The Literature

Following the outbreak of conflict in Serbia, Somalia, Rwanda,

and elsewhere, the study of political violence has once again

become central to the study of politics. Familiar to many, for

example, would be the attempts by Collier and Hoeffler (2004)

and Fearon and Laitin (2003) to comprehend the origins of civil

wars. Also familiar would be studies of the impact of ethnic-

ity (Fearon and Laitin 2003), democracy (Hegre, Gates et al.

2001; Hegre 2003), and natural-resource endowments (e.g.,

Ross 2004). In my attempts to comprehend why things fell

apart in late-century Africa, I draw upon these writings. But I

also take issue with them, for virtually all share common prop-

erties from which I seek to depart.

Consider, for example, the assumption that civil war can be

best treated as the outcome of an insurgency. When thinking

about the origins of political disorder in Africa, I can find no

way of analyzing the origins of insurrection without starting

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Introduction

with the behavior of governments. The conditions that led

to the breakdown of order in Africa include the authoritarian

nature of its states and their rulers’ penchant for predation. By

rendering their people insecure, they provoked insurgencies.

While both insurrectionaries and incumbents must necessar-

ily feature in the analysis of political disorder, in this instance it

makes sense not to focus exclusively on the rebels but to stress

as well the behavior of those whom they seek to drive from

power.

Recent contributions exhibit a second common feature:

the methods that they employ. Utilizing cross-national data,

they apply statistical procedures to isolate and measure the

relationship of particular variables with the onset and duration

of civil wars. I, too, make use of cross-national data; but rather

than collecting data for all countries in the globe, I restrict my

efforts to Africa. I do so in part because Africa provides an

unsettling range of opportunities to explore state failure and

because political disorder is so important a determinant of the

welfare of the continent. I also do so because I find it necessary

to draw upon my intuition. To employ that intuition, I need

first to inform it, be it by immersing myself in the field or in

qualitative accounts set down by observers. I have therefore

made use of a selected set of cases – those from the continent

of Africa – and my knowledge of their politics

4 The use of a subset of countries also eases the search for exogenous vari-
ables, and thus causal analysis. For example, given the small size of Africa’s

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Introduction

Lastly, if only because they are based on the analysis of

cross-national data, contemporary studies exhibit a third

property: Their conclusions take the form of “findings.” These

findings are based upon relationships between a selection of

key variables and the outbreak or duration of civil wars. Collier

and Hoeffler (2004), for example, stress the importance of

“opportunities,” that is, chances to secure economic rewards

and to finance political organizations. Noting that the magni-

tude of primary product exports, the costs of recruiting, and

access to funding from diasporas relate to the likelihood of

civil war, they conclude that “economic viability appears to be

the predominant systematic explanation of rebellion” (p. 563).

Fearon and Laitin (2003), by contrast, conclude that “capa-

bilities” play the major role: “We agree that financing is one

determinant of the viability of insurgency,” they write (p. 76).

But they place major emphasis on “state administrative, mil-

itary, and police capabilities” (p. 76), measures of which bear

significant relationships to the outbreak of civil wars in their

global set of data.

In this work, I proceed in a different fashion. I start by

first capturing the logic that gives rise to political order. While

I, too, test hypotheses about the origins of disorder, I derive

economies, I can treat global economic shocks as exogenous – something
that yields inferential leverage when seeking to measure the impact of
economic forces on

state

failure.

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Introduction

these hypotheses from a theory. By adopting a more deductive

approach, I depart from the work of my predecessors.

Key Topics

Energized by such works as Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy”

(1994), students of Africa have focused on the relationship

between ethnic diversity and political conflict. At least since

the time that William Easterly and Ross Levine penned “Africa’s

Growth Tragedy” (1997), empirically minded social scientists

have sought to capture the impact of ethnicity on the eco-

nomic performance of Africa’s states. Interestingly, however,

they have found it difficult to uncover systematic evidence of

the relationship between measures of ethnicity and the likeli-

hood of political disorder

In this study I, too, find little evidence of a systematic rela-

tionship. And yet, the qualitative accounts – be they of the

killing fields of Darfur or of the tenuous peace in Nigeria – con-

tinue to stress the central importance of ethnicity to political

life in Africa. In response, I argue that ethnic diversity does

not cause violence; rather, ethnicity and violence are joint

5 For a discussion, see Bates, R. H., and I. Yackolev (2002), Ethnicity in Africa,
in The Role of Social Capital In Development, edited by C. Grootaert and T.
van Bastelaer, New York: Cambridge University Press; and Fearon, J., and
D. Laitin (2003), “Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War,” American Political
Science Review 97(1): 75–90.

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Introduction

products of state failure. Their relationship is contingent: It

occurs when political order erodes and politicians forge polit-

ical organizations in the midst of political conflict.

The political significance of resource wealth has also

attracted much attention. Analyzing their data on civil wars,

Collier and Hoeffler (2004) report that “dependence upon pri-

mary commodity exports” constituted “a particularly power-

ful risk factor” for the outbreak of civil war (p. 593). Africa

is, of course, noted for its bounteous natural endowments of

petroleum, timber, metals, and gemstones. And scholars and

policymakers have documented the close ties between the dia-

mond industry and UNITA (National Union for the Total Inde-

pendence of Angola) in Angola (Fowler 2000), the smuggling

of gemstones and the financing of rebels in Sierra Leone (Reno

2000), and the mining of coltan and the sites of rebellion in

eastern Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo)

(Kakwenzire and Kamukama 2000).

And yet, using Collier and Hoeffler’s (2004) own data,

Fearon (2005) has demonstrated that their findings are frag-

ile, depending in part on decisions about how to measure

and classify cases. In this study, too, I fail to find a signifi-

cant relationship between the value of natural resources and

the likelihood of state failure.6 Once again, then, there arises

6 For both Fearon (2005) and myself (this work), only the value of petroleum
deposts is related to political disorder. Even here the relationship is fragile,
however.

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a disparity between the evidence from cross-national regres-

sions and that from qualitative accounts. I shall argue that the

disparity suggests that the exploitation of natural resources

for war finance is a correlate rather than a cause of political

disorder.

A third factor plays a major role in the literature: democ-

ratization. Qualitative accounts, such as those of Mansfield

and Snyder (Mansfield and Snyder 1995; Snyder 2000) sug-

gest that democratization produces political instability and

leads to the mobilization of what Zakaria (1997) calls “illib-

eral” political forces. Careful empirical researchers, such as

Hegre (Hegre, Gates et al. 2001; Hegre 2004), confirm that new

democracies and intermediate regimes – those lying some-

where between stable authoritarian and consolidated demo-

cratic governments7 – exhibit significantly higher rates of civil

war. As demonstrated by Geddes (2003), many of these inter-

mediate regimes are the product of the “third wave” of democ-

ratization (Huntington 1991) and the collapse of communist

regimes and are therefore themselves new and vulnerable to

disorder.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many of Africa’s governments

reformed. Regimes that once had banned the formation

of political parties now faced challenges at the polls from

7 Using Polity coding. Available online at: http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/
polity/.

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Introduction

candidates backed by an organized political opposition. And

in the late 1980s and early 1990s, militias assembled, states

failed, and Africa faced rising levels of political disorder. The

experience of Africa thus appears to conform to what the liter-

ature has recorded: Electoral competition and state failure go

together.

In analyzing the impact of political reform, I employ two

measures: the movement from military to civilian rule and the

shift from no- or one- to multiparty systems. In discussions of

democracy, the followers of Schumpeter (1950) argue for the

sufficiency of party competition; those of Dahl (1971) contend

that party competition is necessary but not sufficient. Without

an accompanying bundle of political and civil rights, the latter

argue, contested elections are not of themselves evidence of

democratic politics. In debates over the relationship between

party systems and democracy, I concur with the followers of

Dahl. When addressing political reform, I pay no attention to

the number of political parties, their relative vote shares, or

the conditions under which the opposition is allowed to cam-

paign. I therefore address not the relationship between democ-

racy and political conflict but rather the relationship between

political reform and politi

cal disorder.

Lastly, there are those who emphasize the impact of pov-

erty. That poverty and conflict should go together is treated

as noncontroversial, as if disorder were simply an expected

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Introduction

corollary of the lack of economic development.8 But consider:

If, as many argue, lower per capita incomes imply lower wages

and therefore lower costs of rebellion, so too do they imply

fewer gains from predation; income thus cancels out the ratio

between the costs and benefits. From the theoretical point of

view, moreover, there is simply little that can be said about the

relationship between the average level of income – or, for that

matter, poverty – and incentives for violence. As I will argue

in Chapter 2, for our purposes, discussions of private income

can be set aside; for the logic of political order suggests that

the focus be placed not on private income but rather on public

revenues. Economic shocks will indeed play a major role in this

analysis, but the focus will be on their impact on the revenues

of states, not on the incomes of individuals.9 In this work, when

I measure the impact of income per capita, I treat it as a control

variable, rather than as a variable of theoretical interest.

In Chapter 2, I parse the logic of political order. I recount the

theory informally, portraying the interaction between govern-

ments and citizens and among citizens as well. Presented as a

8 Indeed, see Sambanis, N., and H. Hegre (2006), “Sensitivity Analysis of
Empirical Results on Civil War Onset,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution
50(4): 508–35. The authors point to per capita income as one of the very
few variables that bears a robust relationship with civic

violence.

9 See the arguments in Hirshleifer, J. (1995), Theorizing About Conflict, in
Handbook of Defense Economics, edited by K. Hartley and T. Sandler, New
York: Elsevier.

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Introduction

fable, the argument is based upon rigorous foundations and

points to the conditions under which governments choose to

engage in predation and citizens choose to take up arms.

Chapters 3 through 5 set out the conditions that prevailed

prior to the collapse of political order. They document the

social and political configurations that were in place at the

time of the impact of the economic and political shocks that

dismantled the state in Africa. In Chapter 6, states fracture

and political disorder engulfs nations in Africa. Chapter 7

concludes.

10 The informed reader will note the parallels between my analysis and that
of Azam, J.-P., and A. Mesnard (2003), “Civil War and the Social Contract,”
Public Choice 115(3–4): 455–75; Snyder, R., and R. Bhavani (2005),
“Diamonds, Blood and Taxes: A Revenue-Centered Framework for Ex-
plaining Political Order,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 49(4): 563–
97; and Magaloni, B. (2006), Voting for Autocracy, New York: Cambridge
University Press.

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From Fable to Fact

I devote this chapter to the exposition of a fable.1 Whilediminutive, it is incisive: It captures the incentives that
drive the choices that lead to the failure of states. It is also

suggestive, for it points to the conditions under which polit-

ical order should, or should not, prevail. After expositing this

fable, I determine whether it is also informative. It can be

so only insofar as the forces that animate its central char-

acters find their parallel in late-century Africa. I devote the

last portions of the chapter to arguing that they do and that

the story communicated by the fable can therefore bear the

weight of the tragedy that befell the continent. The fable can

be used – with help – to explore the foundations of political

disorder.

1 A rigorous presentation appeared as Bates, R. H., A. Greif, et al. (2002),
“Organizing Violence,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 46(5): 599–
628.

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Introduction

A Fable

Consider the following scenario: A community is peopled by a

“specialist in violence” and two groups of citizens. Headed by

powerful patrons, the groups can act in a unified manner.2 The

specialist in violence earns his living from the use of force; he

either seizes the wealth of others or pockets funds they pay for

their protection. Sheltered behind their patrons, the citizens

generate incomes by engaging in productive labor; but they

too can be mobilized either to seize the income of others – or

to defend their incomes from seizure. The three personages in

this drama repeatedly interact over time. The question is: Can

political order prevail in such a setting?

The answer is: Yes. Under certain circumstances, the spe-

cialist will chose to use his control of the means of violence to

protect rather than to despoil private property. And the groups

of citizens will chose to devote their time and energies to labor

and leisure and forswear the use of arms, while rewarding the

specialist in violence for protecting them against raids by oth-

ers. In addition, under certain well-specified conditions, these

choices will persist in equilibrium, rendering political order a

state.

The primary reason for this outcome is that the players

interact over time. The specialist in violence and political

2 That is, they have solved the collective action problem.

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From Fable to Fact

organizations can therefore condition their future choices on

present behavior; that is, they can make threats and inflict pun-

ishments and thus shape the behavior of others. Should one

group raid or withhold tax payments, the specialist can retal-

iate by changing from guardian to predator. And should the

specialist opportunistically seize the wealth of the member of a

group, his defection would trigger punishment by that citizen’s

confederates: They can withhold tax payments or mobilize for

fighting. If not sufficiently paid for the provision of security,

the specialist in violence can pay himself: he can turn from

guardian to warlord. And if preyed upon or left undefended,

then the citizens can furnish their own protection; they can

take

arms.

When both the specialist and the citizens turn to pun-

ishment, political order breaks down. People become inse-

cure. They also become poor; having to reallocate resources

to defense, they have fewer resources to devote to produc-

tive activity. The resultant loss of security and prosperity stays

the hand of a specialist in violence who might be tempted to

engage in predation or of a group that might be tempted to

forcefully seize the goods of another or withhold tax payments,

thus triggering political disorder.

To better grasp the incentives that animate this story, focus

on the choices open to the specialist in violence, as commu-

nicated in Figure 2.1. In this figure, the vertical axis repre-

sents monetary gains or losses. The further above zero, the

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Introduction

Payoffs

–

Time

Payoffs on the equilibrium path

Payoffs from defection and subsequent punishment

Figure 2.1. Payoffs from strategy choices.

greater the payoffs; the further below, the greater the losses.

The horizontal axis designates time, with the more immediate

payoffs occurring near the origin and the more distant ones

further to the right. The dotted line represents the flow of pay-

offs that result from tax payments; the flow is steady, mod-

erate, and positive in value. The dashed line represents the

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From Fable to Fact

flow of payoffs that result from predation. Predation yields an

immediate benefit: The dashed line leaps above the dotted

line, indicating that the income from predation significantly

exceeds that from tax payments. But that one period spike

then gives way to a stream of losses, as illustrated by the plunge

below the zero point that separates gains from losses. Insofar

as a decision maker is forward looking, the losses that accrue

in the punishment phase caste a shadow over the returns from

defection and so temper any wish

to engage in predation.

If summed over time, each line – that representing the

returns to taxation and that the returns to predation – yields an

expected payoff. What would determine their magnitudes? In

particular, what would determine whether the value of the vari-

able path, generated by predation, will be more or less attrac-

tive than that of the steady path, generated from tax payments?

The factors that determine the relative magnitude of these pay-

offs determine whether the specialist in violence will adhere

to the path of play and continue to behave as guardian or veer

from that path, engage in predation, and trigger the re-arming

of the citizenry and subsequent disorder.

The Conditions of Political Order

One factor is the level of tax revenue. If too low, the benefits of

predation may be tempting despite the subsequent costs.3 A

3 But they may also be if too high. See the discussion in Bates, R. H., A. Greif,
et al. (2002), “Organizing Violence.”

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Introduction

second is the magnitudes of the rewards that predation might

yield. If sufficiently bounteous, the specialist in violence might

choose to deviate despite the losses. A third is the special-

ist’s rate of discount. A specialist in violence who is impatient,

greedy, or insecure will discount the future payoffs that accrue

along the path of play; and she will also discount the penal-

ties that follow an opportunistic deviation. She may therefore

find the prospect of predation more attractive than if she were

patient, prosperous, or secure.

The fable thus suggests that the possibility of political order

rests on the value of three variables: the level of public revenues,

the rewards from predation, and the specialist’s rate of dis-

count. The interplay of these forces helps to determine whether

governments safeguard or prey upon the wealth of the land;

whether groups of citizens take up arms; and whether there is

political order – or state failure.

The tale may be engaging; elsewhere it has been shown

to be logically consistent (Bates, Greif et al. 2002). But it is

informative only insofar as it captures and incorporates key

features of Africa’s political landscape. Only insofar as it does

so will it offer insight into the tribulations of that continent.

Features of Late-Century Politics

Recall that the scenario was populated by a specialist in vio-

lence and by citizens who could, should they choose, take up

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From Fable to Fact

�

5�

10�
15�
20�
25�
30�
35�
40�

1970-�
74 �

1�975�-�
79�

1980-�
84�

1985�-�
89�

1990-�
95�

Percentage�

Figure 2.2. Percentage country years in which country ruled by mili-

tary head of state.

arms. Now note a characteristic feature of late-century poli-

tics in Africa: A significant portion of Africa’s states were ruled

by their military. Turning to Figure 2.2, we find that from the

beginning of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, in more than

30 percent of the observations, Africa’s heads of state came

from the armed forces.4 In the 1990s, U.S. president William

Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair heralded the

emergence of a “new generation” of African rulers – Yoweri

Museveni in Uganda, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, Meles Zenawi

in Ethiopia, and Isaias Afwerki in Eritrea – while failing to men-

tion that each had come to power as the head of an armed

insurgency. In many states, then, power came from the barrel

of a gun (Ottaway 1999).5

4 For details of the sample, see Table A.1 in the Appendix.
5 Lest readers regard the link between coercion and politics to be distinc-

tive of politics in Africa, they might first recall the note sent by the father

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Introduction

Not only were heads of states specialists in violence, the cit-

izens, too, frequently took up arms. By way of illustration, con-

sider the case of Chad. At the beginning of our sample period,

1970, Francois Tombalbaya, head of the Parti Progressive Tcha-

dien (PPT), was president of Chad. Tombalbaya belonged to

the Sara, an agriculturalist people in the southern portions of

the country; the eastern and northern portions were popu-

lated by pastoralist peoples. As Tombalbaya consolidated his

rule, he posted administrators from the south to govern these

other regions. There they imposed policies designed to propa-

gate Sara culture and imposed new taxes on cattle. In response,

the pastoralists mounted protests, fomented riots, and formed

militias: the Front for the Liberation of Chad (FLT) in the east

and the Front for National Liberation (FROLINAT) in the north.

It was only by calling for military assistance from France that

Tombalbaya remained in power.6

of Frederick the Great to the young man’s tutors: “[I]n the highest mea-
sure . . . instill in my son a true love of the military . . . and impress on him
that nothing in the world can give a prince such fame and honor as the
sword and that he would be the most despicable creature on earth if
he did not revere it and seek glory from it. . . . ” (p. 18 of Asprey, R. B.
(1986), Frederick the Great, New York: Ticknor and Fields). Recall, too,
the rueful words of the dying Louis IV: “I have loved war too much.”
(http://encarta.msm.com).

6 For accounts, see Buijtenhuijs, R. (1989), Chad, in Contemporary West
African States, edited by D. B. Cruise O’Brien, J. Dunn, and R. Rath-
bone, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press; May, R. (2003),
Internal Dimensions of Warfare in Chad, in Readings in African Poli-
tics, edited by T. Young, Oxford: James Currey; Lemarchand, R. (1981),
“Chad: The Roots of Chaos,” Current History (December); Nolutshungu,

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Whereas the militarization of Chad marks the opening of

the sample period, conflict between militias in Congo (Braz-

zaville) marks its end. In 1992, a southerner, Pascal Lissouba,

became president of Congo(B); in the run up to the next pres-

idential election, the strongman and former president, Denis

Sassou-Nguesso, declared his candidacy. As political tensions

mounted, each politician mobilized a private army: the Cobras,

who supported Sassou-Nguesso, and the Zulus, who sup-

ported Pascal Lissouba. Kindled in the provincial towns, fight-

ing between these groups erupted in the capital where the

mayor, Bernard Kolelas, had organized his own militia, the

Njinjas. Combat between these militias lay waste to one of

the major cities of French-speaking Africa.7

As seen in Figure 2.3, over the course of the sample period

1970–1995, reports of the formation of militias became more

common. With increasing frequency, citizens took up arms

and states lost their monopoly over the means of violence.

The scenario depicted at the outset of this chapter

thus incorporates two major features of the politics of late

S. C. (1996), Limits of Anarchy, Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia; and Azam, J.-P. (2007), The Political Geography of Redis-
tribution, Chap. 6 in The Political Economy of Economic Growth in
Africa, 1960–2000: An Analytic Survey, edited by B. Ndulu, P. Collier,
R. H. Bates, and S. O’Connell, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press.

7 One of the best accounts appears in Bazenguissa-Ganga, R. (2003), The
Spread of Political Violence in Congo-Brazzaville, in Readings in African
Politics, edited by T. Young, Oxford: James Currey.

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.3
.4
.5

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995
year

95% CI Fitted values

Figure 2.3. Reports of militias by year, percent of observations.

twentieth-century Africa: rule by specialists in violence and

the militarization of civic society. In accounting for political

disorder, it pointed to three key variables: the level of public

revenues received by governments; the magnitude of tempta-

tions they face, as determined by the rewards for predation;

and the relative weight placed upon them. A moment’s reflec-

tion leads to the recognition of the possible significance of

these variables for the politics of late-century Africa.

Revenues

In the 1970s, a sharp increase in the price of oil triggered global

recession. The increased price of energy led to higher costs of

production in the advanced industrial economies, resulting in

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the laying off of labor and a lowering of incomes. For Africa,

the result was a decrease in the demand for exports.

In Africa, as in many other developing regions, taxes on

trade constitute one of the most important sources of public

revenue. As the value of exports from Africa declined, so too

did the taxes collected by Africa’s governments. In the latter

decades of the twentieth century, then, while Africa’s people

faced a “growth tragedy” (Easterly and Levine 1997), its states

faced a crisis of public revenues. The break in the global econ-

omy was sharp and unanticipated; and the recovery of pub-

lic finance required comprehensive and protracted restructur-

ing, involving changes not only in tax rates but also in policies

toward trade and industrial

development.

The economic forces at play in late-century Africa thus

aligned with the conditions in the fable, reducing the revenues

of governments. Within the framework of the fable, the decline

in public revenues represents a decline in the rewards from

public service. In the face of such a reduction, those who con-

trol the means of violence find the income derived from the

protection of civilians declining relative to the returns from

predation. By the logic of the fable, they would therefore be

more likely to turn to predation. Rather than providing secu-

rity, those who controlled the state would become a source of

insecurity, as they sought to extract revenue from the wealth

of their citizens.

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Discount Rate

In the fable, if the government becomes more impatient or

insecure, the rewards that accrue to those who act as guardians

decline in value; so, too, the penalties that would be imposed

were they to revert to predation. As the “shadow of the future”8

thus dissipates, the level of temptation rises: Immediate ben-

efits weigh more heavily than future losses, and incumbents

may become more predatory, provoking state failure.

Returning to the empirical record, in the late 1980s, Africa

underwent a period of political reform. With the end of the

Cold War, the “third wave” of democratization9 swept across

the continent and governments that in the 1980s had been

immune to political challenges now faced organized polit-

ical opponents. As seen in Figure 2.4, whereas from the

early 1970s to the mid-1980s, more than 80% of the country-

year observations contained no- or one-party systems, by the

mid 1990s, more than 50% experienced multiparty systems.

With the shift to multiparty politics, those who presided over

Africa’s authoritarian governments faced an unanticipated

increase in the level of political risk. Few had prepared them-

selves to compete at the polls; some surely would have chosen

8 The phrase comes from Axelrod, R. (1985), The Evolution of Cooperation,
New York: Basic Books.

9 Huntington, S. P. (1991), The Third Wave, Norman, OK: Oklahoma Uni-
versity Press.

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0
10
20

1970-

1975-

1980-

1985-

1990-
95

Percentage of
Country Years

No-Party

One-Party

Multiparty

Figure 2.4. Political competition over time.

to govern with more restraint had they known that they might

someday be forced from political office and shorn of the pro-

tection it afforded. Incumbents became less secure. And by the

logic of the fable, they would therefore find the modest rewards

that accrue to political guardians less attractive, and the fear

of future punishment less daunting, increasing the temptation

to engage in predation.

Resources

To a degree that exceeds any other region of the world, the

economies of Africa are based on the production of precious

minerals, gemstones, petroleum, and other precious com-

modities. These resources pose a constant temptation to those

with military power. Were they to shift from guardian to preda-

tor, their future prosperity would nonetheless be ensured,

underpinned by the income generated by natural

resources.

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Consider the case of Nigeria, where, in the words of Bill

Dudley (1982, p. 92): “[T]he oil boom was a disaster . . . ” – one

made worse by military rule. As Dudley states:

[T]he effect of the oil boom was to convert the military polit-

ical decision-makers . . . into a new property-owning, rentier

class working in close and direct collaboration with foreign

business interests with the sole aim of expropriating the sur-

pluses derived from oil for their private and personal benefit

(Dudley 1982, p. 116).

Consider, too, the Sudan or Chad, following the discov-

ery of oil. In both, incumbent regimes turned to repression,

the one harrying the Dinka and the other the Sara. Resource

wealth thus appears to shape the behavior of elites. In the

face of dwindling public resources or insecure political futures,

given the availability of wealth from appropriable resources,

they could greet with equanimity a future of political disorder.

Those immersed in environments richly endowed by nature

would therefore be willing to take actions that rendered others

insecure, thus triggering state failure.

Conclusion

The logic of the fable highlights the importance of public

revenues, democratization, and natural resources and the

manner in which they impinge upon the possibility of political

order. As we have seen, the elements that affect political order

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in the fable parallel political forces that shaped the politics of

the continent in the later decades of the twentieth century.

While many who have studied Africa have emphasized

the political importance of economic collapse, the “resource

curse,” and the relationship between political competition and

political conflict, this account focuses on the logic that system-

atically links these forces to the political incentives that under-

lie state failure. Being abstract, the logic is also adaptable; it

can play out in a variety of forms. Consider the nature of the

groups that may – or may not – transmute into militias. In

one setting, they may be the youth wings of political parties;

in another, regional coalitions; and in a third, ethnic groups.

The same applies to the specialists in violence. In some set-

tings, the military rule; clearly the military specialize in the

use of violence. In other instances, it is civilians who gov-

ern. Even a civilian head of state presides over police, public

prosecutors, and a prison system; by bringing them to bear

upon citizens, he too can transform the state into an instru-

ment for predation. In still other instances, the civil service

assumes the role of a specialist in violence, using its command

of the bureaucracy to redistribute income from the citizens

to themselves. Different actors can thus fulfill the major roles

in the fable, but their parts are inscribed in a common script.

By the choices they make, they animate the sources of political

order, induce state failure, thereby enacting the tragedy that

engulfed late-century Africa.

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Sowing the Seeds

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Political Legacies

B y convention, 1960 marks the year of independence inAfrica.1 Shortly after independence, Africa’s new states
faced two withering critiques, one mounted by Franz Fanon

(1963) and a second by Rene Dumont (1962). Although their

indictments overlap, Fanon’s targeted their politics whereas

Dumont’s focused on their policies. In this chapter, I ana-

lyze the nature of post-independence politics, emphasizing

in particular the nature of political institutions. In Chapter 4,

I address the policies chosen by Africa’s governments in the

post-independence era.

As reported in Chapter 2, by the late 1970s, in more than

eighty percent of the country years,2 opposition parties failed

to challenge incumbent heads of state, most often because

it was illegal for them to do so (Figure 2.4), and in roughly

1 Of the forty-six states in our sample set of countries, only six had achieved
independence prior to 1960; in 1960 alone, fifteen became sovereign.

2 The sample covers a panel of forty-six countries over twenty years. A single
observation therefore constitutes a country year, e.g., Zimbabwe in the
year 1970. Thus the origins of this awkward term.

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Sowing the Seeds

one-third of the country years, military officers served as

heads of state (Figure 2.2). The political institutions of post-

independence Africa were thus authoritarian. For late-century

Africa, the consequence was an increased likelihood of politi-

cal disorder.

Throughout this chapter, I repeatedly draw illustrations

from Zambia’s political history. Box 3.1 provides a synopsis,

to which the reader may refer while seeking to master the sev-

eral narratives. Map 3.1 outlines the boundaries of Zambia’s

provinces, whose political leaders jockeyed for top positions

in the ruling party and national gov

ernment.

The Incumbent’s Dilemma

When colonial regimes departed from Africa, they orchestrated

their retreat by holding elections and exiting midst the polit-

ical din. While competitors for office championed the cause

of independence and denounced the evils of colonialism, a

notable feature of their campaigns was the stress they placed

on seizing the “fruits of independence.”

In a careful study of the city of Abidjan, Michael Cohen

(1974) explores the use of power in Cote d’Ivoire. Rural back-

ers of the ruling party, he noted, used their political connec-

tions to move from provincial towns to the national capital

(Cohen 1974). Some had been appointed to the boards of state-

owned corporations, which produced “palm oil, hardwood,

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Box 3.1. Political highlights, post-independence Zambia

– Zambia achieved independence in 1964, with the UNIP (the United
National Independence Party) as the governing party and ANC (the
African National Congress) as the opposition.

– High office in the governing party translated into high posts in the gov-
ernment. Kenneth David Kaunda, president of UNIP, became presi-
dent of Zambia as well, and Reuben Kamanga, a politician from the
Eastern Province and vice president of UNIP, served also as vice
president of Zambia.

– In 1967, UNIP held internal party elections. A Bemba-speaking bloc
captured a majority of the seats in the Central Committee of the
ruling party and Simon Kapwepwe, a Bemba-speaker from Northern
Province, displaced Reuben Kamanga as vice president.

– In the subsequent general election, Barotse Province (also known
as Western Province) joined the Central and Southern provinces in
support of ANC.

– In 1969, the president dissolved the quarrelsome Central Committee
of UNIP, Eastern Province politicians resumed their posts, and Reuben
Kamanga returned as vice president.

– In 1971, the Bemba-speaking politicians, led by Simon Kapwepwe,
defected from UNIP, the ruling party, and joined the opposition.

rubber . . . and construction equipment” (ibid., pp. 24–5). Oth-

ers received prized plots of land in the low-density town-

ships, where they built homes, and in the high-density areas,

where they constructed new enterprises. As they worked their

way up the political hierarchy, Cohen writes, the backers of

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Map 3.1. Provinces of Zambia. Note: Ndola is the capital of the

Copperbelt. Source: www.answers.com/topic/ZM-Provinces .

the ruling party achieved even more desirable addresses.

“[A]dministrative and political control of urban land conces-

sions . . . turns out to be an extraordinarily sensitive measure

of political status within the ruling class,” he writes: “Admin-

istrative appointments or promotions are often accompanied

by approval of an individual’s application for land. . . . ” (ibid.,

pp. 44–5). Cohen concludes with a depiction of a housing pyra-

mid, in which the “ministers live in luxurious European-style

villas” (p. 47) while their subordinates dwelt in “smaller but

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Political Legacies

very luxurious homes in Cocody,” a prosperous suburb (p. 48).

To the powerful, he writes, went the rewards: “[T]he winning

coalition” used its power to achieve “wealth and position . . . ”

(p. 6).

Cote d’Ivoire achieved independence in 1960; Zimbabwe,

two decades later. As documented by Norma Kriger (2003),

freedom fighters, political organizers, and rank-and-file mem-

bers of Zimbabwe’s ruling party began agitating for the rewards

of independence. Under intense political pressure from the

ruling party, the Ministry of Home Affairs hired 3,500 freedom

fighters; the Ministry of Local Government, 2,600 more. The

Ministry of Health had to sign on 2,000 and the Central Intelli-

gence Organization more than 1,000 (ibid., p. 178). Once they

secured jobs, Kriger writes, the militants agitated for additional

benefits: compensation for losses incurred during the strug-

gle for independence, pensions, loans, and land. The political

movement that seized the state thus subsequently “built a vio-

lent and extractive political order” (ibid., p. 5), as the victors

continued to agitate for the fruits of independence.

The pattern has been documented for socialist Zambia

(Szeftel 1978) as well as capitalist Nigeria (Schatz 1977). As

described by Dumont (1962) and Fanon (1963), independence

represented the capture of the state by local political elites who

then used power to accumulate wealth.

The ambitions of the elites was equaled by the aspirations

of the electorate. Thus Barkan, in his study of elections in

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Sowing the Seeds

post-independence Kenya (1976, 1986); Hayward and Kandeh,

in their study of Sierra Leone (1987); and Hayward, when he

turned to the study of Ghana (1976), report that constituents

viewed politicians as their agents whose job it was to bring

material benefits to the local community – jobs, loans, or cash.

Those in Kenya, Barkan notes, stoked the fires of political ambi-

tion, inciting candidates to bid for political support by con-

tributing funds for the construction of local projects (Barkan

1976). The result, as Allen writes of Benin, was “the exchange

of blocs of votes . . . for valued goods. . . . ” (1989, p. 22). Com-

petitive elections came to resemble a political marketplace, in

which votes were exchanged for material benefits.

Analysis

In 1983, Gerald Kramer (1983) explored the nature of political

competition in a world in which incumbents and challengers

compete by distributing material benefits.3 In his analysis, the

voters value private consumption and party labels and the

politicians control a fixed stock of material goods. In the com-

petition for votes, the incumbents move first: They distribute

benefits in a way designed to return to office, while preserving

as large a portion as possible for their own consumption. Once

3 See also Groseclose, T., and J. M. Snyder (1996), “Buying Supermajorities,”
American Political Science Review 90(2): 303–15.

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the governing party has proposed its allocation, the opposition

then responds with a counteroffer. In this competition, Kramer

asks, how will incumbents and challengers behave? How will

they play the game?

When seeking to unseat the incumbent and to do so at least

expense, Kramer argues, the challenger will bid for the support

of those who may be disadvantaged under the incumbent’s

rule. By offering slightly more than what the incumbent has

provided, the challenger can capture their votes and weaken

the incumbent’s coalition. He can then devote the rest of his

resources to obtaining the additional votes necessary to secure

a majority. The costs of this strategy will of course be higher the

greater the degree to which the voters identify with the party

in power.

Anticipating the strategy of the challenger, Kramer argues,

the incumbent’s best strategy will be to distribute benefits

widely. Should he fail to give a segment of the electorate bene-

fits equal to those enjoyed by others, then he simply will have

lowered the costs to the challenger of assembling a sufficient

number of votes to unseat him.4 The incumbent will therefore

distribute his resources uniformly across all members of the

electorate.

4 In addition, if he spends more on one segment of the electorate than upon
others, he could lower his own costs – and increase the resources that he
could retain for his own consumption – by reducing the differential.

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Turning to the voters, Kramer advances the argument an

additional step by asking: What if they were to behave stra-

tegically? What if they were to back political parties instru-

mentally, rather than out of an unreasoned sense of loyalty?

Behaving strategically, Kramer argues, the voters, in pursuit of

private benefits, would reduce their level of party loyalty. The

incumbent can purchase the votes of those who strongly iden-

tify with the ruling party relatively cheaply; the support of those

less loyal would command a higher price. As Kramer demon-

strates, when the voters learn to play the system to their advan-

tage they will then extract all the benefits on offer. Thus the

incumbent’s dilemma: Pursuing power to accumulate wealth,

they find themselves having to surrender their ill-gotten gains

to retain polit

ical office.

Did not the history of political competition in Zambia lend

support to Kramer’s argument, it would be easy to dismiss his

analysis as overstylized, abstract, and therefore divorced from

the realities of African politics.

The Example of Zambia

When Zambia became independent in 1964, it was governed

by UNIP (the United National Independence Party), which

had won majorities in all but Central and Southern provinces,

where the opposition ANC (the Africa National Congress)

held sway. In local council elections, legislative elections,

40
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bi-elections, and general elections, the governing party relent-

lessly targeted the opposition’s bailiwick. In each round of the

elections, it flooded the two provinces with organizers, provid-

ing them with housing, running money, and access to petrol

from the government’s stores. Most relevant for this discus-

sion was the theme of the government’s campaigns: “It pays to

belong to UNIP.” From the government’s point of view, those

who supported the opposition had merely increased the price

of their political loyalty. By refurbishing schools, grading roads,

and distributing public monies through local development

agencies, the government vigorously bid for votes from the

heartland of the opposition.

Naturally, political leaders in other regions deciphered the

lesson to be drawn from the government’s efforts. Most rele-

vant is the response of those from Luapula, a province long

loyal to the governing party. While politicians from the North-

ern Province dominated the Central Committee and therefore

the cabinet as well, the government built a well-surfaced road,

a railway, and an oil pipeline through Northern Province to the

coast. Political leaders from Luapula Province began to feel

that their colleagues from Northern Province were reaping a

disproportion of the benefits from holding office. By lowering

the level of their loyalty to UNIP, the politicians from Luapula

reasoned, they could increase the price of their support for

the incumbent regime and secure a larger share of the spoils

(Bates 1976). The flirtation of the “Luapulaists” with defection

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adumbrated later revolts, as other regional blocs listed their

grievances and maneuvered to extract benefits from those in

power.

From the government’s point of view, the costs of retaining

office had risen. Threatened with additional provincial defec-

tions and thus with the loss of power, the president empan-

elled a commission to explore the electoral rules; he charged

the commission with enquiring into the merits of single-party

rule. As documented by Larmer (2006), the commission

solemnly convened hearings in each and every region. Having

heard testimony in favor and against the abolition of opposi-

tion parties, it sensibly performed the task for which it had in

fact been convened: It recommended that Zambia become a

one-party state.

While the case does not map as clearly onto the matrix of

Kramer’s model as does that of Zambia, the post-indepen-

dence politics of Benin suggests similar forces at play. “Re-

sources,” Allen writes (1989), “were necessarily limited, but ex-

pansion and retention of support implied an ever-increasing

pressure for allocation of resources. . . . ” (p. 25). The compe-

tition for support led to a twenty percent increase in public

employment and a forty percent increase in public expendi-

ture – all in the first five years of independence. But then the

government encountered a critical constraint: the unwilling-

ness of the central bank, which was controlled by France, to

underwrite further increases in spending. By the late 1960s,

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Allen writes, it had become apparent to all that the system

based on the competitive supply of “pork” could no longer be

sustained (ibid.). The governing elite then put an end to elec-

toral competition.

As in Zambia, in Benin – and elsewhere – incumbents

formed single-party regimes. In other instances, and espe-

cially under military rulers, the incumbents formed no-party

systems. In the single-party regime, the cabinets were dom-

inated by top officials from the ruling party; in the no-party

system, the presidents formed cabinets as if picking a per-

sonal staff. In either case, in response to the crisis of clien-

telism, in Allen’s phrasing (Allen 1989), or to the high costs

of securing wealth from power, in the language of this study,

incumbents changed the structure of the political game. They

created authoritarian governments.

The New Political Game

Even after the banning of party competition, competitive polit-

ical forces remained, but they played out within the regime. It

was the head of state, rather than the voter, who now became

the object of competitive bidding, as minor apparatchiks jock-

eyed for recognition and competed for political favor and,

while doing so, marked down the price of their political loy-

alty. Political sycophancy replaced constituency service as the

best strategy for those with ambitions for office.

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Given the new structure of political competition, it was the

supplier rather than the demander of political favors who now

held the advantage. In the game of authoritarian politics, the

head of state controlled both access to material benefits and

control of the means of coercion. And it was to the chief exec-

utive that wealth and power now flowed.

In most African states, major financial institutions fell

under the control of the chief executive. Allen (1989) notes

that presidents in Francophone West Africa kept the ministry

of planning in their portfolios, not because they were com-

mitted to the formulation of development plans but rather

because these ministries received, and disbursed, foreign aid;

by controlling them, the president controlled a major source

of foreign exchange. In the case of Benin, he noted, the foreign

aid channeled through this ministry totaled $600 million in

1980–83 and “thus matched the size of the recurrent budget”

(Allen 1989, p. 52). In countries outside of the Francophone

zone, the president often controlled the central bank. Accord-

ing to Erwin Blumenthal,5 the national bank of Zaire main-

tained such accounts in Brussels, Paris, London, and New York

registered in the name of the national president (Blumenthal

1982).

5 Blumenthal had been dispatched by the International Monetary Fund to
restructure and manage the finances of Zaire.

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In addition to the financial bureaucracy, the president con-

trolled the means of coercion. Policing remains a national, not

a local, activity throughout most of Africa. The office of the

president oversaw the ministry of interior. The attorney gen-

eral, the official prosecutor for the state; the special branch;

and the prison system – in most countries, these agencies

lodged within the office of the president. In addition, the pres-

ident controlled special military forces, many organized to

suppress internal opposition rather than to defend against

external threats. Examples would include Robert Mugabe’s

Fifth Brigade, which unleashed a reign of terror in opposi-

tion areas within five years after independence, or Kwame

Nkrumah’s President’s Own Guard Regiment (POGR), some-

times referred to as his “private army” (Meredith 2005, p. 19).

Consider, too, the military units that reported to the president

of Zaire. Among them numbered:

A Civil Guard, commanded by his brother-in-law, Kpama

Baramoto;

A Special Research and Surveillance Brigade, commanded

by General Blaise Bolozi, also related to the President by

marriage;

A Special Action Forces, a paramilitary unit, commanded

by Honore Ngabanda Nzambo-ku-Atumba, a close aide

of Joseph Desire Mobutu and his chief of intelligence;

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and a Special Presidential Division, by all accounts the

most effective unit of them all, commanded by Gen-

eral Nzimbi Ngabale, also a “close relative” (Nzongola-

Ntalaja 2002, p. 154).

With control over wealth and the means of coercion,

authoritarian regimes were able to play a game that differed

from that played in the era of multiparty politics. As a mo-

nopoly supplier of political favors, the president could indi-

vidually tailor his political offers. Thus Kenneth Kaunda could

secure the loyalty of Mainza Chona at lower cost, given the

latter’s lack of a strong political base, than he could Simon

Kapwepe, who enjoyed a large following. Or Joseph Desire

Mobutu could recruit Barthelemy Bisegimana to serve as his

chief of staff at low cost, given the latter’s ambiguous standing

as a “citizen” of Rwandan extraction, but had to tolerate the

barbs and indulge (some of ) the whims of Étienne Tshiesekedi

with his strong local backing (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2004). And

rather than having to allocate resources in a universalistic and

egalitarian manner, the chief executive could employ them to

assemble a team of just sufficient political weight for winning.

With control over the means of coercion, the president was

positioned to make take-it-or-leave-it offers; with control over

bounteous benefits and fearsome sanctions, he could prevent

efforts by others to collude. The winning coalition would there-

fore not be egalitarian and universalistic, but rather unequal

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and minimum winning (Baron and Ferejohn 1989). And by

assembling a ruling coalition of small size, the president could

divert a larger portion of the “national pie” to his own bank

account.

The Shrinking Political Arena

In post-independence Africa, most states became authoritar-

ian (see Figures 2.2 and 2.4): Rather than having to distribute

benefits in a universalistic manner, incumbents could now

allocate them more narrowly, thereby retaining a greater por-

tion for themselves.

Once thus reconfigured, the political order appeared in-

creasingly to narrow; in the words of Kasfir (1976), in the 1970s,

it was “shrinking” in size.6 In search of resources to consume

and to expend in the pursuit of power, elites continued to en-

gage in extraction; their taxes were levied universally. But by

channeling benefits to those whom they favored, the elites

could offset the costs they inflicted upon those in whose loyalty

they sought to invest. The value of the (net) benefits would

increase as the number of clients declined, thus generating

incentives for the insiders to narrow the definition of what it

meant to be loyal.7 Incentives thus dictated a logic of exclusion.

6 The phrase is taken from Kasfir, N. (1976), The Shrinking Political Arena,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

7 This analysis draws upon Adam, C. S., and S. A. O’Connell (1999),
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The criterion for exclusion varied. Politicians often played

the nationality card: They thereby sought to exclude foreigners

from employment, as in Cote d’Ivoire (Cohen 1974), or from

ownership of land, as in Zaire (Lemarchand 2003; Nzongola-

Ntalaja 2004). In Zambia and Cote d’Ivoire, they invoked

national origins to discredit presidential candidates – Kenneth

Kaunda and Alassane Öutarra, respectively – arguing that they

had been born to immigrant parents.

Politicians also sought to restrict the benefits provided by

government to members of the ruling party. In single-party

states, those who were not members could not aspire to pub-

lic office or to a position in the public portion of the economy.

In Sierra Leone, Kpundeh records, clause 139 (3) of the cons-

titution of the ruling party provided that “no one can be

appointed or continue to be a permanent secretary ‘unless he

is a member of the recognized party’” that is, of the All People’s

Congress (APC), the governing party (Kpundeh 1995, p. 65). So,

too, in Zaire: When drafting the 1973 regulations for the ser-

vice, the civil service commissioner stated “special emphasis,

among the conditions required for recruitment, is placed on

party militancy and Zairian nationality” (Gould 1980, p. 67).

And in Senegal, Boone writes, “licenses were granted to the

Politics 11(3): 225–54; and Bueno de Mesquita, B., A. Smith, et al. (2003),
The Logic of Political Survival, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. See also
Kasara, K. (2007), “Tax Me If You Can,” American Political Science Review
101(1): 159–72.

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bons militants of the UPS [the Senegalese Progressive Union,

the ruling political party]” (Boone 1990, as quoted in Tangri

1999, p. 75).

To achieve a deeper familiarity with the meaning of single-

party rule, I turn once again to the case of Zambia. After Pres-

ident Kaunda reinstated the Eastern Province politicians to

their posts in UNIP’s Central Committee (see Box 3.1), sev-

eral Bemba-speaking leaders defected and formed an oppo-

sition party. The government responded by filing trumped-

up charges of murder and assault and detained the dissident

leaders.

When Simon Kapwepwe, the Bemba-speaking vice presi-

dent, also defected from UNIP, the government realized that

it stood to lose political support in the Luapula, Northern, and

Copperbelt provinces – all dominated by Bemba-speakers –

and so it could be left in control of fewer than one-half of

the provinces in Zambia. The government therefore sought to

manipulate the electoral process. Seats in Parliament, it was

ruled, belonged to the party, not the person; and when a mem-

ber crossed the floor, her seat then became vacant, neces-

sitating a bi-election, which it contested vigorously and vio-

lently, supporting its candidates with the resources of the state.

The government also reverted to repression. When those who

defected from the ruling party sought reelection to Parliament,

they found their permits for meetings denied, their campaign

posters defaced, and their supporters intimidated by gangs

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of youths and squads of police. In January 1972, one such

gang assaulted Simon Kapwepwe. In February, the government

banned his party and rounded up and imprisoned more

than 100 of its leaders. Many were beaten, some were tortur-

ed, and, as already noted, Zambia became a one-party state

(Gertzel, Baylies et al. 1984; Larmer 2006).

Following the end of multiparty politics, membership in the

ruling party became a form of citizenship. In 1970, the Provin-

cial Conference of UNIP resolved that “the UNIP membership

card should be made a legal document for the purpose of iden-

tification and holders of the card should be given preferential

treatment over non-holders in such spheres as employment,

promotions, markets, loans, business, housing and all socio-

economic activities” (Larmer 2006, pp. 36–7). Ordinary people

could not board public transport, cross bridges or pontoons,

or transact in public markets without producing a party card.

Those with educations and finances could not hold director-

ships or posts in state industries, qualify for bursaries or loans,

or secure the kinds of positions to which they aspired: ones

with a housing allowance, a limousine, and opportunities for

travel abroad. By tightly circumscribing the range of poten-

tial political beneficiaries, Zambia’s political elite more tightly

restricted access to economic opportunities.

In some instances, the logic that drove the politics of exclu-

sion appears to have culminated in the formation of a truly

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miniscule elite. In Rwanda, for example, President Juvenel

Habyarimana, close family members, and senior members of

the family of his wife dominated the financial ministries, the

security services, and the ruling party. That the word akasu, or

small house, came to refer to this group underlines the diminu-

tive size of the inner circle (Prunier 1998). In Kenya, Jomo

Kenyatta, his sons, his wives, and their relatives were referred

to as the “royal family.” Burundi was governed by a small group

from Bururi; Zaire by the “Ngbandi” clique from Equateur; and

Togo by the Kabye from Kara in the north.

To comprehend the capacity of such small groups to remain

in power, it is useful to recall that the security services in

Kenya were headed by the president’s in-law; that Equateur,

Bururi, and Kara provided the military elite in Zaire, Burundi,

and Togo, respectively; and that the akasu headed a security

apparatus that in April 1994 proved capable of killing 800,000

Rwandans.

The restructuring of African political institutions thus trig-

gered a logic of exclusion, resulting in political privilege and

economic inequality. Implicit in these transformations lay as

well the strengthening of incentives for political elites to deal

in private rather than public goods.

Consider a district of 20,000 people, each expecting “his”

or “her” politician to provide one dollar in benefits. The crea-

tion of one public good, producing a dollar’s worth of benefits

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for each resident, would be likely to cost less than the placing

of a dollar in the pocket of each resident. In general, as the

number of persons who claim benefits from the political elite

rises, the cost advantage to politicians of providing benefits in

the form of public rather than private goods increases as

well.

As Africa’s political elite restricted the scope of those entitled

to the benefits of independence, this advantage declined. The

shrinking of the political arena thus led to a reduction in the

incentives for those who sought positions of power to reward

their followers with public goods. Private benefits drove out

public goods as the coin of the political realm.8

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that searching for wealth and

power, political elites reconfigured African political institu-

tions, transforming them from multi- to single- or no-party sys-

tems or replacing civilian governments with military

regimes.

They also narrowed the range of those entitled to political ben-

efits. Rather than political independence serving the collec-

tive welfare, then, it instead conferred narrowly circumscribed

privileges upon those who won out in the competition for polit-

ical office.

8 This analysis builds upon Adam, C. S., and S. A. O’Connell (1999), “Aid,
Taxation, and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Economics and Poli-
tics 11(3): 225–54; and Bueno de Mesquita, B., A. Smith, et al. (2003), The
Logic of Political Survival, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

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During the struggle for independence, Africa’s citizens

had embraced politics. In response to the political realities

about them, however, in the post-independence era, they

increasingly came to view their leaders as a source of insecurity

and the state as a source of threat rather than of well-being.

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F ocusing on the determinants of economic growth in thepost-independence period, researchers from the Africa
Economic Research Consortium (AERC) isolated a set of “anti-

growth” syndromes: styles of policymaking that reduce the rate

at which national economies could grow (Ndulu, Collier et al.

2007). Most common is the combination of policies that they

designate as “control regimes,” which led to:

1. A closed economy.

2. The distortion of key prices in the macroeconomy.

3. The promotion and regulation of

industries.

4. The regulation of markets.

In this chapter, I shall describe these policies and discuss

their origins and their consequences. Control regimes are eco-

nomically costly, and I shall explain why incumbents nonethe-

less retained them, even after their costs were known. The

reason, I argue, is that the policies generated political ben-

efits for Africa’s authoritarian regimes. They provided elites

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with sources of income and furnished means for transform-

ing even declining economies into political organizations,

enabling politicians to recruit political dependents, willing to

fight – if necessary – to keep them in power. While yielding

political advantages, however, these policies contributed to

the subsequent collapse of Africa’s states.

The Content of Control Regimes

As reported by the AERC researchers, governments that adopt

control regimes regulate trade, manipulate the interest and

exchange rates, and develop close ties with urban-based

industries.

The Control of Trade

In the post-independence period, governments imposed tar-

iffs and quantitative controls on a wide range of industrial pro-

ducts. To sell their goods in Africa’s markets, foreign firms then

had to “jump over” these barriers and to invest in the plant and

equipment that would enable them to produce and thus mar-

ket their goods locally. These policies most frequently targeted

the goods most commonly consumed by the residents of poor

societies: processed foods, beverages, textiles, shoes, blankets,

kerosene, and other consumer products. In at least one case,

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Zambia, the government severely restricted the importation of

automobiles; and for a brief and inglorious moment, automo-

biles were produced in Livingstone, a small urban center on

the southern border of the country (Elliott 1971).

Macroeconomic Policies

Given the low level of industrialization, investors wishing to

establish new firms had to import plant and equipment from

abroad. To lower the costs of such investments, governments

restructured financial markets. Creating banks that targeted

“commerce,” “industry,” or more broadly “development,” they

made available loans at low rates of interest to those seeking

to invest in projects to which they accorded a high priority.

Outside of the Franc zone, they issued their own currencies.

Many then employed their control over the banking system to

set the rate at which this currency could be exchanged for cur-

rencies from abroad. By overvaluing their currency, they set

the exchange rate to the advantage of importers: Because they

could purchase foreign “dollars” more cheaply, those seeking

to invest in local industry could then import plant and equip-

ment at lower cost. Trade barriers having already been set in

place, their goods remained protected against foreign compe-

tition, whose products would have gained a price advantage

as a result of the revaluation of the local currency.

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Industrial Regulation

Governments that implemented control regimes also imple-

mented regulatory policies that enhanced the profitability

of firms. By licensing, they discouraged entry and protected

established producers. When governments themselves owned

firms, the governments were certain to prevent new firms

from competing with established producers; public enter-

prises then remained as the monopoly suppliers of their prod-

ucts. Moreover, because governments subsidized the costs of

capital, many firms adopted capital-intensive technologies;

they then tended to operate most profitably when producing

near full capacity. Because the protected markets of Africa were

small, the result was the creation of highly concentrated indus-

tries, with but one or two large firms in each, with firms operat-

ing at low capacity and therefore at high cost. But because the

noncompetitive structure of the domestic market conferred

on firms the power to set prices, they could remain privately

profitable, even while highly inefficient.

The Incidence of Costs and Benefits

When governments artificially increased the value of their cur-

rencies, the benefits that they conferred upon the importers

of capital equipment were matched by the costs they inflicted

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on exporters. When foreign dollars converted into fewer cedi

(the unit of currency of Ghana), or other African currencies,

exporters experienced a reduction in their incomes. In Africa’s

agrarian economies, most exporters were farmers, who pro-

duced coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton, sisal, and other crops for

foreign markets. When governments artificially increased the

value of their currencies, they may have protected the prof-

its of industrial firms by imposing tariffs and quantitative

restrictions on imports, but they rarely offered similar pro-

tection to farmers. Producers of rice in West Africa therefore

found themselves competing in local markets with imports

from Louisiana, and producers of cassava in Central Africa

faced competition from bakers advantaged by the low costs of

imported wheat. Trade policies were thus biased against the

exporters of cash crops and the producers of food crops as

well.

When governments regulated urban industries, they pro-

tected the profits of urban firms: By limiting competition,

they granted them the power to set prices to their advantage.

When governments regulated agriculture, they conferred mar-

ket power on consumers: They created monopsonies for the

purchase of both export and food crops. Governments pur-

chased the cash crops at a low domestic price, sold them at

the prices prevailing in international markets, and deposited

the difference in the public treasury. They purchased the food

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crops at prices set to ensure that soldiers, bureaucrats, and

urban workers would be assured of low cost food.

In the 1960s, the majority of Africa’s population lived in

the rural areas and agriculture constituted the largest single

industry. The policies thus favored the interests of a minority

over those of the vast majority of the population in most states.

As noted by Dumont (1966), “In May 1961 a number of farmers

north of Brazzaville said to me: ‘Independence isn’t for us; it’s

only for the city people’” (p. 17). It was precisely this property

of post-independence policies that Dumont condemned.

Control regimes thus benefited the urban and industrial

sector; indeed, given the aspiration for industrial development

that motivated many policymakers, this was their intent. But

they did so at the expense of the great majority of Africa’s pop-

ulation – those who lived in the rural areas – and the greatest

of Africa’s industries – agriculture.

For these policies to persist, opposition to them had to be

demobilized. The most likely opponents would be farmers;

and because they constituted a political majority, the farmers

were dangerous. The political commitment to control regimes

could persist, then, only insofar as political challengers

lacked an incentive to pursue electoral majorities. Authoritar-

ian institutions thus underpinned the imposition of control

regimes.

The relationship between political institutions and public

policies is captured by the data in Figures 4.1 and 4.2.

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0
10
20
30
40
50
60

Military Civilian All

P
e

rc
e

n
t

O
b

s
e

rv
a

ti
o

n
s

Percent Control Regimes

Figure 4.1. Control regimes and military government.

0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70

No-Party One-Party Multiparty All

P
e
rc
e
n
t
O
b
s
e
rv
a
ti
o
n
s
Percent Control Regimes

Figure 4.2. Control regimes and party system.

As indicated in Figure 4.1, military governments were far

more likely than civilian ones to adopt control regimes. From

the period 1970–1995, in more than 50% of the country years,

if the data registered the presence of military regimes, they

registered the presence of control regimes as well. As shown

in Figure 4.2, one- and no-party regimes were also more likely

to adopt control regimes, with more than 50% of the observa-

tions that centered on no- or single- party systems exhibiting

control regimes as well, as compared with but 30% of those

with multiparty systems. In this study, I label as authoritarian

governments that are headed by soldiers rather than civilians

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and those civilian regimes that have banned the formation of

opposition parties. The data thus suggest an elective affinity

between authoritarian politics and interventionist policies in

the post-independence period.1

Economic Costs and

Political Benefits

Given that agriculture is the largest single industry in most

African countries, it is not surprising that the economies of

countries that imposed control regimes appear to have grown

more slowly than others. The AERC research team measured

the economic impact of four major “anti-growth” syndromes

(Ndulu, Collier et al. 2007). The first was state failure. Next

came “inter-temporal redistribution,” which most commonly

occurred when governments would consume rather than save

the proceeds of resource booms. A third was ethnic or regional

redistribution, when governments became the political agents

of subnational minorities. The fourth was the adoption of con-

trol regimes.

Controlling for a variety of factors that might affect growth –

the growth rate of trading partners, for example – and

1 See, too, the Appendix. Turn as well to Chapters 4 and 11 of the first vol-
ume of Ndulu, B., P. Collier, et al. (2007), The Political Economy of Economic
Growth in Africa, 1960–2000, 2 vols, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.

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correcting for the impact of the growth rate on the choice

of policies, the researchers confirmed what most would have

expected: that state failure was the most damaging to growth.

When states failed in late-century Africa, growth rates fell

between 1.8% and 1.9% per annum. More surprising, perhaps,

was that they found that the imposition of a control regime

led to a loss of roughly 1.6 percentage points per annum in the

growth rate, thus rivaling the impact of state failure. State fail-

ure was relatively rare, occurring in just more than 10% of the

country years, 1970–1995. The imposition of control regimes,

however, was most decidedly not: They appear in more than

60% of the country year observations in the late 1970s and

early 1980s. The adoption of control regimes thus imposed

high costs on Africa’s economies.

If the policies harmed the economic interests of most

Africans and lowered the growth rate of national economies,

then why were they chosen? And, once chosen, why did they

remain in place? The answer, I argue, is that the policies served

political rather than economic interests.The interventionist

style of policymaking enabled governments to target benefits

to important constituencies, thus – in the short term, at least –

promoting political order. And by transforming industries and

markets into political organizations, it enabled governments

to spin webs of political obligation and thus forge the political

machines that kept them in power.

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Political Benefits

In West Africa, the richer regions lie in the southern portions,

which are heavily forested. The Sahelian regions – dry and with

uncertain rainfall – have little to offer the international econ-

omy2; lying inland from the coast, what little they have to offer

has necessarily to be shipped at high cost, leaving few prof-

its for producers. Throughout West Africa, then, there exists a

disparity between the economies of the coast and interior.

Illustrative is the case of Nigeria. At the time of indepen-

dence, the economy’s most important exports – cocoa, palm

oil, and other agricultural products – flowed from the south.

Not only did the south have prosperous farmers, but it also was

home to the merchants, bankers, and lawyers who provided the

services for the export industries. While the north was not rich,

it was powerful. It contained more than one-half of Nigeria’s

population. It was relatively homogeneous: The great major-

ity of its people followed Islam and considered themselves to

be Hausa-Fulani. And its emirates provided a means for orga-

nizing its people. While relatively poor, then, the region could

marshal formidable political forces.

By dint of the north’s large size and degree of organization,

following independence, its politicians assumed control of the

executive branch of the federal government. Pursuing a policy

2 The exception is cotton, which long has faced high tariff barriers in global
markets.

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of import substituting industrialization (Helleiner 1966; Little,

Scitovsky et al. 1970; Schatz 1977), the government promoted

the formation of domestic industries, many of which it con-

vinced to locate in the north. It also placed a disproportion of

its development projects in the region. The costs of these ini-

tiatives fell largely upon the south, whose consumers paid the

higher prices that resulted from tariff protection and whose

farmers paid the taxes that financed public investments.

The south’s reaction is captured in a statement issued in

1964 by the government of the eastern region:

Take a look at what they [the North] have done. . . . Kainji Dam

Project – about £150 of our money when completed – all in the

North. . . . Bornu Railway Extension – about £75 million of our

money when completed – all in the North. . . . Military training

and ammunition factories and installations are based in the

North, thereby using your money to train Northerners to fight

Southerners. . . . Building of a road to link the dam site and the

Sokoto cement works – £7 million, when completed – all in the

North. . . . Total on all these projects about £262 million (italics

in original Gboyega 1997, p. 161).

The regional tensions that marked the politics of Nigeria

found their parallel elsewhere in Africa. In Togo, General

Gnassingbé Eyadéma held power for thirty-eight years; him-

self from the north, Eyadéma used the powers of the state to

extract the wealth of the south for the benefit of his family, the

military, and his region. In Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, it was the

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south that tended to control the national government; but by

choosing northerners for the vice presidency (as in the case of

Ghana) or by intervening in the economy and channeling pub-

lic funds into the interior (as in Cote d’Ivoire), political leaders

sought to ease regional tensions.3

Turning to East Africa, Uganda, too, was marked by north-

ern poverty and southern prosperity. In Tanzania, the pro-

ducers of export crops cluster at the higher elevations, where

they enjoy bounteous and reliable rainfall and moderate

temperatures; the dry climate and arid lands at lower eleva-

tions sustain subsistence production. Both Milton Obote in

Uganda and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania built their political

base in the poorer regions, propounded socialist principles,

and imposed control regimes in an effort to redistribute the

wealth of the prosperous regions to the semi-arid zones.

While these examples are suggestive, the evidence from

Zambia is more compelling. It enables one to observe “in real

time,” as it were, the process by which regional tensions shaped

policy choices. Within a half decade of independence, the

United National Independence Party – UNIP, the governing

party – was wracked by conflict between regional blocs of

3 For an analysis of similar tensions in Cameroon, see Bayart, J.-F. (1989),
Cameroon, in Contemporary West African States, edited by John Dunn,
Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, and Richard Rathbone, London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press; and Levine, V. T. (1986), Leadership and Regime Changes
in Perspective, in The Political Economy of Cameroon, edited by M. G.
Schatzberg and I. W. Zartman, New York: Praeger.

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politicians, each of whom sought to seize high offices in the

ruling party and thus in the government as well. Politicians

from the Bemba-speaking districts made up one faction. They

came from the Northern and Luapula provinces, and also

from Copperbelt Province, the mineral rich region to which

Bemba speakers had long migrated in search of employment

(see Map 3.1). Another faction consisted of politicians from

the Nyanja-speaking provinces: Eastern Province and Lusaka

(which includes the city of Lusaka, the national capital). To

the side stood the leaders from Barotse, or Western Province,

in the southwest; the Central and Southern provinces, largely

controlled by the opposition party; and the North-Western

Province, which was sparsely inhabited.

At the time of independence, 1964, politicians from the

Eastern Province held the vice presidency and the largest sin-

gle bloc of seats in the Central Committee (see Box 3.1). Three

years later, the Bemba-speaking politicians coalesced with

those from Central and Southern provinces to seize the vice

presidency and capture the Central Committee. The result was

a political crisis within the ruling party, as the losers sought to

lay claim to the offices they once had held, and to the govern-

ment posts, with their attendant perquisites, that went with

them. In response to this crisis, the president, Kenneth Kaunda,

introduced the first of what became known as “economic

reforms.” In this instance, the reforms involved the takeover of

foreign-owned companies. The distribution and management

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of their assets provided a resource to compensate those who

lost out in the competition for power.

In the general elections that followed those within the rul-

ing party, Barotse, whose leaders had allied with the Nyanja-

speaking bloc, defected to ANC (the Africa National Congress),

thus joining the Central and Southern provinces in the ranks

of the opposition. To consolidate support in the six provinces

that remained loyal, President Kaunda struck once again, this

time nationalizing the copper industry. In 1969, the newly

elected vice president of UNIP resigned, sparking rumors of

the withdrawal of the Bemba-speaking bloc from the govern-

ing party. The president responded with yet another economic

“reform,” adding the banking and insurance industries to the

government’s portfolio (see Elliott 1971; Szeftel 1978; Burdette

1988).

In the years following independence, regional conflict thus

punctuated the politics of Zambia. In response to the open-

ing of each political fissure, the president extended the scope

of the government’s control of the economy. By nationalizing

firms, gaining control over key sectors, and building a regu-

latory apparatus about publicly owned firms,4 the president

multiplied the political resources at his command. He posted

4 The firms were known as INDECO (Industrial Development Corporation),
FINDECO (Finance and Development Corporation), and MINDECO (Min-
ing Development Corporation), all under ZIMCO (Zambia Industrial and
Mining Corporation).

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politicians to the boards of each firm in which the government

held an interest. And he staffed the bureaucracy that superin-

tended each group of firms with directors chosen from within

the ruling party.

Interventionist policies, the example of Zambia suggests,

confer upon governments the resources with which to ame-

liorate political tensions, many arising from conflicts between

regions. Control regimes may be expensive, then; they may

reduce the rate of economic growth of the national econ-

omy. But their costs appear to represent the costs of forging

viable political bargains. In Africa, political order is expensive

to maintain.

The Maintenance of Authoritarian Regimes

If conflicts between regional political delegations help to

account for the adoption of control regimes, the question still

remains: Why, once chosen, did they remain in place?

A major reason for the retention of these policies, I would

argue, is that they were economically rewarding for those in

power – and politically useful as well. They provided the liga-

ments that bound together Africa’s authoritarian regimes.

As we have seen, when imposing control regimes, govern-

ments often pegged their currency at a value higher than that

which would have been generated by a competitive market.

When doing so, they created an excess demand for foreign

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“dollars.” Those in possession of local currency could then

purchase foreign currencies at a price that lay below that pre-

vailing in currency markets. Because the demand for foreign

exchange exceeded the supply at official prices, the foreign

currencies then had to be rationed: Whoever controlled their

allocation was now in a position to reward his political follow-

ers, his family, and his friends. Control over the central bank

creates the opportunity to increase one’s wealth and to build

a political network.

By appreciating the value of the domestic currency, gov-

ernments that intervened in currency markets increased the

demand for imports. When the currency was set at an artifi-

cially high level, those who secured it at the official price could

purchase foreign goods more cheaply. By importing those

goods and selling them in the domestic market, they could

then pocket in local currency the benefit created by the gov-

ernment’s manipulation of the exchange rate. But because the

currency was set at an artificially high level, those who export

earned less in foreign markets: Each dollar earned abroad gen-

erated less local income. With the demand for imports increas-

ing and the incentives to export decreasing, governments that

set the value of their currency too high soon began to incur

trade deficits. To stem these deficits, they began to regulate

imports. They blocked the importation of “luxuries” to facili-

tate the continued importation of “essential” goods, banning

the import of liquor, for example, to enable the purchase of

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medicines or banning the importation of motorcars to safe-

guard the purchase of tractors.

Governments that sought to control the value of their

money in international markets thus soon found themselves

regulating the flow of trade as well. One result was the growth

of a bureaucracy to ration access to foreign exchange and the

importation of foreign goods. Another was the growth of politi-

cal machines, as those who controlled and enforced trade regu-

lations conferred the right of access to foreign markets, thereby

creating clients: people who owed them their economic for-

tunes and whose political loyalty they could therefore expect

in return.

The intersection of the borders between Rwanda, Uganda,

and eastern Zaire (present-day Congo) provides an apt illustra-

tion. In 1973, General Juvenal Habyarimana deposed Gregoire

Kayibanda as president of Rwanda. Already commander of

the armed forces, the new president sought control over the

economic bureaucracy as well, including – and perhaps espe-

cially – the central bank.

To the west of Rwanda lie some of the most productive

lands of Zaire: temperate, well watered, and endowed with

rich, volcanic soils. There grows some of the best coffee pro-

duced in East Africa. Near the border also lie deposits of gold

and some of the last major herds of elephants in Africa. Able to

purchase hard currencies at advantageous rates, those upon

whom Habyarimana conferred access to foreign exchange at

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the official rate were at an advantage in the scramble for the

riches of eastern Zaire. The president targeted his largesse on

his family, his wife’s family, and his subordinates in his mili-

tary, many of whom, like Habyarimana and his wife, came from

the northern districts of the country. Funded by members of

Rwanda’s inner circle, traders and businessmen crossed the

border to Zaire and purchased coffee, ivory, and gold. Trans-

porting these goods to the coast, they returned laden with

luxuries: liquor, automobiles, appliances, and expensive cloth-

ing, to be sold in shops, boutiques, and showrooms owned

by friends of the president.5 Each member of the president’s

circle then assembled his own political retinue from among

those to whom they had extended favors: the granting of for-

eign exchange, the “right” to market shoes or liquor purchased

abroad, or to sell their coffee to private buyers instead of to the

state monopoly. The politicians thus cast webs of political obli-

gation about the informal markets to which the government’s

interventionist policies gave rise.

Recall that the ruling elite controlled not only the economic

agencies but also the security services. The political ties that

ramified about the regulated economy were forged not only

from selective benefits but also from targeted sanctions. Many

5 Meredith, M. (2005), The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of
Independence, London: Free Press. Interviews by the author, Rwanda,
2000.

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of the most valuable sources of wealth were illegal: Riches were

gleaned in the “shadow economy.” Those who secured their

income illegally were liable to seizure, prosecution, and deten-

tion – or worse, and their vulnerability grew in proportion to

their bank accounts. Given that they had violated the law, their

prospects – financial and political – lay at the discretion of those

who controlled the coercive apparatus of the state.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that there is an elective affin-

ity between political institutions and policy choices in post-

independence Africa. The banning of opposition parties and

the end of multiparty politics enabled political elites to adopt

and retain economic policies that harmed farmers, even

though in many states the rural producers formed a major-

ity of the population. Because politicians competed for the

favor of the state house rather than for the backing of citizens,

the numerical supremacy of Africa’s rural population posed no

threat to those in power and so failed to alter their choice of

policies.

Because of the incidence of the costs, control regimes effec-

tively constituted a tax on agriculture. If only because agricul-

ture represented the single largest industry in most of Africa’s

economies, the policies thereby lowered the continent’s rate of

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economic growth. That these policies nonetheless remained

in place reflects the political advantages that they conferred:

resources that authoritarian elites could employ to ameliorate

political tensions, to recruit political clients, and to build polit-

ical machines, and thereby remain in power.

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B eneath the political surface of Africa’s authoritarianregimes, there were forces at work that sowed the polit-
ical landscape with multitudinous opportunities for conflict.

The economies of Africa’s rural communities rendered them

politically expansionary, and therefore generated competing

claims for land. So long as political order reigned at the national

level, and so long as the incumbent regimes could marshal

the resources with which to purchase or to compel political

restraint, the resultant conflicts could be contained. When

states began to fail, however, local conflicts then acquired

national significance. They offered opportunities to politicians

The argument in this chapter should be viewed as a contribution to the study
of Africa’s “political geography,” as pioneered by Herbst, J. (2000), States and
Power in Africa, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Boone, C. (2003),
Political Topographies of the African State: Rural Authority and Institutional
Choice, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press; and Azam, J.-P. (2007),
The Political Geography of Redistribution, Chapter 6 in The Political Economy
of Economic Growth in Africa, 1960–2000, edited by B. Ndulu, P. Collier, R. H.
Bates, and S. O’Connell, Cambridge, U.K.:

Cambridge University Press.

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seeking to consolidate political followings, and as national

elites were drawn to parochial disputes, Africa’s rural citizens,

in search of political champions, flocked about them. When

political order declined in late-century Africa, it therefore did

so precipitously. Competition between local communities thus

increased the costs of governing by authoritarian regimes and

the pace with which they subsequently collapsed.

Rural Dynamics

To apprehend the forces at play, consider a family and its

choice of where to settle.1 The family will naturally choose to

farm the highest-quality land, where its efforts will result in

the greatest return. Alternatively, by working such lands, it

can secure sufficient food to feed itself at least effort. Now let

another family arrive and the population increase. This fam-

ily must choose between being the second family to settle on

the highest-quality land or the first to settle on the land of the

next-best quality. Where it settles depends upon the relative

magnitude of the output that it can secure in the two loca-

tions. For purposes of argument, assume that the differential

in land quality is such that this second family, as did the first,

1 This analysis follows Ricardo, D. (1821), On the Principles of Political Econ-
omy and Taxation, London: John Murray.

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secures a higher return to its labor in the highest-quality

land.

It will then choose to locate adjacent the first family. As the

cycle repeats itself over time, a settlement will therefore grow

in the lands of higher quality.

A second pattern will also emerge, however: a trickle of set-

tlers to the periphery. Because of diminishing returns, as more

families crowd onto the lands of high quality, the increment

in production that results from each additional unit of labor

declines. New arrivals will therefore eventually find it more

attractive to be the first to settle on the lands of lesser quality

rather than to be the last to settle on lands of superior quality.

There therefore begins a process of dispersal in the settlement

pattern.

Arable and Pastoral Production

In Africa, as elsewhere, agriculture involves more than the

planting and harvesting of crops. It also involves the breed-

ing and herding of livestock, and this activity too induces the

shifting of population to the periphery. When livestock graze,

they make extensive use of land. As the core becomes more

densely settled, land becomes scarce; it therefore increases in

value. To conserve on the use of this resource, farmers there-

fore tend to shift their livestock to less densely settled areas. In

addition, when grazing, cattle, goats, and sheep may wander

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into the fields, and pastoralism can therefore lower the return

from arable production. Farmers therefore seek to separate

the two activities, shifting their livestock from the core to the

periphery. In the absence of “mixed farming,”2 the two activi-

ties – arable and pastoral production – will be most productive

if managed apart.

Investment

Families combine persons of different genders, ages, and gen-

erations, and this property furnishes an additional reason for

territorial expansion: the opportunity to invest and thereby

escape a future dominated by diminishing returns.

As time passes and population increases, without technical

change, each additional unit of labor adds less to the total prod-

uct. If labor is paid its marginal product, then wages fall. Even

were the total product to be divided equally, insofar as output

increases more slowly than does population, per capita con-

sumption will fall. In either case, the society becomes poorer

with the passage of time.

In the face of diminishing returns, out-migration offers an

escape from poverty. Because migration is costly, it is likely to

2 This is the change that marked the commercial revolution in European
agriculture. See, for example, Timmer, C. P. (1969), “The Turnip, the New
Husbandry, and the English Agricultural Revolution,” Quarterly Journal
of Economics 83: 375–96.

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be the younger rather than the older generation that migrates,

for the younger generation can amortize the costs of migra-

tion over a longer stream of earnings. To treat migration as a

choice made solely by the younger generation, however, is to

fail to recognize other incentives at play. The elders, too, are

subject to the consequences of diminishing returns; as popu-

lation grows, they, too, experience a fall in the wage rate and

in average income. As elders, they may be less likely to emi-

grate. But they, too, would benefit from the out-migration of

the young, as their departure would reduce the quantity of

labor and therefore raise the earnings of workers in the core.

Diminishing returns thus creates an incentive for the elders

to invest in the out-migration of the young. The search for an

escape from diminishing returns strengthens the incentives to

invest in expansion in Africa’s rural economies.

Variations in Form

Thus far I have emphasized the economics of territorial expan-

sion. It is important to address the politics as well. In doing

so, I draw the conventional distinction between decentralized

and centralized societies in Africa (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard

1987). In decentralized societies, politics is dominated by fam-

ily heads; there is no chief and no bureaucracy. In centralized

societies, there exists a chief executive, a retinue of palace offi-

cials, and bureaucrats who levy taxes and make war. I note as

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well a third kind of political system, one in which there is no

bureaucracy but the society is spanned by formal institutions

called age grades. Despite the variation in the way the societies

are structured, each type can be regarded as offering an alter-

native political solution to a common problem: the need for

intergenerational contracts that will promote the peopling of

the periphery.

The Family

Migration requires infusions of capital. If a farmer, the junior

member will have to be supported until he claims, clears, and

cultivates a piece of land. If a pastoralist, he will need to be given

stock with which to build a herd. In either case, repayment is

deferred. In some instances, the returns to such investments

take the form of increased land holdings and a lowering of risk,

as the family estate comes to ramify across different ecological

zones; in others, it yields a flow of milk, curds, and hides from

flocks consigned to the young for safekeeping, or of cattle with

which to pay bride price and increase the size and prestige

of the lineage. In either case, the elder investors incur costs

today; the young recipients later repay; and there arises a flow

of resources back to senior members of the family.

The transformation of the family into a means of invest-

ment confronts a major dilemma, however. The transactions

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are separated temporally: The costs fall upon the elders in

present time while repayment must of necessity be delayed.

In addition, the parties to the transaction are separated by

space. The elders cannot monitor the efforts of the young; they

cannot assess the validity of excuses for non-repayment, such

as the loss of livestock to disease or of crops to grazing wildlife.

The potential for opportunism is therefore high, weakening

the incentives to invest.

In African societies, the politics of gerontocracy provide one

solution to this dilemma. The solution takes the form of the

conferral upon the elders of resources and sanctions sufficient

to enable them to counter the attractions of defection by the

young.

In many African societies, only those who are married and

have fathered children of their own can hold seats in polit-

ical councils, take part in policy debates, and lay claim to

prestigious honors. And often it is the elders who control the

resources required for the payment of bride wealth. Because of

polygamy, they also control a large portion of the stock of mar-

riageable women, and thus the opportunities for the young

men to find suitable brides. The elders’ control over the possi-

bility of marriage therefore yields them power over the political

prospects of the young (see Meillassoux 1981).

If an elder rules that certain rituals have not been prop-

erly observed or that certain ceremonies have been improperly

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performed, then a marriage – or a birth – might not be legit-

imate. Those whose standing in the family is thus rendered

uncertain may therefore lose access to the property or to the

political offices controlled by their lineage. That the elders

interpret family law therefore places them in a position to gov-

ern the allocation of both wealth and power.

Gerontocratic political institutions thus shape the incen-

tives that govern the conduct of the young. Whereas they may

prefer to avoid their obligations, given the power of the elders,

the young are unlikely to choose to do so. Within a political

gerontocracy, the elders control sufficient sanctions to make

it in the interests of the young to keep their pledges. Knowing

that the young will not defect, the elders are therefore will-

ing to invest; they are willing to sponsor the movement to the

frontier. Political structures thus shape economic incentives

in ways that strengthen the forces of territorial expansion in

rural Africa.3

3 See Fortes, M. (1958), Introduction, inThe Developmental Cycle in Domes-
tic Groups, edited by J. Goody, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press; Kenyatta, J. (1953), Facing Mount Kenya, London: Secker and
Warburg; Sahlins, M. D. (1961), “The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization
of Predatory Expansion,” American Anthropologist 63: 322–45; Sahlins, M.
D. (1968), Tribesmen, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall; Sahlins, M. D.
(1971), Tribal Economies, in Economic Development and Social Change,
edited by G. Dalton, Garden City, NY: Natural History Press for the Amer-
ican Museum of Natural History: 43–61; and Bates, R. H. (1989), Beyond
the Miracle of the Market, Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press.

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Age Grades

In some societies, relationships between generations are

explicitly marked by the presence of age grades. In such soci-

eties, youths pass through a series of stages before being

allowed to marry and assume senior positions in the tribe.

Toward the end of their “probationary period,” they serve as

warriors. One of their tasks is to provide defense; a second is

to conquer, seizing cattle and appropriating land. Each age set

adds an increment to the total population of the tribe; each is

expected to add as well to its productive holdings. As stated by

Waller and Sobania, writing of the Masai:

[T]raditions of nineteenth-century expansion and warfare are

structured to link successive stages in their occupation of

Maasailand and control of its resources to the progression of

age-sets. The advances made by one set are consolidated and

exploited by their successors, land resources of stock, graz-

ing and water captured are utilized by elders. In this [process

of] . . . individual maturation, the continuous flow of age-sets,

and community growth and expansion are woven together. . . .

(Waller and Sobania 1994, p. 58).

States

Those who study the origins of political centralization in Africa

often stress the role of conflict: The lineages that can conquer

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or subvert are those that furnish kings (see, for example,

Wrigley 1996). They also stress the willingness of followers to

obey, that is, to cede power and wealth to the ruling lineage.

In search of the factors that shape the level of deference, it is

useful to return once again to the role of land, and in particular

to the significance of differences in its productivity.

As stressed by Carneiro (1970) and Reyna (1990), when land

is of uniform quality, those who feel oppressed can resist sim-

ply by exiting. As stressed by Turner (1957), the existence of

this option limits the power of headmen and promotes polit-

ical schism rather than political centralization. When there

is a differential in the productivity of the best and next-best

lands, however, then political centralization becomes possible.

When the high-quality lands are circumscribed by unproduc-

tive ones, people will be reluctant to exit, even though coerced

or taxed. Thus it is that states formed in the highlands of the

Sahara, where the rains fall midst the desert, but rarely in the

savannahs, where the uniform productivity of the land made

exit a viable strategy (Vansina 1966). Thus, too, the location of

states in the richly endowed river valleys, where alluvial soils

and abundant moisture promises returns far greater than those

in adjacent territories.

Not only do communities in such favored settings tend to be

more highly centralized; they also tend to be more densely pop-

ulated (Stevenson 1968). The price of land is therefore high rel-

ative to that of labor. As a result, the monarch can accumulate

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power. He can do so by exchanging the protection of land rights

for political services, such as the payment of taxes or the levy-

ing of conscripts.

Like their decentralized counterparts, centralized king-

doms tended to expand. Rather than dispatching youths to

settle lands on the periphery, in states, monarchs recruited

them into the military and sent them to conquer new terri-

tories. The occupation of newly seized territories decreased

the pressure of population on the lands of the core; it there-

fore increased the wage rate in the center. And it brought an

influx of wealth from assets captured by the military: taxes

from traders and miners, as in Ashanti (Wilks 1975); on ports,

as in Dahomey (Polanyi 1991) and Uganda (Wrigley 1996); and

on ivory, as in Central Africa (Vansina 1966). By the forceful

seizure of resources abroad the military added to the stock of

wealth at home. Centralized societies thereby secured higher

incomes for their members through expansion and conquest.

Impact on Contemporary Politics

Because of the “imperial peace,” traditional states now rarely

mobilize for conquest or warfare in Africa; nor, in most cases,

do age-grade societies continue to keep their youths under

arms. Nonetheless, past conquests by monarchs and warriors

created territorial disputes that reverberate to this day and so

shape contemporary politics. And even in the present, families

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organize the out-migration of junior kin, generating conflicts

between “strangers” and “sons of the soil.” Beneath the sur-

face of national politics there thus lie the political tensions

produced by the dynamics of agrarian societies.4

Kenya

The Kikuyu of Kenya exemplify the decentralized mode of

expansion. In the nineteenth century, the Kikuyu resided on

the slopes of Mt. Kenya, where the soils were rich, the tem-

peratures moderate, and where rains fell both in spring and

the autumn, enabling the production of two crops a year. As

described in detail by Ensminger and Leakey (Leakey 1977), as

their numbers rose, families opened up new territory, moving

to lower-lying lands at the base of Mt. Kenya. With yet further

increases in population, the Kikuyu spread outward. Young

people, entrusted with the family herds, were among the first

to be dispatched to the frontier; they were soon followed by

young couples who planted gardens. Crossing the mountains

of Aberdare range, they settled along the upper margins of the

escarpment bordering the Rift Valley (Mbithi and Barnes 1975).

Doing so, they penetrated into contested terrain: lands grazed

by the pastoralists – the Masai to the north and south and the

Kalenjin-speakers to the west.

4 The argument just offered can be viewed as providing “micro-
foundations” for Fearon’s findings regarding the origins of ethnic warps.
See Fearon (2004).

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In “normal” years, the pastoralists tend to graze on the

valley floor; during the dry season, they drive their herds to

higher elevations. In periods of drought, they enter forested

areas along the rim of the valley, which offers browse that could

replace the grasses. For their part, the Kikuyu had found the

lands unsettled; when the pastoralists and their herds took

refuge in the wooded fringe, the Kikuyu then felt that they had

been invaded. By contrast, from the pastoralists’ point of view,

the Kikuyu had reduced their options for dealing with the risks

of nature.

In the 1990s, the conflicts in the Rift Valley moved from

the local to the national political agenda. Following violent

demonstrations at home and mounting pressures from abroad

(Hempstone 1997), President Daniel arap Moi agreed in 19

to an end to single-party rule. The pastoralists composed the

political base of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the

governing party; the Kikuyu steadfastly backed the political

opposition. Campaigning for votes in the Rift Valley, oppo-

sition politicians backed the cause of the Kikuyu settlers;

the incumbents backed the communities whose lands they

had “invaded.” “Majimboism” – meaning federalism – became

a code word for this dispute. Were federalism to be adopted,

the more numerous pastoralists would have gained control

over the provincial government, leading to the extinguish-

ing of Kikuyu land rights in the Rift Valley – and to ethnic

cleansing.

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In the midst of growing insecurity, ambitious elites hurried

to build competing political organizations. In the five months

that passed from the end of single-party rule to the time of

multiparty elections, the Rift Valley became a breeding house

for the formation of armed militias, as politicians sought to

build reputations for being able to defend rights to land.5

Ethiopia

In northwestern Kenya and eastern Uganda, young Karama-

jong, Pokot, and Samburu, carrying AK-47s rather than spears,

pillage the cattle of their neighbors and compel agricultural-

ists to allow their cattle to graze on their fields (Fratkin, Roth

et al. 1994; Jalata 2005). Further north lie the Oromo who, by

tradition, initiate a new age set of warriors every eight years.

5 Daily Nation, Constituency Review: Laikipia District, July 16, 2002,
pp. 11–14; Rutten, M. (2001), “Fresh Killings”: The Njoro and Laikipia
Violence in the 1997 Kenyan Elections Aftermath, in Out for the Count:
The 1997 General Elections and Prospects for Violence in Kenya, edited by
M. Rutten, A. Mazrui, and F. Gignon, Kampala, Uganda: Fountain Pub-
lishers; Mwakikagile, G. (2001), Ethnic Politics in Kenya and Nigeria,
Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers; Kimenyi, M. S., and N. Ndung’u
(2005), Sporadic Ethnic Violence: Why Has Kenya Not Experienced a Full
Blown Civil War? in Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, Vol-
ume 1 (Africa), edited by P. Collier and N. Sambanis, Washington, DC: The
World Bank; Finance Magazine, “Kalenjin Liberation Army,” September
15, 1992, pp. 20–6; National Council of Churches of Kenya (1992), The
Cursed Arrow, Nairobi: NCCK; Republic of Kenya, Parliamentary Select
Committee (1992), Report of The Parliamentary Select Committee to Inves-
tigate Ethnic Clashes in Western and Other Parts of Kenya, Nairobi: Kenya
Parliament.

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Over the centuries, their youthful fighters have helped the

Oromo to spread from their homeland in Borena throughout

the Ethiopian lowlands, occupying the northeastern territo-

ries near the Red Sea and the southwestern regions bordering

Kenya.

Until the revolution of 1974, the Ethiopian state rested

on foundations forged from traditional states on the high-

lands. The highland kingdoms embodied the “high culture”

of Ethiopia. They defended the elaborate ecclesiastical hier-

archy of the Coptic Church, lived off incomes extracted from

peasants, and participated in the culture of the imperial court.

The Oromo, by contrast, embodied the “low” culture. While

a large number are Christian, few Oromo staffed the hierar-

chy of the church. Their economy is based on pastoralism, not

farming, and their society is egalitarian, not hierarchical.

Propelled by the expansionary dynamics of the age-grade

system, the Oromo peopled the margins of the Ethiopian state,

territorially and ideologically. They became the object of cam-

paigns mounted by the hegemonic center. In the times of the

empire, they were forced to convert to Christianity and to tithe

to the church; following the revolution, they were forced to sur-

render their lands to a socialist state. They have been subject to

forceful occupation by clients of the national government. In

the era of the empire, the center granted court favorites lands

on the frontier and the right to enserf the Oromo who occu-

pied them; following the revolution, the central government

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stationed military units in the periphery and commandeered

food and livestock to feed its soldiers and bureaucrats. Seek-

ing economic development, the present government invests

in the growing of cotton, sugar, and wheat. More often than

not, it locates its projects not in the highly populated center

but rather in the less crowded periphery, resulting in the loss of

land and water rights for the Oromo (de Waal 1991; Salih and

Markakis 1998; Lewis 2001; Marcus 2002).

The politics of Ethiopia is thus marked by conflicts between

a dynamic and expansionary society, which has extended its

territory and claims to land, and a state system that champions

what it regards as the interests of the center. Powerful issues of

culture underlie these conflicts. Central, too, are disputes over

land.
Uganda

When colonizing East Africa, the British had found it bet-

ter to work through rather than to displace the kingdom of

Buganda.6 Conferring upon it the status of a protectorate, they

employed its administration and police to govern other por-

tions of Uganda. And they rewarded the Baganda for their ser-

vices by acceding to their territorial claims, which included

6 Uganda is the country, Buganda the territory of the Baganda, one of the
tribes that dwell in Uganda. By the same construction, Bunyoro is the
kingdom of the Banyoro people.

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ownership of several “counties” that Buganda had seized from

Bunyoro, a neighboring kingdom. When Milton Obote sought

Uganda’s independence from Britain, he found it useful to

ally with the Baganda, and he allied his UPC (Uganda Peo-

ple’s Congress) with the KY (Kabaka Yekka), the court party of

the Kabaka, their paramount chief. Implicit in the agreement

was his government’s support for the land claims of Buganda.

By championing the cause of a party to this dispute, junior

politicians could build political ties with a political kingdom,

secure a powerful political ally, and thereby accelerate their rise

to political prominence. More senior politicians, particularly

those within the upper ranks of the UPC, also took advantage

of the dispute between the two kingdoms. By threatening to

champion the cause of the Bunyoro, they could threaten to

alienate the KY, thus destabilizing the Obote regime. In this

manner, they sought to extort favors from the central govern-

ment. The conflict between two of the most powerful states

in Uganda thus destabilized the Obote government, driving

Uganda close to state failure – and to single-party rule (Kasfir

1976; Kasozi 1994; Hansen and Twaddle 1995; Kabwegyere

1995; Khadiagala 1995).

Conclusion

Africa’s peoples, like the rest of us, desire higher incomes. In

the absence of technical change, the law of diminishing returns

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ensures that the growth of population results in immiseration

rather than prosperity. To elude the power of that law, people

flee to the periphery. In the conditions that prevail in rural

Africa, the search for prosperity thus fuels territorial expansion

and competing claims to land. In times of political disorder,

these local conflicts can accelerate the failure of states.

The dynamics depicted in this chapter are not unique to

Africa, of course. They resemble those that shape political con-

flict in South Asia, although there the protagonists are char-

acterized as “strangers” and “sons of the soil” (Weiner 1978;

Brass 1985) rather than as “tribes,” as in the literature on Africa.

They find their parallel in pre-industrial Europe as well, espe-

cially at the time of the migration of the Germans and Goths

(Bartlett 1993). That the migrants were known as jovenes –

or youths – highlights the role that generational succession

played in the political dynamics of these societies. The feudal

order that emerged in response to these invasions was based

on the exchange of protection of property for political service

(Bloch 1970). That this exchange characterizes political con-

tracts in much of Africa highlights the broader significance of

the dynamics discussed in this chapter.

In the chapter that follows, I turn to the outbreak of political

disorder in late-century Africa. As adumbrated in the fable of

Chapter 2, it was triggered by elite predation – something ren-

dered more likely because of the lowering value of the resources

at the elite’s command, their rising level of political insecurity,

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and the high levels of temptation they faced, given Africa’s

resource endowments. While triggered at the elite level, polit-

ical disorder was marked by the rapid spread of insecurity to

the local level, as popular movements rapidly formed and their

members took up arms. The nature of Africa’s societies helps to

account for the speed with which political disorder cascaded

from the center to the

periphery of Africa’s states.

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Part Three

Things Fall Apart

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6
Things Fall Apart

T his chapter gathers together the threads of the argu-ment. It highlights the impact of changes in key vari-
ables – the level of public revenues and the elite’s rate of dis-

count – arguing that sharp, exogenous shocks helped to drive

their value into ranges that threatened the underpinnings of

political order. That these changes took place in an environ-

ment richly endowed by nature meant that the payoffs to the

incumbent elites from defection could rapidly become more

attractive than those to good governance. In the context of

Africa’s resource endowments, the value of these variables

needed to alter but little before predation became more attrac-

tive than stewardship, thus leading to choices that triggered

state failure.

The changes in the values of these variables resulted in

part from the impact of previous choices: the forging of

The title purposely echoes Achebe, C. (1975), Things Fall Apart, New York:
Fawcett Crest.

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Things Fall Apart

authoritarian political institutions and the choice of control

regimes. It also resulted from sharp external shocks, the first

economic recession, resulting from the rise of energy prices,

and the second political, resulting from the geo-political

realignment that followed the

end of the Cold War.

The Decline of Public Revenues

In late-century Africa, governments faced a decline in public

revenues, resulting from past policy choices, changes in the

global economy, and the predatory behavior of political elites.

The Untaxed Economy

Emizet (1998) notes the web of regulations and controls that

Zaire (present-day Congo) imposed upon the producers of pri-

mary products. “The goal of these institutional arrangements

was to expropriate economic surplus . . . ,” he writes (Emizet

1998, p. 105). But, he notes,

Citizens . . . reacted to the existing institutional arrangements

by exiting the official economy, especially in coffee growing

and gold regions of Kivu, Upper Congo (Haut Congo) and

Lower Congo (Bas Congo), as well as in the diamond regions of

Eastern Kasai (Kasai Oriental). . . . The central bank reported

that these activities in the second half of the 1970s cost the

government an annual average of 15 percent equivalent in tax

revenues. (Emizet 1998, pp. 105–6)

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In 1982 Zaire had exported 2,000 kg of gold to Belgium;

neighboring Burundi had exported less than 1,000. By 1990, it

was Zaire that exported less than 1,000 kg of gold to Belgium

and Burundi that exported 2,000. Evidence from the dia-

mond industry also suggests high levels of smuggling, with the

amount exported illegally being “50 to 100 percent of recorded

exports” (Emizet 1998, p. 122). The regulation and taxation of

economic activity thus led to the flight of the real economy

from the reach of the government.

The Global Economy

In response to sharp increases in energy prices and the costs

of capital, in the early 1980s, the level of unemployment in

the advanced industrial (OECD; Organisation for Economic

Co-operation and Development) nations rose by 50% and the

rate of economic growth fell to less than 1%. The demand for

imports therefore plummeted and the value of Africa’s exports

declined. So too, did the revenues generated by taxes on trade,

the single largest source of public revenues for most of Africa’s

governments (see Figure 6.1).

As producers of oil, several African states in fact gained

from the rise in petroleum prices; producers of coffee and

cocoa also benefited from a late-century price rise, resulting

from a sharp drop in exports from Latin America. The gov-

ernments of the nations that thus prospered launched new

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2
5

3
0

3
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Figure 6.1. Government revenues.

projects, but following the later return of petroleum prices to

normal levels, they then found themselves burdened by the

costs of these ventures. Many then borrowed, finding willing

lenders among banks now flush with deposits from the oil-

producing states. When the commodity booms receded, these

governments were then faced with the costs of servicing their

debts. As had the governments of nations whose export earn-

ings had declined, governments in nations that initially ben-

efited from changes in the global economy therefore found

themselves financially strapped.

The late twentieth century marked a time of fiscal crisis for

the state in Africa.

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Things Fall Apart

Predation

As stated by Sahr John Kpundeh (1995, p. 24), “during the

period 1983–1986, it was difficult to distinguish the Sierra

Leone government from a private enterprise. . . . ” Resisting any

attempt to form an independent central bank, Siaka Stevens, its

president, pegged the national currency at an artificially high

level and began rationing access to it. He allocated a major por-

tion to the National Trading Company, to which he assigned the

exclusive rights to import of nearly 100 commodities. As joint

owner of the company, Stevens shared in its monopoly prof-

its. Had foreign exchange been allocated by the market rather

than by discretion, its sale would have swelled the coffers of

the state rather than the bank account of its president.1

Even more dramatic was Stevens’s plundering of the dia-

mond industry (Reno 1995). Sierra Leone’s diamond deposits

lay in a region that supported the Sierra Leone People’s Party

(SLPP), the political opposition, and were worked by a private

corporation, the Sierra Leone Selection Trust. As a member

of De Beers, the international diamond cartel, Selection Trust

tightly regulated diamond production so as to underpin prices

1 See also Reno, W. (1995), Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone,
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press; and Reno, W. (2003), Sierra
Leone: Warfare in a Post-State Society, in State Failure and State Weakness
in a Time of Terror, edited by R. I. Rotberg, Cambridge, MA, and Washing-
ton, DC: The World Peace Foundation/Brookings Institution: 71–100.

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Things Fall Apart

in the global market. The taxes it paid constituted a major por-

tion of the public revenues of Sierra Leone.

Siaka Stevens reconstituted Selection Trust as the National

Diamond Mining Company, however. Ostensibly representing

the nationalization of the industry, the restructuring instead

represented its privatization: Stevens and his cronies domi-

nated both the board and management. By dismantling the

controls imposed by Selection Trust, Stevens permitted the

working of the alluvial deposits by private individuals, tak-

ing care to allocate licenses to political loyalists. Those who

entered diamond production formed political colonies in the

heartland of the opposition. Serving as local units of the ruling

party, they helped to convert – or to intimidate – those about

them into supporting the government in power.

Stevens thus benefited financially and politically from the

transformation of the diamond industry; the state lost out.

Indicative of the magnitude of the diversion of funds is the

magnitude of the decline of reported diamond production,

which fell from 595,000 carats in 1980 to 48,000 in 1988 (Smillee,

Giberie et al. 2000). Also indicative is the decline in tax pay-

ments, which fell from $200 million in 1968 to $100 million in

1987 (Musah 2000).

As indicated in Figure 6.2, the share of central government

revenues in Sierra Leone’s gross domestic product eroded,

falling to less than 5% at one point in the 1990s.

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0

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Figure 6.2. Fall of government revenues, Sierra Leone.

The Impact of Declining Revenues

The decline in public revenues adversely impacted the

incomes of public employees. Returning once again to Sierra

Leone, Sahr Kpundeh provides a vivid example. Interview-

ing the Freetown Commissioner of Taxes in the md-1980s,

he “was shown his pay stub. . . . If he buys a bag of rice . . . to

feed his family [or] pays . . . for transportation to and from work

every day, his expenses exceed his earnings” (Kpundeh 1995,

p. 67). The commissioner therefore worked fewer hours in his

public office and more in the private economy. Janet Mac-

Gaffey reports similar findings for Kinshasa in 1986. Employees

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simply could not survive on the salaries paid them by the gov-

ernment, she concludes (MacGaffey 1991).

Given the erosion of public sector salaries, the quality

of public services declined. Teachers abandoned their class-

rooms, nurses left clinics untended, and offices stood empty

while public servants turned to private trade in search of

income. In addition, the level of corruption rose. In economies

in which the government regulated prices, goods disappeared

from the shelves; those in charge would sell the product to

those willing to pay the market as opposed to the official

price. The same was true in post offices, where stamps might

be scarce at the window but be available on the street; or in

medical or veterinary offices, where pharmaceuticals might

be in short supply but available in private clinics. In schools,

children found themselves paying for supplies that once were

freely provided; in hospitals, patients found it necessary to

“tip” to secure a towel, a washcloth, or a bed pan.

A bureaucracy that had been created to facilitate the lives

of the citizens began instead to undermine their welfare. Its

members began to feed themselves by consuming the time

and money of those they once had served.

The most visible of those endowed with the power to coerce

was, of course, the military. Their salaries, too, eroded or

fell into arrears. Their uniforms became tattered, the qual-

ity of food declined in their mess halls, and their equipment

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malfunctioned and, for want of funds, could not be repaired.

In his account of the events leading up to the attempted coup

in Kenya in 1982, James Dianga (2002) stresses the lack of such

basics as proper clothing, palatable food, and affordable hous-

ing. The soldier “has signed a contract with the State,” he argues

(p. 48). The soldier will defend the state; the state will ensure a

decent life for the soldier. But with the “decline in the supply of

uniforms,” Dianga writes, soldiers began “to wonder why the

contract was not being honored” (Dianga 2002, p. 49).

As the value of their salaries declined, soldiers began to pay

themselves. Like doctors and nursing aides, they sold services

to which the citizens were formally entitled. Most commonly,

they regulated access to public thoroughfares. As Kasozi states

for Uganda in the mid-1980s:

Any soldier who needed money . . . would just pick an isolated,

strategic part of the road, put logs or chains across it, and

wait for unfortunate travellers. These twentieth-century high-

waymen would rob everyone of anything they fancied: cash,

watches, casette radios, clothes, and the like. (Kasozi 1994,

p. 152)

In Zaire, soldiers turned to looting. In the early 1990s,

Mobutu attempted to draw Étienne Tshisekedi, the leader of

the opposition, into his ruling clique. Tshisekedi sought not

only an illustrious title – that of prime minister – but also power

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and therefore demanded control over the military and the

central bank. Mobutu conceded to Tshisekedi’s demands, but

he pressured him to direct the bank to pay off long-standing

debts: arrears built up with utility companies, bills submit-

ted by suppliers of petroleum, transport services, and gov-

ernment stores, and salaries owed civil servants and soldiers.

When Tshisekedi refused, Mobutu fired him and then ordered

the central bank to pay. The result was a flood of emissions.

Soldiers received their salaries in the form of new banknotes;

but local merchants, knowing the government to be bankrupt,

refused to accept them. Having been paid in scrip deemed to

be worthless, the armed forces responded by going on “looting

sprees” (Lemarchand 2003), p. 40.2 They demolished down-

town Kinshasa, the national capital, cordoning off commercial

blocks, chasing shopkeepers from their premises, smashing

windows, and carting off food, clothing, furniture, and appli-

ances. Similar disturbances broke out in Lubumbashi in 1991;

in Mbanzu-Ngungu, Goma, and Mbandika in 1992; and in

Kisangani, Goma, and Rutshuru in 1993. On the one hand,

these “pillages,” as they were called, signaled the paucity of

the resources with which to pay public servants; on the other

they heralded the breakdown of the state.

2 See also Pech, K. (2000), The Hand of War: Mercenaries in the Former
Zaire 1996–97, in Mercenaries: An African Security Dilemma, edited by
A.-F. Musah and J. K. Fayemi, London: Pluto Press; and Nzongola-Ntanlaja,
G. (2002), The Congo from Leopold to Kabila, London: Zed Books.

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Managing Regionalism

The decline of public revenues also made it more difficult

to manage regional tensions. In Cote d’Ivoire, for example,

political order rested on a series of pacts negotiated between

regional elites and the center (see Azam 1994; Boone

2003).

Southerners, and in particular the Akan, controlled the center.

Prominent in the periphery were the Senoufo, who possessed

a well-organized polity in the north. “The complaint of the

northerners,” Boone writes, was that “their region was impov-

erished and relegated to backward status in the national polit-

ical economy. . . . ” (2003, p. 263). To counter mounting discon-

tent, President Houphouët-Boigny launched a series of public

initiatives starting projects that led to the opening of paras-

tatal agencies, the construction of roads, and the founding

of cotton and livestock industries in the region. Channeling a

massive flow of benefits to the area dominated by the Senoufo,

the government recruited members of the ruling clans into the

agencies that managed these projects (Boone 2003, pp. 267ff ).

Should revenues fall, however, the government would be

unable to fulfill the periphery’s demands. And indeed with

the end of the coffee boom of the late 1970s, those in the

center could no longer credibly pledge to target the north with

largesse (Rapley 1993). The north therefore began to organize

against the central government. After the death of Houphouët-

Boigny, the forces of the north gathered about Allasane

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Öuttara; once prime minister, he now sought to become

president. Led by Laurent Gbagbo, southern politicians rallied

to check the rise of Öuttara, portraying him as a non-national

and therefore ineligible for high office. The courts agreed.

Following a coup by soldiers, whom the government had

failed to pay, the rival politicians transformed their political

organizations into armed militias. Cote d’Ivoire collapsed.3

When public revenues begin to decline, then, the likelihood

of political disorder increases. When poorly reimbursed, pub-

lic servants use political power to raise their own pay; they

become more predatory. Fiscal dearth also renders it more

difficult to induce those who are dissatisfied to continue to

participate in the political game, rather than withdraw from it;

regional tensions therefore rise, and with them, threats to the

integrity of the state. As a result, political order is threatened

by the conduct of the elite in the core and of politicians in the

periphery of Africa’s states.

Political Reform

The decline of public revenues not only triggered efforts by

public employees to pay themselves, it also incited popular

opposition to those in power. In response to the declining

3 For an incisive analysis, see Azam, J.-P. (2001), “The Redistributive State
and Conflicts in Africa,” The Journal of Peace Research 38(4): 429–44.

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quality of public services – and public life – in Africa, people

demanded political reform. Citizens called for changes in the

institutions that structured political life. They sought to render

government the servant of the citizen, rather than her master,

and viewed the introduction of multiparty politics and com-

petitive elections as the way of achieving that end. While the

impulse for reform originated within Africa itself, it also arose

among the continent’s creditors, as those who held its debt

sought ways to alter the policy choices of its regimes. By ren-

dering governments accountable to their people, they sought

to create incentives for them to choose policies that would

promote the growth of Africa’s economies and bring greater

prosperity to its people.

While the reforms were designed to secure political ac-

countability and economic prosperity, they also contributed

to political disorder. By raising the level of insecurity for those

in power, they strengthened the incentives for them to defect,

engaging in predation and thus provoking their citizens to take

up arms.

The Local Impulse

Oquaye (1980), writing about life in Ghana, recalls blackouts

because of the “breakdown of . . . electricity supply” (p. 38).

Children, he writes, had to drink “from filthying pools” . . . and

“septic tanks remained un-flushed,” raising the risk of disease

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(ibid., p. 38). Shortages of petrol led to the breakdown of the

transport system, resulting in increased prices for food (ibid.).

Life in Sierra Leone traced a similar trajectory, as roads and

railways in the interior fell into disrepair (Richards 1995); pub-

licly owned companies shut down for lack of power and main-

tenance (ibid., p. 26). Most galling, Richards reports, was the

decline of the educational system, which deprived youths of

what their families had regarded as their “birthright” (ibid.,

p. 177): the chance to acquire skills, to improve their future

prospects, and to enhance the quality of their lives. Again

and again students rallied in protest against the low quality of

their schools. In some instances, their parents joined in these

demonstrations. And in reaction, the government dispatched

troops to beat, arrest, and detain those taking part (ibid.,

pp. 54ff ).

Growing dissatisfaction with the quality of public services –

and punitive response to calls for their improvement – gen-

erated calls for political reform. Benin provides an apt illus-

tration. In 1975, the ruling party had endorsed “Marxist-

Leninism” and the government had expanded the range of its

services and the size of its civil service accordingly. By the late

1980s, however, the government lacked the resources to pay

its workers. The result was wave after wave of demonstrations

by government employees and increased indiscipline amongst

soldiers. While unable to meet the salaries of those it employed,

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the political elites did manage to find ways to pay itself: In 1988,

the issuance of $500 million in unsecured loans to the presi-

dent and his cronies led to the collapse of three state-owned

banks. Such acts inspired further demonstrations, encouraged

and cheered on by ambitious challengers to the incumbent

regime.

Paralyzed by the mounting waves of protest, the president

of Benin, Mathieu Kerekou called for a “Conference Nationale

des Forces Vives . . . at which business, professional, religious,

labor, and political groups, together with the government,

would be given an opportunity to draw up a new constitutional

framework” (Meredith 2005, p. 388).4 Kerekou had expected to

dominate the proceedings of the conference, but he failed to

do so. Declaring themselves a sovereign assembly, the confer-

ees dissolved the government, appointed a new prime min-

ister, and laid down a schedule for new elections – elections

that Kerekou lost to Nicephone Soglo, the assembly’s preferred

candidate.

An intriguing feature of the reform movement in Africa was

the tendency for events in one country to respond to, or to

trigger, events in another. Benin’s national conference opened

February 19, 1990; February 25, a second opened in Congo.

4 See also Heilbrunn, J. (1993), “Social Origins of National Conferences in
Benin and Togo,” Journal of Modern African Studies 31(2): 227–99.

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Table 6.1. The spread of political reform

Election Outcome: Incumbent

Country Conference Date Duration Month Free and Fair Ousted Retained

Benin Feb-90 1 week Feb-91 yes
√

Mar-96 yes
√

Congo Feb-91 3 months Aug-92 yes
√

Gabon Mar-90 3 weeks Dec-93 no
√

Mali Jul-91 2 weeks Apr-92 yes
√

Niger Jul-91 6 weeks Feb-93 yes
√

Burkina Faso Aug-91 2 months Dec-91 no
√

Ghana Aug-91 7 months Dec-92 yes
√

Togo Aug-91 1 month Aug-93 no
√

Zaire Aug-91 1 year – –

Central African

Republic

Oct-91 2 months Aug-92 yes
√

Chad Jan-93 3 months Jun-96 no
√

112

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Things Fall Apart

The national conference of Benin closed on February 28, 1990;

on March 1, that of Gabon opened (Robinson 1994).

As shown in Table 6.1, following five of the first six national

conferences, the incumbent head of state was compelled to

leave office. The climax came in Zambia, where the national

conference called for multiparty elections. News of Kaunda’s

defeat in these elections (October 1991) resounded throughout

the continent: The forces of political reform had claimed one

of Africa’s “founding fathers.” On the one side, those still in

office found reason to revise upward their assessment of the

magnitude of the threat posed by those clamoring for political

reform. On the other, the reformers took heart, finding reason

to redouble their efforts.

External Forces

By the end of the 1970s, the international community was

fully aware of Africa’s economic plight. Emboldened by the

reformist mandate bestowed by its president, Robert Mc-

Namara, the World Bank had financed a dazzling array of

small-farmer and community-level projects. As recounted in

its official history, the World Bank’s own evaluations revealed

a distressingly low rate of return for its Africa projects: “More

than any other task the Bank had undertaken, its engage-

ment with Sub-Saharan Africa sapped the institution’s . . .

confidence,” it reports (Kapur 1997, p. 720). When seeking

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reasons for the failure of its projects, the Bank found them

in “the policy environment.” In its famed “Berg Report,”5

the Bank documented the tendency of Africa’s governments

to adopt policies that distorted market prices and under-

mined economic incentives and so crippled growth and

development.

In addition to being a financer of projects, the World Bank

then became an advisor to governments. In pursuit of policy

change, it drew upon two sources of strength. The first was

expertise. Through publications, seminars, and the training

of public servants, the Bank sought to expose the economic

costs of prevailing policies and to offer alternatives. The sec-

ond was capital. In any given country at any given time, the

Bank would normally finance a multitude of projects, the can-

cellation of any one of which would go largely un-noticed by

the national government. To gain the attention of policymak-

ers, Please (1984) writes, the Bank therefore began to bundle

its projects into sectoral programs; more would then be at risk

were the Bank to suspend its lending. Sectoral programs soon

gave way to country programs and to conditionality, as the

Bank sought to strengthen further its leverage over policymak-

ers in debtor nations and to sharpen the incentives for policy

reform.

5 World Bank (1981), Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An
Agenda for Action, Washington, DC: The World Bank.

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As Africa’s creditors focused on the behavior of African

governments, they struggled with the question: Why would

these governments adopt policies that undermined economic

prosperity? Over time, a consensus emerged: that the behavior

of these governments reflected their lack of political account-

ability. Not being accountable, governments in Africa could

adopt policies that conferred concentrated benefits on the

elites while imposing widely distributed costs on others.

Increasingly, then, the World Bank focused not only on pol-

icy choice but also on political reform.6

Among the most active of those championing political

reform was Keith Jaycox, vice president of the World Bank. In

meeting after meeting, conference after conference, and inter-

view after interview, he called for the introduction of political

reforms. As reluctant as he may have been to call openly for

the introduction of democratic institutions, he left but little

doubt that Africa’s creditors would welcome the legalization

of opposition parties and the holding of competitive elections

for political office.

The economic crisis that alienated Africa’s citizens thus

impelled Africa’s creditors to champion political reform as

well. Lending further impetus to the two political currents

6 See, for example, World Bank (1989), Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis
to Sustainable Growth, Washington, DC: The World Bank; and World
Bank (1991), Governance and Development, Washington, DC: The World
Bank.

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was a second shock at the global level. With the collapse of

the Soviet Union, diplomats and security specialists who dur-

ing the Cold War had been disinclined to unseat authoritarian

regimes no longer had reason to object to efforts of economic

technocrats to displace them.7

The disintegration of the Soviet Union strengthened the

position of those inclined to bully rather than to cajole Africa’s

governments. By way of illustration, consider the demise of

Joseph Desire Mobutu, president of Zaire. In the midst of

the Cold War, foreign observers had averted their gaze from

Mobutus’s depredations, largely because of his support in

fighting “communism” in southern Africa. Following the fall

of the Soviet Union, the hands of those pushing for politi-

cal reform in Zaire were no longer stayed by those seeking

Mobutu’s political services. To receive further financial aid,

Mobutu – like other tyrants – had now to reform.

In the 1980s, changes in the international environment

thus amplified the impact of local political forces that had

been calling for reform, and the grasp of Africa’s authoritarians

on political power became less secure. Abandoned by foreign

patrons and facing increasing threats at home, incumbents

had increased reason to fear for their political futures. Their

time horizons therefore shortened. In the long run, repression

7 See the discussion in Dunning, T., “Conditioning the Effects of Aid: Cold
War Politics, Donor Credibility, and Democracy in Africa,” International
Organization 50(2): 409–23.

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might increase the level of political disorder, but incumbents

had less reason to place great weight on the long run. That even

a founding father like Kenneth Kaunda could be turned out of

office wondrously focused their minds.

Elite Responses

In response to the call for multipartyism, wily cynics, like

Mobutu, sponsored the formation of political parties, rather

than banning their formation. Where plurality voting pre-

vailed, the incumbent could then prevail against a fragmented

opposition. Others, like Daniel arap Moi of Kenya, took more

sinister measures. The shift from Jomo Kenyatta to arap Moi

had entailed a shift from a political base centered in the Central

Province to one located in the Rift Valley and from an old guard,

largely Kikuyu, to a new guard, largely Kalenjin-speaking. The

rise of the reform movement imparted new energy to those

who had been marginalized. To counter their attacks on his

regime, Moi increasingly made use of the coercive powers at

his command. Invoking the Preservation of Public Security Act,

he jailed his political opponents. His security services were

implicated in the killing of a cleric, who was an outspoken pro-

ponent of political reform, and a civil servant, who appears to

have been too diligent in his enquiries into corruption. When

opposition politicians called for an end to the bullying tactics

of Moi and his henchmen, they, too, were arrested, tortured,

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and detained (Hempstone 1997; Anguka 1998; Nnoli 1998;

Mwakikagile 2001; Meredith 2005).

Moi was not the only incumbent to bring the powers of

the state to bear upon his challengers. So, too, did Gnassingbé

Eyadema, the longtime president of Togo. Inspired by events

in neighboring Benin, parliamentarians in Togo had also called

for a national assembly; to the surprise of many, they suc-

ceeded in stripping the president of many of his powers, trans-

ferring them to the office of the prime minister – a figure whom

they, as legislators, would install in office. As befits a military

man, Eyadema fought back. His artillery shelled the palace of

the prime minister; his infantry trampled upon those who took

to the streets in protest; his police closed newspapers and jailed

professionals, party workers, and priests. Eyadema forcefully

repressed those who had challenged him and re-appropriated

the powers of the presidency (Heilbrunn 1997).

As intimidating as Moi or Eyadema might have been, nei-

ther matched the ferocity of the elites of Burundi or Rwanda.

While officially a one-party state, throughout the last decades

of the twentieth century, Burundi in the 1980s was ruled by

its army, and indeed by a small coterie of officers from the

province of Bururi. Pressured by donors abroad and, it would

appear, misperceiving his popularity at home, Pierre Buy-

oya, army major and president, agreed to legalize the forma-

tion of opposition political parties and to call for elections.

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The Front pour la démocratie du Burundi (FRODEBU) consti-

tuted the largest challenge to the incumbent regime. Headed

by Melchior Ndadye, FRODEBU appealed to the majority Hutu

and defeated Buyoya, a Tutsi, in the 1993 elections, win-

ning close to two-thirds of the vote. The elections took place

July 10, 1993; on October 2, 1993, Ndadya was assassinated

and the military, slaying tens of thousands of Hutu, returned

to power (Lemarchand 1993; Ngaruko and Nkurunziza 2000;

Ould-Abdallah 2000).

The slaughter in Burundi resonated ominously with events

in neighboring Rwanda. Rwanda, itself divided between Hutu

and Tutsi, was also ruled by its military, clothed in the guise

of a political party, the Mouvement révolutionnaire national

pour le développement (MRND). But whereas Burundi’s polit-

ical elite was drawn largely from the minority Tutsi, that in

Rwanda came from the Hutu, the ethnic majority. More pre-

cisely, it came from the portion of the Hutu who originated

in Ruhengiri, a prefecture in the northwestern portion of the

country. The danger posed by reform in Rwanda, then, was not,

as in Burundi, revolution by those long suppressed; rather, it

was that the Hutu majority would split, with the “moderates”

aligning with the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) – the milita-

rized political movement that championed the interests of the

Tutsi – to dislodge their northern brethren from power. And

indeed, as the process of political reform proceeded, such an

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alignment became more likely. In the transition government,

negotiated under international auspices in Arusha, both the

MRND and the RPF gained eleven seats. Should the RPF draw

support from one of the minor parties included within the

transitional government – the Liberal, the socialist, or the

Christian Democratic parties – it could then form a govern-

ment. The allocation of posts generated at Arusha thus left

the hardliners insecure, and they determined to render any

alliance between Tutsi and Hutu infeasible.

In neighboring Burundi, the Tutsi-led military had returned

to power by assassinating the leadership of the opposition and

slaughtering their Hutu supporters. The incumbent regime in

Rwanda broadcast these facts widely and portrayed them as

foreshadowing the fate of the Hutu, should the RPF come to

power. They also launched massacres of their own. By attacking

Tutsi in the name of the Hutu, they rendered improbable the

forging of political alliances between the RPF and other politi-

cal parties and incredible the promises of good faith necessary

for their construction. In Rwanda, as in Burundi, attempts to

introduce political reform thus triggered vindictive reprisals

and incumbents inflicted terror and pain upon their citizens

in an effort to forestall the loss of power (Prunier 1998; Jones

1999; Jones 2001). Figure 6.3 suggests the level of co-variation

between political reform on the one hand and the militariza-

tion of civic society on the other.

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Figure 6.3. Political reform and militarization.

Natural Resources

With the loss of public revenues, governments became more

predatory. With the loss of their political monopolies, they

became less secure. Recall, once again, the opening fable and

the third and last of the variables whose values define the

possibility of political order: the level of temptation. Because

of their rich endowment of natural resources, many govern-

ments in Africa were tempted to abandon their role as guardian

and to embrace the role of predator, employing the power

of the state to extract wealth from the continent’s natural

resources.

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Things Fall Apart

In the midst of economic decline, an alternative source

of income lay close at hand: the continent’s rich deposits of

petroleum, gemstones, and precious metals. To seize such

prizes might require the use of force; it might provoke resis-

tance, particularly in the region in which the resources lay. But

the short-term benefits would readily outweigh the long-term

costs, particularly at a time when governments were finding

increasing reason to discount their political futures.

Consider, for example, the Sudan. In 1962, politicians and

military from the south rebelled against the central govern-

ment, protesting its refusal to agree to a federal form of gov-

ernment and its forced incorporation of southern troops into

the national army. When Jafar Numeri seized the presidency

in 1969, he negotiated an end to the conflict. But in 1978, oil

was discovered in a region lying in the south. Numeri then

redrew the provincial boundaries of Sudan, effectively placing

the oil fields in the portion of the country controlled by the cen-

tral government. The south’s perception of Numeri abruptly

changed; once regarded as a guardian of their interests, he

now appeared a threat. The south soon took up arms again.8

8 See Johnson, D. H. (1995), The Sudan People’s Liberation Army and the
Problem of Factionalism, in African Guerillas, edited by C. Clapham,
Oxford, U.K.: James Currey; Johnson, D. H. (2003), The Root Causes of
Sudan’s Civil War, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; and de
Waal, A., and A. H. A. Salam (2004), Islamism, State Power, and Jihad in
Sudan, in Islamism and its Enemies in the Horn of Africa, edited by A. de
Waal, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Things Fall Apart

Consider, too, the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo

(previously Zaire). A centralized state under Belgian rule, it

fragmented soon after independence. At the forefront of those

who sought to dismantle the state was Katanga, a region richly

endowed with copper, cobalt, and other minerals. Following

Katanga’s forceful reintegration into Congo, however, the prof-

its from the mines accrued to the central government – a gov-

ernment presided over by Joseph Desire Mobutu.9 Succumb-

ing to the temptations offered by these riches, Mobutu became

one of the wealthiest men in the world while presiding over the

disintegration of Zaire.

For a last example, turn to Angola. In the 1960s, a group

of intellectuals, some based in Lisbon and others in Angola’s

capital city, Luanda, formed the Popular Movement for the

9 See Gould, D. (1980), Bureaucratic Corruption and Underdevelopment in
the Third World: The Case of Zaire, London: Pergamon Press; Blumenthal,
E. (1982), “Zaire: Rapport sur sa Credibilite Financiere Internationale,” La
Revue Nouvelle 77(November 11): 360–78; MacGaffey, J. (1991), The Real
Economy of Zaire, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Weiss,
H. (1995), Zaire: Collapsed Society, Surviving State, Future Policy, in Col-
lapsed States, edited by I. W. Zartman, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner; Thom,
W. G. (1999), “Congo-Zaire’s 1996–1997 Civil War in the Context of Evolv-
ing Patterns of Military Conflict in Africa in the Era of Independence,” The
Journal of Conflict Studies 19(2): 93–123; Otunnu, O. (2000), An Historical
Analysis of the Invasion of the Rwanda Patriotic Army, in The Path of a
Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaire, edited by H. Adelman
and A. Suhrke, London: Transaction Publishers; and Pech, K. (2000), The
Hand of War: Mercenaries in the Former Zaire 1996–97, in Mercenaries: An
African Security Dilemma, edited by A.-F. Musah and J. K. Fayemi, London:
Pluto Press.

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Things Fall Apart

Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Part political party, part military

force, the MPLA were well positioned when the Portuguese

retreated from Africa. Its leaders quickly seized the national

capital, the central bureaucracy – and Angola’s oil fields. As

described by Birmingham (2002), Chabal (2002), and others

(Dietrich 2000; Meredith 2005), while the MPLA speaks of serv-

ing “the needs of the people,” it in fact channels little of Angola’s

oil wealth to them. The president has retreated to his palace;

the party elite to their villas; and their Mercedes and Land

Cruisers course through streets of Luanda, which is strewn with

garbage and broken glass and inhabited by maimed soldiers.

Other cases could be adduced, each suggesting the manner

in which the temptation to defect – that is, to employ the means

of violence to engage in predation – can overpower the incen-

tives to employ the means of violence to safeguard life and

property. In the midst of fiscal crisis, the temptation increased.

So great are the riches offered by Africa’s natural resources that,

in these instances at least, the rewards to be gained by seizing

them appear to have outweighed the prospects of living in the

midst of political disorder.

Reverberations

Public revenues declined, political elites became insecure,

and the temptation to engage in predation therefore rose in

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Africa, amidst abundant opportunities to do so. In the face of

increased threats from above, citizens found reason to search

for patrons who could help them to safeguard life and prop-

erty. While inflicting widespread costs, disorder also offered

attractive prospects for those willing to invest in the build-

ing of political organizations.10 Among the strategies they

could employ, one stood out: the championing of claims to

land.

To illustrate the process, we return to the politics of east-

ern Zaire. During the colonial period, Rwandans settled in the

district of Masisi in the northern part of the region, attracted

by jobs in the coffee farms and mines of the area. Local chiefs

conferred land rights on the aliens in exchange for the payment

of tribute. By the 1990s, the Bahunde – the local population –

comprised a mere 15% of the population of Masisi and realized

that they now constituted a minority, disadvantaged politically

by their small numbers and economically by the appropriation

10 This is, of course, a central argument in the work of David Keen. See,
for example, Keen, D. (1998), The Economic Functions of Violence in
Civil War, Adelphi Paper 320, Oxford, U.K.: International Institute for
Strategic Studies; Keen, D. (2000), Incentives and Disincentives for Vio-
lence, in Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, edited
by M. Berdal and D. Malone, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner; and Keen, D.
(2001), The Political Economy of War, in War and Underdevelopment:
The Economic and Social Consequences of Conflict, Vol. 1, edited by F.
Stewart, V. Fitzgerald, and Associates, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University
Press.

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of their lands. They therefore began to organize. The Bahunde

demanded the dismissal of immigrants from local government

offices; some had become chiefs. They demanded a change in

the land laws, claiming their rights as “sons of the soil” for

the return of properties sold to “strangers.” And when Rwanda

disintegrated in the east and Zaire beneath them, they took up

arms. They grouped their local militias into a loose but armed

coalition, called Mayi-Mayi, and backed the fortunes of local

politicians who championed the expulsion of the Rwandan

immigrants from eastern Zaire (Pech 2000; Mamdani 2001;

Nzongola-Ntanlaja 2002; Lemarchand 2003).

Further south in Kivu, the thread that tied the region to

Kinshasa, the national capital, had long run through the hands

of one Barthelemy Bisengimana, chief of staff for President

Joseph Desire Mobutu. Kivu was the home of the Banyamu-

lenge, a group that had migrated from Rwanda and Burundi

and taken residence in Zaire. Bisengimana was himself a Tutsi

and championed the rights of the Banyamulenge, defending

in particular their claims to citizenship and land. But when in

the 1980s nationality became a prerequisite for citizenship,

Bisengimana became vulnerable. Labeled a Rwandan and

therefore a foreigner, he was squeezed out of Mobutu’s inner

circle. And with the downfall of their advocate in Kinshasa,

the Banyamulenge, too, became vulnerable. After the fall of

Bisengimana, his enemies – many in search of wealth and

power in the frontier territories of eastern Zaire – revoked the

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citizenship of the Banyamulenge. Because they now could

not vote, they could not secure representation on the local

councils. Gladly taking their place, others allocated to them-

selves the perquisites of office: licenses for vehicles, permits

for shops, and housing. More important still, given the density

of settlement in the region, by labeling the Banyamulenge for-

eigners, they deprived them of land rights and so themselves

gained access to one of the most valuable of resources in Kivu’s

agrarian economy (Nzongola-Ntanlaja 2002; Lemarchand

2003).

As aliens, the Banyamulenge were thus left exposed to the

whims of those with access to power. In response, they took up

arms. And when Rwanda invaded Zaire in 1996, their militias

joined in the crossing of Zaire, the entry into Kinshasa, the

toppling of Mobutu – and the dismembering of the Zairian

state.
Conclusion

In late-century Africa, external shocks and forces set in motion

by previous decisions led to the erosion of the fiscal founda-

tions of the state. In response to the declining quality of pub-

lic life, citizens called for political reform, Africa’s creditors

echoed their demands; and in the early 1990s, both were able

to slip the restraints formerly imposed by foreign powers, now

less motivated by concerns arising from the Cold War.

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In the latter decades of the twentieth century, then, the

values of the variables that define the possibility of the state

altered. Order gave way to disorder, as elites attacked their

own citizens, the latter sought to provide their own security,

and states failed

in late-century Africa.

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7
Conclusion

I n the last decades of the twentieth century, the sinisterlyclownish garb of teenage killers in Liberia, the theatri-
cal rage of mobs in Mogadishu, and the dignified suffering of

refugees in camps throughout Africa vividly underscored the

significance of political order. The power of these images cried

out for a response from humanitarians and policymakers. It

challenged scholars as well by posing that most innocent and

unsettling of questions: Why? Why in late twentieth-century

Africa did states fail and things fall apart?

To address these questions, I have retreated to the founda-

tions of my field, which focus on coercion and the properties

of the state. I have also re-immersed myself in the politics of

Africa. From the first came a theory; from the second, the evi-

dence with which to explore – and to test – its answers.

The realities of contemporary Africa compel us to realize

that political order is not a given; it is the product of decisions.

There is political order when citizens choose to turn away from

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military activity and to devote their energies to productive

labor and when those who govern – specialists in violence –

choose to employ their power to protect rather than to prey

upon the wealth that their citizens create. Political order

becomes a state when these choices persist as an equilibrium.

The foundations of the state lie in the conditions that support

that equilibrium; so, too, then, must the origins of state failure.

The fable that framed this analysis highlights the condi-

tions that rendered possible political order. It also suggests the

importance of forces unleashed in the late twentieth century.

Changes in the global economy and economic mismanage-

ment at home resulted in fiscal dearth: The decline in public

revenues led to predation by those in positions of power and to

resistance by those whom they ruled. The fall of communism

permitted erstwhile patrons to abandon abusive incumbents

and enabled those who had protested the quality of gover-

nance to lay claim to the rights of political opposition. Loos-

ing support from abroad and facing new threats from within,

incumbents faced a sharp and unanticipated increase in the

level of political risk. And in many states, the political elite

dwelt in the midst of resources bestowed by nature. Those

in power could seize control of petroleum deposits or dia-

mond fields and be better off, even though bearing the costs

of fighting, than had they continued to subsist on the salaries

paid to those who served the public. It was within this ambi-

ence of temptation that the value of public finances and the

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time horizons of elites sharply altered. And it was within the

ambience of local tensions, arising from competition over land

rights and over the power to allocate them, that political dis-

order rapidly spread. The conditions that rendered political

order an equilibrium no longer prevailed and states collapsed

in late-century Africa.

Changing Perspectives

In advancing this argument, I depart in several ways from

the current literature on political violence. Rather than focus-

ing on the protest from below – as do Collier and Hoeffler

(2004), Fearon and Laitin (2003), Kalyvas (2006), Weinstein

(2007), and their predecessors, such as Popkin (1979) and

Scott (1976) – I explore its origins “at the top.” Rather than

probing the motives of rebels or the nature of their organiza-

tions, I instead ask: Why would governments adopt policies

that impoverish their citizens? Why would they “overextract”

wealth from their domains? Why would they alter the distri-

bution of income so grossly that it would become politically

unsustainable? By addressing such questions, I explored the

ways in which incumbent regimes prepared the field for the

forces of political disorder.

Not only do I thus change the point of entry, focusing on

the behavior of incumbents rather than insurgents, but I also

recast the role of the economic forces. In this work, I did not

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focus on national income, as do Fearon and Laitin (2003), Col-

lier and Hoeffler (2004), and Sambanis and Hegre (2006)1; by

the same token, neither did I focus on the impact of poverty,

as do the contributors to the World Bank studies of civil war

(Collier, Hoeffler et al. 2003). Rather, I traced political disorder

to crises in public revenues.

Not only does this work thus depart from contemporary

treatments of the role of economic forces. It also offers new

perspectives on ethnicity, the resource curse, and democra-

tization, several of the central topics addressed in studies of

violence.

Ethnicity

The level of ethnic diversity is greater in the African conti-

nent than in other regions of the world.2 The level of disorder

is high. Many therefore hold ethnicity responsible for Africa’s

political conflicts. To this line of reasoning, I offer two alterna-

tives. The first flows from the inherently expansionary nature

of local societies in rural Africa. Because the search for eco-

nomic well-being underpins a strategy of territorial expan-

sion, groups file competing claims for land rights and political

1 But see Alexander, M. (2007), Is Poverty to Be Blamed for Civil Wars? Cam-
bridge MA: Department of Government, Harvard University.

2 See the regional comparisons offered in Easterly, W., and R. Levine (1997),
“Africa’s Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions,” Quarterly Journal
of Economics 112(4): 1203–50.

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fissures crisscross the nations of Africa. When states are sta-

ble, property rights are secure; when states begin to fail, cit-

izens turn to other sources for their protection. At times of

state failure, politicians can therefore marshal political follow-

ings and recruit armed militias by championing the defense of

land rights. In the midst of state failure, ethnicity may therefore

come to the fore. But by this reasoning, it is the product rather

than the source of political disorder.

Secondly, given that in most African countries some regions

are better endowed than others and that ethnic groups tend

to occupy distinct territories, demands for regional redistribu-

tion take on an ethnic coloring and regional conflicts assume

the guise of ethnic discord. Ethnic conflict is not a “clash of cul-

tures,” then, but rather a struggle over the regional allocation

of resources.

In discussing ethnicity, I have also noted – and stressed –

the disparity between the conclusions drawn from qualitative

accounts of political disorder and those drawn from cross-

national studies of the relationship between ethnicity and state

failure.3 The first emphasizes the significance of ethnicity; the

other, its failure to correlate with measures of political disorder.

3 See also the evidence that the scale of measurement employed in quanti-
tative measures – that is, the use of national averages – fails to capture the
variability of interest, which occurs at the subnational level. When such
variability is captured in the measurements, then statistical estimates of
the relationship between ethnic differences rise. See Murshed and Gates
(2003) and Cederman and Girardin (2007).

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Rather than arguing for the superiority of a particular method

of research, however, I choose instead to combine the two sets

of findings. Ethnic tensions do in fact relate to political con-

flict in Africa, I would argue, but they do so at times of state

failure.

The Resource Curse

Just as Africa is the continent most blessed with ethnic diver-

sity, so, too, is it the continent most blessed with natural

resource wealth: By one reckoning, 30% of Africa’s population

live in resource-rich economies, as opposed to 11% elsewhere

in the developing world.4 It is natural, then, that its politics is

frequently employed to illustrate the power of the “resource

curse”: the link between natural resource wealth and political

disorder (Collier 2000; Herbst 2000).

Just as observational data for the importance of ethnicity

is contradicted by statistical evidence, so, too, do qualitative

accounts of the role of precious metals and gemstones contra-

dict the quantitative findings. While Collier and Hoeffler (2004)

suggest a close link between the value of primary products

and civil wars, their findings have been called into question

4 Collier, P., and S. O’Connell (2007), Opportunities, Choices and Syn-
dromes, Chapter 2 in The Political Economy of Economic Growth in Africa,
1960–2000, edited by B. Ndulu, P. Collier, R. H. Bates, and S. O’Connell,
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

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by Fearon (2005). They are also called into question by my

research, which, like that of Fearon (2005), finds only oil pro-

duction to be significantly related to the likelihood of politi-

cal disorder (see Appendix). But just as a combination of the

two kinds of evidence generates a deeper understanding of

the relationship between ethnicity and conflict, so, too, does

it teach us more about the political importance of natural

resources.

Qualitative accounts repeatedly link rebel movements to

the working of deposits of minerals, gemstones, and other

commodities. Statistical investigations largely find little by way

of a relationship between natural resource wealth and political

violence.5 The conflicting evidence suggests to me, at least, the

importance of the temporal course of political disorder. The

first step involves the disintegration of the state; the second,

the turmoil that follows. The quantitative evidence bears upon

the first; it indicates that states whose economies have been

richly endowed are no more likely to fail than are others. The

case materials pertain to the subsequent period of disorder. At

this stage rival forces seek to seize control over timber, metals,

5 See Fearon, J. D. (2005), “Primary Commodities Exports and Civil War,”
Journal of Conflict Resolution 49(4): 483–507. See also Snyder, R., and
R. Bhavani (2005), “Diamonds, Blood and Taxes: A Revenue-Centered
Framework for Explaining Political Order,” The Journal of Conflict Resolu-
tion 49(4): 563–597; and Snyder, R. (Forthcoming), “Does Lootable Wealth
Breed Disorder? A Political Economy of Extraction Framework,” Compar-
ative Political Studies.

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and gemstones, and to employ the resources that flow from

their possession. Resource wealth and political conflict then

co-vary.

On the one hand, this revision stands as a critique: Implic-

itly it charges the earlier literature with having mistaken a

symptom of state failure for a cause. On the other, it stands

as a positive contribution, suggesting an important feature of

the consequences of state failure.

Democratization

In the broader literature on political conflict, scholars treat

political reform with caution. New democracies, they find, are

politically unstable; far more secure are authoritarian regimes

and “consolidated” democracies.6 By contrast, in the literature

on Africa, political reform is widely celebrated and democrati-

zation viewed as valuable, both inherently and instrumentally.

6 See Hegre, H., S. Gates, et al. (2001), “Toward a Democratic Civil
Peace? Democracy, Political Change and Civil War, 1816–1992,” American
Political Science Review 95(1): 33–48; Hegre, H. (2003), Disentangling
Democracy and Development as Determinants of Armed Conflict, paper
presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association,
Portland, Oregon; Goldstone, J., R. Bates, et al. (2005), A Global Forecasting
Model of Political Instability, McClean, VA: State Failure Task Force, SAIC;
Bates, R., D. Epstein, et al. (2006), Political Instability of Task Force Report,
Phase IV Findings, McLean VA: SAIC; and Epstein, D. L., R. Bates, et al.
(2006), “Democratic Transitions,” American Journal of Political Science
59(3): 551–69.

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Conclusion

Clearly, this book can be read as supportive of the argu-

ments of those who are skeptical of the benefits of political

reform. By provoking a sharp, upward revision in the level of

political insecurity of incumbent regimes, I have argued, polit-

ical reform provoked political disorder. But further reflection

suggests an alternative reading. Recall that it was authoritar-

ianism that lay the foundations for state failure; multiparty

political systems would have been less likely to impose control

regimes as governments that advocated such policies could not

have retained the support of the political majority. Insofar as

authoritarian governments can champion policies that under-

mine their economies, political reform thus removed a major

source of political instability. Moreover, because the evidence

linking political reform to political disorder derives from less

than a decade of data, it may be misleading. We need further

evidence before we can determine whether the relationship

between political reform and political disorder reported here

represents the turbulence associated with transitional dynam-

ics or constitutes, as the skeptics would have it, the properties

of a new steady state.

State Failure

In the late twentieth century, the political foundations of Africa

were hit with shocks, both economic and political, and subject

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to forces that eroded political order. Posed dispassionately,

Africa was subject to an experiment, as these forces pushed

the value of key variables into ranges in which the possibility

of political order became vanishingly small. It was the misfor-

tune of Africa’s peoples to be caught in a perfect storm – one

in which political fundamentals were so altered that the foun-

dations of the state lay nakedly revealed: a sight that was both

horrible – and instructive.

In closing, we return one last time to the fable and turn to

a portion that, until now, has remained un-read. The state has

collapsed. And in the midst of the disorder that then engulfs

the specialist in violence and the citizenry, the government

turns to predation while the citizens enlist behind champions

who offer protection in exchange for political services. People

now dwell in a world wherein the government has turned into

a warlord and where they themselves have picked up arms.

Following the logic delineated by Bates, Greif et al. (2002),

we can learn more about the subsequent fate of these people.

Among the insights we achieve is that in the midst of political

disorder, they must trade off between peace and prosperity.

When private individuals provide their own protection, one

way they can achieve security is by being poor: They can “deter”

attacks by having few possessions worth stealing. In the midst

of state failure, then, poverty becomes the price of security.

Cruelly, the opposite also follows: The price of prosperity is

being prepared to fight. In a world in which people provide

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their own protection, if they wish to accumulate wealth, they

must be prepared to defend it. They must be willing to pick up

arms.

Whereas those who live in states can enjoy both security

and prosperity, those who live where states have failed must

choose whether to be wealthy or secure; without being willing

to fight, they cannot be both. The formation of militias midst

diamond fields is thus emblematic of the way in which people

must live when states fail.

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Appendix

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Cross-National Regressions

T his study has drawn on a combination of argument,narrative, and quantitative data. The narratives form
the body of the manuscript and the formal arguments ani-

mated the opening fable, but until now the statistical evidence

has lurked in the background. It is time for it to step forward.

In this appendix, I first discuss the data and the inferential

challenges they posed. I then bring statistical analysis to bear

upon the three central phenomena addressed in the study:

policy choice, political reform, and political disorder.

The Data

The data form a time series, cross-sectional panel, drawn from

46 countries (see Table A.1) and 26 years (1970–1995).

Most states in Africa achieved independence in the early

1960s, and many initially were unable to gather and report

data of key interest to this study. I judged 1970 to offer a suitable

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Appendix

Table A.1. Countries in the forty-six-nation sample,
1970–1995

1. Angola 24. Madagascar

2. Benin 25. Malawi

3. Botswana 26. Mali

4. Burkina Faso 27. Mauritania

5. Burundi 28. Mauritius

6. Cameroon 29. Mozambique

7. Cape Verde 30. Namibia

8. Central Africa Republic 31. Niger

9. Chad 32. Nigeria

10. Comoros 33. Rwanda

11. Congo, Republic of 34. São Tomé and Principe

12. Cote d’Ivoire 35. Senegal

13. Djibouti 36. Seychelles

14. Equatorial Guinea 37. Sierra Leone

15. Ethiopia 38. Somalia

16. Gabon 39. Sudan

17. The Gambia 40. Swaziland

18. Ghana 41. Tanzania

19. Guinea 42. Togo

20. Guinea-Bissau 43. Uganda

21. Kenya 44. Dem. Rep. of the Congo

22. Lesotho 45. Zambia

23. Liberia 46. Zimbabwe

compromise between the depth of the panels and the prob-

lems posed by missing data, and 1970 therefore became the

initial year of the sample. Beginning this project in 1997, I ini-

tially adopted 1995 as the terminal year; the data come from

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published sources and a two-year time lag between the time of

writing and the date of the most current observation seemed

the best that could be achieved. As no other end date would be

any less arbitrary and as attempts at currency would run afoul

pauses for analysis and publication, I have therefore stuck with

1995 as the cutoff date for the sample.1

The panel is composed of all independent countries in sub-

Saharan Africa, with the exception of South Africa. The mag-

nitude of the South African economy and the character of its

politics rendered it a major – and potentially highly influen-

tial – outlier.

Working with a talented team of graduate students, I

gathered economic and financial data from sources com-

monly employed by those building cross-national samples of

country-level data. Tables A.2, A.6, and A.9 describe the char-

acteristics of the measures employed in each portion of the

analysis and the sources from which they were taken.

General Overview

Shaping the strategy of estimation were the extent and inci-

dence of missing data, difficulties of measurement, and pat-

terns of dependence among the observations.

1 The data can be found at http://Africa.gov.harvard.edu. Macartan
Humphreys built the original Web site; Maria Petrova updated it. As I
write, I am continuing to update the data.

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Missingness

Some countries in some years failed to report statistics. To

the extent that the problem originated from the institutional

weakness of Africa’s newly independent states, limiting the

depth of the panel provided a remedy. The problem also arose,

however, from the subsequent collapse of some of these states.

Because of the potential for selection bias, this source required

a more sophisticated response.

Until recently, scholars, when faced with missing data,

have reverted to “list-wise deletion”: If data for a variable

were missing, then the case was dropped from the data set.

Not only does the dropping of cases throw information away

and thus render estimates inefficient, but also, should the

data not be missing completely at random, then list-wise

deletion may render the estimates biased (King, Honeker et

al. 2001). For the reasons just discussed, in this instance,

the likelihood of bias approaches certitude. Employing the

methods championed by Rubin (1996) and implemented by

Schafer (1997), I therefore created multiple data sets that

incorporate values for missing observations that have been

statistically imputed using variables whose values could be

observed. I have posted the resultant data sets on my Web

site (http://people.iq.harvard.edu/∼Rbates/), along with the
R-scripts employed to generate them.

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Appendix

Qualitative

Dependent Variable

Having reviewed the problems confronting those who seek

accurate body counts, I simply could not bring myself to use

reported deaths as a measure of disorder.2 I attempted to cal-

culate the percent of a nation’s territory controlled by rebels,

but accurate estimates of this variable also proved difficult to

devise. Data on refugees and displaced persons appeared to

be much more precise; but the systematic reporting of these

data began late in the sample period and would therefore have

necessitated a severe truncation of the panel.

I sought to use the formation of militias as my indicator of

state failure. I could not use the number of militias as a depen-

dent variable, however: Given that militias often change their

names, I ran the risk of double-counting; and given that some

sought to hide their identity, I ran the risk of undercounting.

Nor could I make use of the number of combatants; public esti-

mates varied wildly, reflecting the incentives of the rebel side

to claim popular backing and of the government to deprecate

such claims.

2 For an illuminating discussion of the accuracy of battle death data in
the Liberian civil war, see the appendix to Ellis, S. (1999), The Making
of Anarchy, New York: New York University Press. For more general and
technical discussions, see the papers made available through the House-
holds in Conflict Network, which can be accessed on the World Wide Web
(www.hicn.org).

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In the end, I therefore chose to employ a categorical mea-

sure. I created an indicator that took on the value of “1” if there

was any report3 of an armed militia in a given country in a given

year and a “0” otherwise.

Patterns of Dependence

To correct for the impart of correlation across time periods

and within countries on the standard errors, I made use of

robust standard errors, clustering by country. The presence of

militias at one time might well affect the likelihood of their

being reported at another. I therefore adopted the techniques

devised by Beck, Katz et al. (1998), introducing cubic splines to

correct my estimates for the impact of temporal dependence

arising from the events themselves.

Possibilities also arise for interdependence among coun-

tries within the cross sections. I introduced “period dummies”

to control for the impact of shocks that might be common to

the whole sample set of countries: the rise of oil prices in the

1970s, for example, or the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s.

For each observation, I also computed4 the value of the depen-

dent variable in neighboring states, allowing me to control for

the possibility, say, that the likelihood of political reform or

3 Reports are from the sources listed in Table A.9.
4 Computations were conducted with the assistance of James Habyarimana.

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disorder in a country in a given year was related to the extent

of political reform or disorder in its neighbors.

Discussion

Given the nature of the data, the challenge therefore became to

draw precise and unbiased estimates from multiple, imputed

sets of time series, cross-sectional data, with a binary depen-

dent variable, controlling for the sources of error discussed

above. Given the state of the art, the properties of the data set

limited my choice of models.

The following three sections present the estimates that I

have obtained.5

Policy Choices

I attributed the initial choice of control regimes in part

to demands for regional redistribution. Their persistence I

attributed to the authoritarian nature of governments, which

virtually disenfranchised those who bore the costs of these

policies. Table A.2 presents the variables employed in the anal-

ysis of policy choices. Table A.3 presents estimates from a

5 I was assisted in these labors by Matthew Hindman and Marc Alexander,
plus others who labored ’round Gary King’s shop at Harvard University,
Olivia Lau and Rebecca Nelson in particular. I owe special thanks to Jas
Sekhon.

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Table A.2. Variables employed in analysis of policy choices

Standard
Measure Mean Deviation Source

Dependent Variable
Control regime 1 = Yes 0.51 0.500 Ndulu, Collier, et al. 2007

0 = No
Syndrome-free 1 = Yes 0.251 0.434 Ndulu, Collier, et al. 2007

0 = No
Independent Variables
Authoritarian regime 1 if no- or single-party. 0.704 0.456 Keesings Contemporary Archives

0 otherwise

Africa Confidential

Economist Intelligence Unit

Military government 1 if head of state is 0.441 0.497 Keesings Contemporary Archives

or ever has been Africa Confidential

military professional. Economist Intelligence Unit

0 otherwise

150

Privileged region 1 = yes 0.891 0.331 Harvard research team
0 = No

President from non- 1 = yes 0.570 0.495 Harvard research team
privileged region 0 = No

Period1 1 if 1970–74

0 otherwise

Period2 1 if 1975–79

0 otherwise

Period3 1 if 1980–84

0 otherwise

Period4 1 if 1985–89

0 otherwise

Note: The variables “authoritarian regime?” and “military government?” have been lagged by one year.
Ndulu, B., P. Collier, et al. 2007. The Political Economy of Economic Growth in Africa, 1960–2000. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press.

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Table A.3. Correlates of policy regimes, pooled sample

Control Regime Syndrome-Free Policy Choices

Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t

(1) (2) (3) (4)

Authoritarian regime 0.214 0.636 −0.826 0.106
(0.473) (−1.614)

Military government 0.143 0.774 −1.390 0.016
(0.287) (−2.415)

Privileged region 2.198 0.082 2.207 0.084 −3.530 0.004 −3.547 0.000
(1.746) (1.735) (−2.877) (−3.503)

President from non- 0.982 0.028 0.971 0.036 −0.329 0.552 −0.185 0.748
privileged region (2.191) (2.100) (−0.596) (−0.322)

Period1 1.102 0.005 1.122 0.005 −0.586 0.131 −0.779 0.047
(2.825) (2.817) (−1.512) (−1.984)

Period2 1.609 0.000 1.646 0.000 −1.580 0.001 −1.819 0.000
(5.129) (5.150) (−3.278) (−3.907)

Period3 1.540 0.000 1.573 0.000 −1.796 0.000 −1.989 0.000
(5.048) (5.147) (−3.614) (−4.159)

Period4 1.148 0.000 1.171 0.000 −1.153 0.001 −1.235 0.001
(4.575) (4.650) (−3.311) (−3.386)

Constant −3.704 0.004 −3.631 0.004 3.561 0.006 3.530 0.000
(−2.909) (−2.907) (2.757) (3.526)

Observations 1150 1150 1150 1150

Note: t statistics in parentheses. Robust standard errors, grouped by country.

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pooled set of data; given the qualitative nature of the depen-

dent variables (see Table A.2), the estimates are based upon a

logit model. When, I introduce country-specific fixed effects

(Table A.4), I employ a conditional logit model.

The dependent variables are policy choices: the choice

of “control regime” in the left-hand panel (equations 1 and

2) and “syndrome-free” policymaking on the right (equa-

tions 3 and 4).6 In both sets of equations, the period dummies

(Period 1 . . . Period 4) help to control for time-specific effects,

such as changes in the global economy or the interna-

tional balance of power. The reference category is 1990–95

(Period 5).

In Table A.3, the variable “privileged region” takes the value

1 when there exists major regional inequality in a country and

0 when there does not. Such inequalities can arise because

of differences in soil quality (in 53% of the cases in which

such inequalities were judged to exist), mineral deposits (in

47% of the cases), or a climate favorable to the production of

export crops (in 92% of the cases). As this variable is time invari-

ant, it could not be incorporated into fixed effects equations

(Table A.4). I therefore make use instead of a variable that

takes on the value 1 if the incumbent president is from a non-

privileged region and 0 if not. In Table A.4, the coefficients on

6 For details concerning the content of these policies, see Chapter 4.

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Table A.4. Correlates of policy regimes, conditional logit

Control Regime Syndrome-Free Policy Choices

Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t
(1) (2) (3) (4)

Authoritarian regime 0.434 0.268 −0.081 0.835
(1.113) (−0.209)

Military government 0.070 0.859 −0.30791 0.517
(0.177) (−0.652)

President from non- 0.823 0.051 2.024 0.037 −1.567 0.020 −1.5256 0.029
privileged region (1.972) (2.104) (−2.657) (−2.498)

Period1 2.060 0.000 2.024 0.000 −1.161 0.001 −1.1956 0.001
(6.029) (5.873) (−3.291) (−3.287)

Period2 3.981 0.000 4.047 0.000 −3.609 0.000 −3.6319 0.000
(9.153) (9.315) (−5.411) (−5.668)

Period3 4.300 0.000 4.310 0.000 −4.571 0.001 −4.5604 0.001
(9.128) (9.204) (−3.904) (−5.504)

Period4 2.604 0.000 2.657 0.000 −2.215 0.000 −2.1527 0.000
(7.262) (7.406) (−5.532) (−5.504)

Constant −3.704 0.004 −3.631 0.004
(−2.909) (−2.907)

Observations 700 700 675 675

Note: t statistics in parentheses.

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the variable therefore indicate the changes in the likelihood of

choosing a particular policy regime when a president from a

non-privileged region enters office.

“Authoritarianism” takes on the value 1 when no- or single-

party systems are in place. The variable “military government”

takes on the value of 1 when the head of state is, or was, a

professional soldier, and the coefficient indicates the differ-

ence in the likelihood of the respective policy being chosen

by a military as opposed to civilian regime. In Table A.3, the

coefficients therefore indicate the difference in the likelihood

of a given policy being chosen when a government is “author-

itarian” or military as opposed to when a government is not.

In Table A.4, the coefficients indicate the changes in the like-

lihood of a given policy choice when associated with changes

in the type of government.

The estimates in Table A.3 indicate that countries char-

acterized by regional inequality are significantly more likely

to adopt control regimes and significantly less likely to

adopt “syndrome-free” or market-oriented economic poli-

cies. The coefficients on the period dummies confirm that

control regimes were abandoned following the end of the

Cold War and that syndrome-free policymaking became more

common.

In Table A.4, the temporal dummies remain highly signif-

icant when country-specific fixed effects are introduced into

the estimates. They strongly underscore the impact of “global”

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Table A.5. First differences – determinants of policy choice, pooled sample

Change in Probability of Adopting
Control Regime

Change in Probability of Adopting
Syndrome-Free Policies

Percentage

Change in
Probability

95%
Confidence

Interval

Percentage
Change in
Probability
95%
Confidence
Interval
Percentage
Change in
Probability
95%
Confidence
Interval
Percentage
Change in
Probability
95%
Confidence
Interval
(1) (2) (3) (4)

Authoritarian regime 0.031 0.009 0.059 −0.067 −0.114 0.034
Military government 0.023 0.197 0.31 −0.135 −0.212 −0.075
Privileged region 0.233 0.18 0.289 0.254 0.003 0.051 −0.515 −0.581 −0.452 −0.500 −0.574 −0.444
Period1 0.053 0.02 0.095 0.065 0.025 0.112 −0.012 −0.034 −0.009 −0.025 −0.057 −0.003
Period2 0.125 0.069 0.195 0.15 0.09 0.227 −0.100 −0.174 −0.047 −0.132 −0.215 −0.068
Period3 0.138 0.077 0.218 0.159 0.094 0.24 −0.132 −0.225 −0.066 −0.153 −0.254 −0.08
Period4 0.092 0.044 0.154 0.11 0.057 0.174 −0.069 −0.137 −0.022 −0.07 −0.15 −0.03

Note: In each instance, the coeffiicent indicates the percentage change in probability of the choice of policy regime resulting from a movement from 0 to 1 in the
value of the independent variable.

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forces on the choice of policy regime. The estimates confirm

that when presidents from a non-privileged region assume

power, the likelihood of adopting a control regime signifi-

cantly increases. The coefficients on the type of government

(Table A.3) indicate that authoritarian governments and mil-

itary rgimes are less likely to adopt syndrome-free styles of

policymaking.

Table A.5 provides data on the magnitude of the relation-

ships between the independent and dependent variables and

is based upon the coefficients in equation 1 of Table A.4. The

estimates are produced by varying each variable from 0 to 1

while holding all others at their modal values (in this instance,

0).7 Countries with a privileged region are roughly 25% more

likely to impose a control regime and 50% less likely to lack

syndrome-free policies. The late 1970s to early 1980s emerges

as the period in which governments were most likely to adopt

interventionist policies; countries were roughly 12 to 15% more

likely to adopt control regimes and 13 to 15% less likely to adopt

market friendly economic measures in the late 1970s and early

1980s by comparison with the 1990s. Authoritarian govern-

ments were roughly 3% more likely to adopt control regimes

and 7% less likely to adopt syndrome-free policy regimes; mil-

itary governments, 2% and 14%, respectively.

7 The first two numbers in a given row indicate the lower and upper
bounds of the 95% confidence interval of these estimated magnitude of
the response of the dependent variable.

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Table A.6. Variables pertaining to political reform

Standard
Measure Mean Deviation Source

Dependent Variable
Multiparty system 1 = Yes 0.208 0.406 Data collected by research team from

0 = No- or single-party Keesings Contemporary Archives
Africa Confidential

Reform 1 = Yes: Civilian government 0.637 0.481 Economist Intelligence Unit
0 = Professional soldier head of state

Independent Variables
Income Log of GDP per capita (PPP) 1173.38 974.723

Penn World Tables Mark 5.6

Urban population Percent of population living 25.849 13.476

World Development Indicators

Literacy Percent of adult population 58.917 19.921 World Development Indicators

that is illiterate

Modernization Factor score derived from −0.018 0.022
principal components

analysis of INCOME,

LITERACY, and URBAN

POPULATION

Petroleum Value of exports per capita 87.010 14.331 Data collected by research team

in constant U.S. dollars (’000) from commercial sources

158

Trade taxes Percentage central government revenues 34.23 0.659 World Development Indicators

from taxes on trade

Business cycle Weighted average growth rate of G7 0.021 0.019 Data created by research team

economies using data from

Penn World Tables Mark 5.6

Aid dependence Foreign aid percent of central government 53.643 68.934 World Development Indicators

expenditure

Duration

No-party system Length of time in years 2.405 4.685 Data collected by research team from

of duration of political system Keesings Contemporary Archives

Africa Confidential
Economist Intelligence Unit

One-party system ditto 3.415 5.551 ditto

Multiparty system ditto 1.271 3.934 ditto

Neighbor average Average level of reform among neighboring 2.741 1.112 Data collected by research team from

states, where 0 = no-party system, Keesings Contemporary Archives
1 = single-party system, and Africa Confidential
3 = multiparty system Economist Intelligence Unit

1990–95 1 if 1990–95

0 otherwise

Note: All independent variables lagged by one year.

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Appendix
Political Reform

The fiscal crisis of the states of late-century Africa, I have

argued, led to a declining quality of public services and to

increased predation by pubic officials, both of which sparked

popular resentment and increasing demands for political

reform. Within Africa, political reform was contagious, dissem-

inating rapidly across national boundaries and into neighbor-

ing states. It was lent impetus from abroad, as Africa’s cred-

itors chided its authoritarian regimes. The power of finance

rose sharply when the interests of Western foreign policy-

makers aligned with those of the fiscal technocrats with the

end of the Cold War.

Table A.6 presents the variables employed to test this line of

argument. Reform is marked by the movement from military

to civilian regimes and from no- and single-party to multiparty

systems among the latter. To analyze the determinants of such

movements, I employ a conditional logit model (Table A.7).

As a result of this specification, several countries drop out

of portions of the analysis, some – like Botswana – because they

remained multiparty systems throughout the sample period;

others – such as Swaziland – because they never reformed;

some – such as the Democratic Republic of Congo – because

they were “always” governed by a professional soldier; and still

others – such as Tanzania – because they consistently remained

under civilian rule.

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Table A.7. Correlates of political reform, conditional logit

Adoption of a Multiparty System Adoption of a Civilian Regime

Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t
(1) (2) (3) (4)

Income 0.000 0.344 0.001 0.042

(0.956) (2.222)

Urban population 0.071 0.116 −0.020 0.585
(1.648) (−0.554)

Literacy −0.003 0.915 −0.004 0.867
(−0.109) (−0.172)

Modernization 0.218 0.807 0.393 0.557

(0.252) −0.597
Petroleum 0.001 0.363 0.001 0.405 −0.002 0.171 0.000 0.825

(0.909) (0.832) (−1.393) (−0.221)
Trade taxes 0.018 0.211 0.017 0.192 −0.033 0.012 −0.029 0.045

(1.308) (1.343) (−2.767) (−2.204)

(continued )

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Table A.7 (continued )

Adoption of a Multiparty System Adoption of a Civilian Regime
Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t Coefficient P > t
(1) (2) (3) (4)

Business cycle −14.782 0.048 −14.523 0.048 0.359 0.952 0.838 0.888
(−1.987) (−1.983) (0.060) −0.141

Aid dependence −0.002 0.712 0.000 0.996 −0.008 0.234 −0.010 0.051
(−0.369) (0.004) (−1.246) (−1.992)

Duration

No-party system −0.124 0.010 −0.094 0.033 −0.246 0 −0.256 0.000
(−2.588) (−2.132) (−5.023) (−5.641)

Single-party system −0.100 0.004 −0.082 0.016 0.104 0.018 0.100 0.024
(−2.898) (−2.407) (2.396) (2.277)

Neighbor average 0.328 0.054 0.358 0.025 0.545 0.006 0.596 0.000

(1.954) (2.250) (2.939) (3.647)

1990–1995 1.938 0.003 2.292 0.000 0.741 0.074 0.643 0.094

(3.579) (5.388) (1.810) (1.686)

Number of observations 980 728 728 675

Note: t statistics in parentheses. Estimates derived from a conditional logistic model, grouped by country.

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As seen in Table A.7, the analysis suggests that political

institutions in Africa exhibit historisis. As indicated by the

coefficients on the duration variable, the longer a country has

been subject to a no- or single-party system, the less likely it

is to change to a multiparty system. The estimates also sug-

gest a relationship between political reform and fiscal dearth.

In the case of civilian regimes, declines in the growth rate

of the advanced industrial nations (“business cycle”) signifi-

cantly and negatively correlate with increases in the likelihood

of changing to a multiparty system; in the case of military gov-

ernments, declines in “trade taxes” significantly and negatively

relate to the likelihood of converting to a civilian form of gov-

ernment.

The coefficient on “urban population” suggests the role

played by urban dwellers in the movement to multiparty

systems; that on “income,” the role played by the middle and

upper classes in overturning military regimes. That protest

diffused across political boundaries is confirmed by the pos-

itive and significant coefficient on “neighbor average,” which

provides a measure of the degree of political liberalization in

neighboring states (see Table A.6).

Interestingly, aid dependence appears not to bear a statis-

tically detectable relationship with the likelihood of change to

a multiparty system; and in the movement to civilian regimes,

the strength of its relationship varies depending upon the vari-

ables included or dropped from the analysis. More robust is

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Table A.8. Marginal effects, political reform

Change in
Probability

95% Confidence
Interval

Income
From min to max −0.057 −0.666 0.031
296 6,965

Urban population
From min to max 0.105 0 0.87
2.4 81.7

Literacy
From min to max −0.049 0.543 0
17.1 100

Petroleum 0.08 −0.052 0.858
From min to max
0 6,574

Trade taxes 0.044 0 0.443
From min to max
.022 76.51

Business cycle −0.029 −0.294 0
From min to max
−0.018 .052

Aid dependence
From min to max −0.025 −0.352 0.034
0 513

Duration of party system
No-party system
From min to max −0.109 −0.782 0
0 25

One-party system
From min to max −0.101 −0.731 0
0 25

Neighbor average
From min to max 0.024 −0.005 0.295
0 6

1990–95
From 0.048 0 0.383
0 1

Note: Estimates derived from simulations of a probit that included country
dummies. Consult Fernandez-Val. (2004), “Estimation of Structural Parameters
and Marginal Effects in Binary Choice Panel Data Models with Fixed Effects,”
Cambridge, MA: Department of Economics, MIT.

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Appendix

the relationship between the time dummy and the likelihood

of reform: the coefficient on the variable “1990–95,” which may

capture the impact of the end of the Cold War, is positive in sign

and statistically significant.

Table A.8 reports the magnitudes of the coefficients of equa-

tion 1 of Table A.7. The coefficient on the measure of dura-

tion under single-party rule suggests that those long subject

to single-party rule, such as Tanzania, would be roughly 10%

less likely to reform than would others, such as Kenya, whose

experience with single-party rule was more limited. The data

in Table A.8 also suggest that countries such as Rwanda or

Burundi, where urban dwellers constitute less than 5% of the

population, were 10% less likely to adopt multiparty rule than

were those, such as Botswana or Cape Verde, where they com-

posed over 60% of the population.

Political Disorder

The analysis of political disorder focused on the impact of three

forces. The first was public revenues: When deprived of suffi-

cient payments for the provision of governance, I argued, elites

would use their power to pay themselves. They would veer from

the equilibrium path, in the words of the fable, and behave

in ways that would render citizens insecure. The second was

political reform: When compelled to allow political opponents

to organize in an effort to displace them, political elites, feeling

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Table A.9. Variables pertaining to political disorder

Standard
Measure Mean Deviation Source
Dependent Variable

Militias 1 = Yes 0.247 0.431 Data collected by research team from
0 = No Keesings Contemporary Archives

Africa Confidential
Economist Intelligence Unit

Independent Variables
Revenues Central government’s revenues as

percent of GDP
18.489 0.382 World Development Indicators

Petroleum Value of exports per capita in
constant U.S. dollars

87.010 14.331 Data collected by research team from commercial
sources

Party System
No-party system 1 = Yes 0.355 0.015 Data collected by research team from

0 = No Keesings Contemporary Archives
One-party system ditto 0.445 0.015 Africa Confidential

Economist Intelligence Unit
Multiparty system ditto 0.205 0.013

Duration
No-party system Length of time in years 2.405 4.685 Data collected by research team from

of duration of political system

Keesings Contemporary Archives
Africa Confidential
Economist Intelligence Unit

One-party system ditto 3.415 5.551 ditto
Multiparty system ditto 1.271 3.934 ditto

166

Neighbor average Number of neighboring states 1.514 1.953 Data collected by research team from
reporting militias or civil or
international wars

Keesings Contemporary Archives
Africa Confidential
Economist Intelligence Unit

Privileged region 1 = yes 0.891 0.331 Harvard research team
0 = no

President from non-
privileged region

1 = yes 0.570 1.953 ditto

0 = no
Period1 1 if 1970–74

0 otherwise
Period2 1 if 1975–79

0 otherwise
Period3 1 if 1980–84

0 otherwise
Period4 1 if 1985–89

0 otherwise
Time since last report Count 5.993 6.235
Instrumental Variables
Business cycle Weighted average growth rate of

G7 economies
0.021 0.019 Data created by research team using data from

Penn World Tables Mark 5.6
Trade taxes Percentage central government

revenues from taxes on trade
34.210 16.32 World Development Indicators

Revenues Central government’s revenues as
percent of GDP

World Development Indicators

Two-year lag 19.272 9.871
Three-year lag 19.100 9.618

Note: All independent variables lagged one year, unless otherwise noted.

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Appendix

insecure, would increase the rate at which they would discount

the future, thus fearing less the disorder that might be provoked

by their predatory actions. The last was resource abundance:

in an environment richly endowed with natural resources, the

potential economic losses following state failure could readily

be offset by using the power of the government to appropriate

the deposits. In such a setting, political elites would more read-

ily succumb to the temptation to deviate from the equilibrium

path and to change from guardians to predators.

Table A.9 defines and describes the variable employed to

test this argument and lists the sources from which they were

taken. Table A.10 presents the coefficients derived from two

models: A logit model applied to the pooled sample and a

conditional logit model, which incorporates country-specific

effects. I attempted to locate instruments that would enable

me to correct for the impact of political disorder on public rev-

enues, but I failed to do so. Table A.11 records first differences,

calculated from the first equation in Table A.10, which provide

measures of the magnitude of the coefficients.

The coefficients on “revenues” are of the sign anticipated

but significant only in the first model. The difference in the

estimates from the two models suggests that it is the quantity

rather than changes in the quantity of public revenues that

counts. Note the data in Table A.11 regarding the magnitude

of the coefficients. In the case of “revenues,” the data suggest

that a shift from the level of revenues garnered in Sierra Leone

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Table A.10. Changes in the probability of militias

Pooled Model Conditional Logit

Coefficient
(1) P > t

Coefficient
(2) P > t

Revenues −0.039 0.061 −0.017 0.556
(−2.04) (−0.609)

Petroleum 0.000 0.743 −0.001 0.727
(−0.328) (−0.349)

No-party system −0.459 0.246 −0.788 0.107
(−1.166) (−1.616)

One-party system −1.017 0.045 −2.166 0.000
(−2.004) (−4.071)

Duration
No-party system 0.096 0.006 −0.019 0.649

(2.789) (−0.455)
One-party system 0.038 0.238 0.146 0.000

(1.179) (3.642)
Multiparty system −0.024 0.600 0.065 0.357

(−0.524) (0.920)
Privileged region 1.403 0.014

(2.491)
President from non- −0.567 0.093 −0.807 0.043

privileged region (−1.679) (−2.027)
Neighbor average 0.092 0.161 −0.052 0.552

(1.401) (−0.595)
Period1 −1.504 0.000 −1.611 0.002

(−3.526) (−3.169)
Period2 −0.914 0.009 −1.398 0.000

(2.615) (−3.565)
Period3 −0.039 0.883 −0.076 0.819

(−0.148) (−0.228)
Period4 −0.183 0.505 0.015 0.959

(−0.667) (0.051)
Time since last report −0.188 0.000 −0.017 0.497

(−5.089) (−0.68)
Constant −0.385 0.559

(−0.584)
Number observations 1048 813

Note: t statistics in parentheses. In equations 1 and 3, robust standard errors, clustered by
country.

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Table A.11. Magnitude of effects

Pooled Model
(First Differences)

Percent Change
in Probability

95% Confidence
Interval

Revenues −0.314 −0.634 −0.089
From min to max
3.5 53.5

Petroleum −0.121 −0.897 0.403
From min to max
0 6547.48

No-party system −0.070 −0.209 0.010
From 0 to 1

One-party system −0.111 −0.315 −0.007
From 0 to 1

Duration
No-party system 0.486 0.171 0.734

From min to max
0 25

One-party system 0.182 −0.056 0.548
From min to max
0 25
Multi-party system −0.054 −0.351 0.312
From min to max
0 25

Privileged region 0.231 −0.006 0.428
From 0 to 1

President from non-
privileged region

−0.072 −0.232 0.006

From 0 to 1
Neighbor average 0.191 −0.047 0.518

From 0 to 1
Period1 −0.137 −0.353 −0.030

From 0 to 1
Period2 −0.103 −0.268 −0.017

From 0 to 1
Period3 0.005 −0.071 0.103

From 0 to 1
Period4 −0.023 −0.114 0.054

From 0 to 1
Time since last report −0.382 −0.708 −0.127

From min to max
0 25

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Appendix

in the mid-1980s to that in Botswana in the same period would

be associated with a 30% reduction in the likelihood of state

failure. Given that political disorder is likely to depress the

level of public revenues, these estimates are likely to be biased

downward.

The coefficients for “petroleum,” a measure of natural

resource endowments, offer little evidence of a relationship

between either differences or changes in the level of the value

of natural resources and the likelihood of reports of militias.

Insofar as the coefficient on “privileged region” (equation 1)

incorporates the effect of natural resource endowments, its

sign and significance does offer evidence in favor of such a rela-

tionship.7 The coefficient on “president from non-privileged

region” is negative and significant in both equations, suggest-

ing that political tensions decline when the poorer region gains

control of the state. As seen in Table A.11, countries contain-

ing a “privileged region” are 23% more likely to experience

state failure. Having a president from a non-privileged region

reduces the likelihood by 7 percentage points; the estimate is

imprecise, however.

The two sets of findings – that having to do with regional

differences and that with the origins of heads of state – warrant

7 The variable “privileged region” should be viewed as an imperfect first
step toward capturing within country variation. Better is the rapidly
increasing use of geographic information systems, as by Buhaug, H. and
G. Gates, “The Geography of Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research 39(4):
417–33.

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Appendix

additional discussion. Acemoglu and Robinson (2001) and

Azam and Mesnard (2003) view politics as centering on redis-

tribution. Economic inequality – class, in the case of Acemoglu

and Robinson and region, in the case of Azam and Mesnard –

animates threats and the use of power. In response to threats

and to forestall violence, those with wealth may offer to share

it; but in the absence of credible means to commit themselves

to fulfill such promises, such offers may well be discounted.

What makes such promises credible, they argue, is the restruc-

turing of institutions. In Acemoglu and Robinson (2001), the

restructuring takes the form of empowering the poor, as by

broadening the franchise or increasing the powers of popular

assemblies. In the context of Africa, the lodging of executive

power in the hands of poorer regions may play an analogous

role to empowerment of the lower classes in industrial states.

The greater credibility of pledges to use the power of the state

to redistribute the wealth of the nation may help to account

for the negative relationship between our measure of disor-

der and the holding of the presidency by the poorer regions of

the nation; by the same token, the negative relationship may

provide evidence in support of their arguments.

The last of the “theoretical” variables is the party sys-

tem. A change to a competitive party system, I have argued,

leads to an increase in the level of political risk. Most rele-

vant, then, are the coefficients of Table A.10 that are based

on within-country changes; both the coefficients on the

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“no-party” and “one-party” are negative, and the latter is highly

significant. The estimates of the magnitude of the coefficients

(Table A.11) are based on equation 1; because they pertain to

differences between rather than to changes in levels, they can

have but little bearing on this discussion.

The control variables also yield coefficients of interest.

Those of “Period1” and “Period2” (1970–74 and 1975–79,

respectively) are significantly lower than those of “Period5”

(1990–95, the reference category), thus offering evidence of

an increase in the likelihood of disorder over time. The esti-

mates in Table A.11 indicate that reports of militias were 10

to 14% less likely in the 1970s than in the 1990s. As seen in

the coefficient to “neighbor average,” countries whose neigh-

bors experienced more violence were more likely to experience

disorder, although the coefficient is not statistically significant.

The data in Table A.11 suggest the magnitude of the effect: A

country such as Mauritius, being an island and therefore iso-

lated from unruly neighbors, would be roughly 20% less likely

to experience political disorder than, say, Zaire in 1994, which

bordered six neighbors engulfed in political conflict.

The estimates remain robust to the inclusion of additional

control variables. These include the standard “modernization”

variables: measures of education, income, and urbanization.

They also include measures of shocks: economic shocks, such

as terms of trade or growth shocks; climatic shocks, such as

droughts; and political shocks, such as national elections. They

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Appendix

include as well such standard controls as population, to cap-

ture the size of the country; and such non-standard controls, as

a measure of the extent to which ethnic groups sprawl across

national borders.

In conclusion, I would draw attention to the “duration” vari-

ables. In any given year and for any given party system, these

variables indicate the number of years that the system has been

in place. When the duration variables are excluded from the

models, the coefficients on the party system dummies fail to

behave in a systematic manner. When they are included, the

coefficients behave in ways that are meaningful and are highly

robust to the inclusion of other variables and to the choice

of model. Why should this be the case? The pattern may be a

statistical artifact, and therefore of little significance, or it may

suggest something about the nature of political institutions

and therefore be important. I continue to be puzzled – and

tantalized – by this finding, but I leave the issue unresolved

while drawing it to the attention of others.

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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: Democracy Goes into Reverse

Book Title: Democracy in Retreat
Book Subtitle: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative
Government
Book Author(s): Joshua Kurlantzick
Published by: Yale University Press. (2013)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt32bh31.4

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Democracy in Retreat
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D
uring april, the hottest month of the year in Thailand, all activity
in Bangkok slows to a molasses pace. With temperatures rising to
well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, many residents leave town, head-
ing north or to the islands east and south of the city, and the slow- moving
fl ow of traffi c releases a cloud of smog into the steaming air. In mid- April,
the entire country shuts down for a week for the Thai New Year, leaving the
few people still in the capital marveling at their sudden ability to drive across
the city in minutes rather than hours.
But in the spring of 2010, Bangkok was anything but quiet. Tens of thou-
sands of red shirted protesters descended upon the city to protest against the
government, which they viewed as illegitimate and unsympathetic to the
working class, and to call for a new election. They mostly hailed from poorer
villages in the rural northeast, or from working class suburbs of Bangkok.
At fi rst, the protests seemed like a village street party. Demonstrators snacked
on sticky rice and grilled chicken, and danced in circles to bands playing
mor lam, a northeastern Thai music that, with its wailing guitars and plain-
tive, yodeling vocals, resembles an Asian version of Hank Williams. Amid a
rollicking, almost joyous atmosphere, over 100,000 red shirts soon gathered
around a makeshift stage in central Bangkok to demand the resignation of
the government.
Within weeks, however, the demonstrations turned violent, leading to
the worst bloodshed in Bangkok in two de cades. On April 10, some dem-
onstrators fi red on police and launched grenades at the security forces. The
troops cracked down hard, sometimes shooting randomly into the crowds.1
By the end of the day, twenty- four people had been killed.
Democracy Goes into Reverse
1
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2 Democracy Goes into Reverse
That was just a warm- up for late May. By that time, the red shirts had
been camped out for weeks in the central business district, shutting down
commerce and paralyzing traffi c. The government and the armed forces,
which had rejected the protesters’ demands for an immediate election, de-
cided to take a tougher line. Advancing into the red shirts’ encampment,
heavily armed soldiers created virtual free- fi re zones, shooting at anyone
who moved and reportedly posting snipers in buildings above the streets to
take out red shirts. A prominent general who had joined the red movement
was killed by a bullet to the forehead as he stood talking with a reporter
from the New York Times.2 The red shirts battled back, setting fi re to the
stock exchange, the largest mall in the city, and other symbols of elite privi-
lege. On the eve ning of May 19, fl ames engulfed the Bangkok skyline, dwarf-
ing the temples of the old city and the glass- and- steel high rises of the
fi nancial district.3 By the end of May, most of the red shirts had gone home,
but the battle had ended at a terrible cost. The clashes had resulted in the
killing of over one hundred people, most of them civilians, and the govern-
ment had declared a state of emergency in most provinces, giving it the
equivalent of martial law powers to detain people without having to charge
them with committing a crime.
Such violence has become increasingly common in a country that was
once among the most stable in Southeast Asia and an example to other
developing nations of demo cratic consolidation. Four years before the red
shirt protests, a different group of protesters had launched Thailand into
turmoil, gathering on the main green in the old city of Bangkok, near the
Grand Palace, with its glittering spires inlaid with tiny gems. Then it was
thousands of middle- class urbanites from Bangkok— lawyers, doctors, shop-
keep ers, and others— demanding the removal of Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra, a charismatic populist, mostly backed by the rural poor, who
had been elected by large majorities but was clearly disdainful of demo cratic
institutions.
Dressed in the yellow of Thailand’s revered monarch, King Bhumibol
Adulyadej, the middle- class protesters were led by a group with the Or-
wellian name People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD). Like the Demo cratic
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 3
People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) or the old German Demo cratic
Republic, the PAD was neither demo cratic nor representative of many people.
Its platform for change called for reducing the number of elected seats in
Parliament, essentially to slash the power of the rural poor, who constitute
the majority of Thais.4 “The middle class— they disdain the rural masses and
see them as willing pawns to the corrupt vote buyers,” said one former U.S.
ambassador to Thailand.5
Thaksin had used his power to eviscerate the civil ser vice, silence the
media, and allegedly disappear po liti cal opponents. He declared a “war on
drugs” in which more than two thousand people were killed by the security
forces, frequently with gunshots to the back of the head, and often despite
the fact that they had no links to narcotics.6 He also cracked down on dissent.
In one horrifi c incident in October 2004, Thai security forces rounded up
hundreds of young men in southern Thailand after demonstrations against
the government at a local mosque. The security forces stacked them inside
stifl ing, insuffi ciently ventilated trucks; eighty- fi ve people died of suffoca-
tion.7 On a daily basis Thaksin spread fear among potential critics. At the
offi ces of the Bangkok Post its tough investigative reporters, who had sur-
vived on cheap whiskey and cigarettes through coups, street protests, and
wars, were completely dispirited. One editor said they were scared even to
touch stories related to Thaksin, for fear the prime minister’s cronies would
buy the paper and fi re them.8
Still, Thaksin had been elected twice, and he dominated Thai politics
largely because he was the most compelling, or ga nized, and dynamic poli-
tician in the country. In a lengthy cable analyzing Thaksin’s appeal— and
released to the public by Wikileaks— Ralph Boyce, a former U.S. ambassa-
dor to Thailand who was no fan of Thaksin’s repressive policies, admitted:
“Thaksin’s personality, sophisticated media pre sen ta tion, focused populist
message, and traditional get- out- the- vote or ga niz ing, combined to allow
[Thaksin’s party] to leave . . . its closest rival in the po liti cal dust . . .
Thaksin . . . has no equal in Thailand on how to attract po liti cal attention.”
In 2005 Thaksin trounced the Demo crat Party, which was favored by
most yellow shirts, and in 2006, when he called a new election, the Demo crats
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4 Democracy Goes into Reverse
simply refused to participate. By that time the Demo crats, once the most
powerful party in Thailand, had been reduced to a small rump in Parlia-
ment, holding less than one hundred out of the fi ve hundred seats in total.
Instead of contesting the 2006 election, then, the yellow shirts, who shared
po liti cal leanings with the Demo crat Party, tried to paralyze the country.
They stormed Parliament and shut it down, trapping lawmakers and forc-
ing some se nior ministers to fl ee, James Bond– style, over a fence and into
a nearby building. Later, they laid siege to the main international airport,
throwing commerce into turmoil and severely damaging tourism, one of
the country’s main sources of foreign exchange.
After months of rallies, Thaksin’s government was fi nally ousted in a
coup in 2006, but this only led to more chaos. For nearly a de cade now, Thai-
land has weathered one street protest after another, with both sides disdain-
ing demo cratic institutions and refusing to resolve their differences at the
ballot box instead of in the streets, often with bloody results. After Thaksin
and, later, other pro- Thaksin parties were prevented from assuming power
despite their electoral mandates, Thailand’s working classes formed their
own movement. They donned red clothing— Thaksin’s color— in response
to the yellow shirts. (The red shirts’ offi cial name was the United Front for
Democracy Against Dictatorship.) Just as the yellow shirts had tried to cre-
ate havoc and paralyze the economy, so too the red shirts attempted to
destroy what was left of demo cratic culture and order. They laid siege to
Parliament, forcing lawmakers loyal to the yellow shirts to fl ee. In April
2009, they stormed a meeting of Southeast Asian nations in the resort town
of Pattaya, forcing many visiting Asian leaders to hide inside their hotel,
and ultimately causing the meeting to be canceled, to the great embarrass-
ment of the Thai government.9 Finally, in the spring of 2010, the red shirts
converged on Bangkok.
In July 2011, despite efforts by Thailand’s middle classes and its mili-
tary to prevent the red shirts from taking power, the red shirts’ favored
party, called Puea Thai, won national elections again, forming a majority in
parliament. The electoral victory handed the prime ministership to Yingluck
Shinawatra, the party’s leader— and the youn gest sister of former prime
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 5
minister Thaksin. Soon, Thailand was boiling again, as Thaksin’s oppo-
nents revolted against his sister’s government, warning that if Thaksin re-
turned to Bangkok— and to power— they might well riot in the streets
again, shutting down the city once more.
In the late 1990s, the possibility of such a breakdown of democracy in Thai-
land seemed remote. After a massive pop u lar demonstration of hundreds
of thousands in Bangkok ousted a military regime in 1992, Thais believed
they had fi nally created a stable democracy. At the Bangkok Post, young re-
porters often seemed downright jubilant. During the day, they crawled
through traffi c in their cars to research investigative pieces unthinkable
under past dictatorships; at night, they often attended informal strategy ses-
sions about how to make good on the promises written into the new, pro-
gressive constitution passed in 1997. That groundbreaking constitution
guaranteed many new rights and freedoms, created new national institutions
to monitor graft, and strengthened po liti cal parties at the expense of un-
elected centers of power— the palace, the military, big business, and the elite
civil service— that together had run Thailand since the end of the absolute
monarchy in the 1930s. It also set the stage for elections in 2001 that were
probably the freest in Thailand’s history. Meanwhile, the media utilized its
new freedoms, along with new technologies like the Internet and satellite
tele vi sion, to explore formerly taboo topics like po liti cal corruption and
labor rights.
By the early 2000s, many Thais felt great pride in their nation’s demo-
cratic development. Outsiders noticed, too. “Thailand’s freedom, openness,
strength, and relative prosperity make it a role model in the region for what
people can achieve when they are allowed to,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of
State James Kelly declared in 2002.10 Besides Kelly, former Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright and then Secretary of State Colin Powell, among
others, heaped praise on Bangkok. Powell declared in 2002, “Thailand has
lived up to our expectations in so many ways.”11 In its 1999 report, the inter-
national monitoring or ga ni za tion Freedom House ranked Thailand a “free”
nation.12
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6 Democracy Goes into Reverse
Today, Thailand looks almost nothing like a model emerging democ-
racy. The never- ending cycle of street protest, by both the middle class and
the poor, paralyzes policy making, hinders economic growth, and deters
investment at a time when authoritarian competitors like China and Viet-
nam are vacuuming up foreign capital. Few Thais now trust the integrity
of the judiciary, the civil ser vice, or other national institutions. Even the
king, once so revered that Thais worshipped him like a god, has seen his
impartiality questioned.13 The Thai military now wields enormous infl u-
ence behind the scenes, a dramatic reversal from the 1990s, when most
Thais believed the military had returned to the barracks for good.14 A once
freewheeling media has become increasingly shuttered and servile. The
government now blocks over one hundred thousand websites, more than in
neighboring Vietnam.15 Once- groundbreaking Bangkok newspapers now
read like Asian versions of the old Pravda, lavishing praise on the red shirts
or the yellow shirts depending on the paper’s point of view.16 The Thai
government even began locking up Americans visiting the country who’d
written blog posts about the Thai monarchy years earlier. Even after Thak-
sin’s sister took the reins of power, little changed, with arrests and Web
blocking continuing as before.
Many middle- class Thais, faced with the breakdown of their once-
vibrant democracy, seem to believe their country is somehow singular— that
its collapse is due to a coincidence of factors that are unique to the country
and hard for a foreigner to understand: the end of the reign of Bhumibol,
who’d long played a stabilizing role; the Asian fi nancial crisis, which pushed
the country toward pop u lism; and the unfortunate rise of Thaksin, a man
with little commitment to the rule of law. “We were just unlucky,” a se nior
Thai government offi cial said. “If we’d not had Thaksin, if His Majesty
could have been more involved, like in 1992, things would have been much
different. . . . It’s a Thai situation.” 17
But demo cratic meltdowns like Thailand’s have become depressingly com-
mon. In its annual international survey, the most comprehensive analysis of
freedom around the globe, Freedom House, which uses a range of data to
assess social, po liti cal, and economic freedoms in each nation, found that
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 7
global freedom plummeted in 2010 for the fi fth year in a row, the longest
continuous decline in nearly forty years. At the same time, most authoritar-
ian nations had become more repressive, stepping up their oppressive mea-
sures with little re sis tance from the demo cratic world. Overall, Freedom
House reported, twenty- fi ve nations went backward, in terms of freedom,
in 2010 alone, while only eleven made any gains; among the decliners were
critical regional powers like Mexico and Ukraine. This despite the fact that
in 2011 one of the most historically authoritarian parts of the world, the
Middle East, seemed to begin to change. The decline, Freedom House noted,
was most pronounced among what it called the “middle ground” of nations,
primarily in the developing world— nations that have begun demo cratizing
but are not solid and stable democracies.18 Indeed, the number of electoral
democracies fell in 2010 to its lowest number since 1995.19 “A ‘freedom
recession’ and an authoritarian resurgence have clearly emerged as global
trends,” writes Freedom House’s director of research, Arch Puddington.
“Over the last four years, the dominant pattern has been one of growing
restrictions on the fundamental freedoms of expression and association in
authoritarian settings, and a failure to continue demo cratic progress in pre-
viously improving countries.”20 Freedom House also found an increasing
“truculence” among authoritarian regimes. This truculence actually was
only made stronger by the Arab Spring, which led autocratic regimes like
China and Uzbekistan to crack down harder on their own populations. The
International Federation for Human Rights, an or ga ni za tion that monitors
abuses around the world, found in its late- 2011 annual report that the Arab
uprisings had little impact on a dire, deteriorating climate for human rights
defenders worldwide.21
Indeed, in the fall of 2011 Rus sia, which along with China is one of the
most powerful authoritarian nations, made clear that any hopes of change
were just a mirage, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has dominated
Rus sia for more than a de cade, announced that, in a secret deal with Presi-
dent Dmitry Medvedev, Putin would once again assume the presidency in
2012 and potentially serve two more terms, which would keep him in con-
trol of the Kremlin until 2024, longer than some Soviet leaders had lasted.
Putin had been constitutionally barred from serving another presidential
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8 Democracy Goes into Reverse
term after his fi rst two terms ended in 2008, and once Medvedev assumed
the presidency some Rus sian liberals had hoped that he would introduce
reforms, despite his history as a close confi dante of Putin’s. Indeed, in offi ce
Medvedev declared that Rus sia’s criminal justice system needed to be over-
hauled, and that the country should open up its po liti cal system, but his
announcement that he had secretly agreed with Putin to manipulate the
presidency and prime ministership to put Putin back in power showed that
he, too, was at heart hardly a demo crat. When Rus sia’s fi nance minister ques-
tioned the handoff of power from Medvedev back to Putin, he was sum-
marily fi red, in a clear message.
The stagnation of democracy predates this fi ve- year period, Freedom
House noted; since 2000 democracy gained little ground around the world,
before sliding backward beginning in the mid- 2000s. “Since they were fi rst
issued in 1972, the fi ndings in Freedom in the World have conveyed a story of
broad advances,” Freedom House reported. “But freedom’s forward march
peaked around the beginning of the [2000s].”
Even as some demo crats were celebrating the Arab Spring and hoping
that, as in 1989, its revolutions might spread to other parts of the world, a
mountain of other evidence supported Freedom House’s gloomy conclu-
sions. Another of the most comprehensive studies of global democracy,
compiled by Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation, uses data examining de-
mocracies’ ability to function, manage government, and uphold freedoms
to produce what it calls the “transformation index.” The overall goal of the
index is to analyze the state and quality of democracy in every developing
nation that has achieved some degree of freedom. To do so, Bertelsmann
looks at a range of characteristics including the stability of demo cratic insti-
tutions, po liti cal participation, the rule of law, and the strength of the state,
among other areas. And the most recent index found “the overall quality
of democracy has eroded [throughout the developing world]. . . . The key
components of a functioning democracy, such as po liti cal participation and
civil liberties, have suffered qualitative erosion. . . . These developments
threaten to hollow out the quality and substance of governance.” The index
concluded that the number of “highly defective democracies”— democracies
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 9
with institutions, elections, and po liti cal culture so fl awed that they no lon-
ger qualifi ed as real democracies— had roughly doubled between 2006 and
2010. By 2010, in fact, nearly 53 of the 128 countries assessed by the index
were categorized as “defective democracies.”
Sixteen of these fi fty- three, including regionally and globally powerful
states like Rus sia and Kenya, qualifi ed as “highly defi cient democracies,”
countries that had such a lack of opportunity for opposition voices, prob-
lems with the rule of law, and unrepresentative po liti cal structures that they
were now little better than autocracies. The percentage of “highly defi cient
democracies” in the index has roughly doubled in just four years. And in
Africa, which had been at the center of the global wave of demo cratization
in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the deterioration was most pronounced.
Between 2008 and 2010, Bertelsmann found, sub- Saharan Africa was
home to nine of the thirteen nations in the developing world that suffered
the greatest deterioration in the quality of their po liti cal systems. Among
these backsliders were Senegal, Tanzania, and Madagascar, which once were
among the greatest hopes for democracy on the continent.
Even nations that have been held up as demo cratic models have re-
gressed over the past fi ve to ten years, according to both the Freedom House
and the Bertelsmann studies. When they entered the Eu ro pe an Union in
the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and
Slovakia were considered success stories and would join the older democ-
racies of Western Eu rope as solid, consolidated demo cratic systems. But in
their de cade inside the EU, all of these new entrants actually have been
downgraded repeatedly by Freedom House, showing that their demo cratic
systems, election pro cesses, and commitments to civil liberties have deterio-
rated.22 Populist and far- right parties with little commitment to demo cratic
norms gained steadily in popularity; public distaste for democracy in these
supposed success stories skyrocketed, so much so that in one 2006 survey
publics in Central Eu rope showed the most skepticism about the merits of
democracy of any region of the world.23 Hungary deteriorated so badly that
its press freedoms reverted to almost Soviet- type suppression, with its gov-
ernment using harsh new laws and other attacks to silence the media.24
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10 Democracy Goes into Reverse
The third major international study of democracy, the Economist
Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) “index of democracy,” only further confi rmed the
decline. The EIU’s annual survey of the entire world analyzes democracy
using categories for electoral pro cess, pluralism, po liti cal participation, po-
liti cal culture, functioning of government, and civil liberties including press
freedom and freedom of association. In its most recent study, it found that
democracy was in retreat across nearly the entire globe. “In all regions, the
average democracy score for 2010 is lower than in 2008,” noted the report.
In ninety- one of one hundred sixty- seven countries it studied, the democ-
racy score had deteriorated in that time period, and in many others it had
only remained stagnant. Of the seventy- nine nations that it assessed as hav-
ing some signifi cant demo cratic qualities, only twenty- six made the grade as
“full democracies,” while the other fi fty- three were ranked only as “fl awed
democracies” because of serious defi ciencies in many of the areas it assessed.
“Democracy is in retreat. The dominant pattern in all regions . . . has been
backsliding on previously attained progress,” the survey concluded.
In some of the specifi c categories that it examined to assess democracy,
such as media freedom, the EIU found that backsliding was even more severe
than the broader decline in the democracy index. More than thirty nations,
including regional powers— and onetime examples of democratization—
like Rus sia, Hungary, Mexico, and Turkey, witnessed sharp increases in
media and online repression between 2008 and 2010. The Economist Intel-
ligence Unit’s 2011 Democracy Survey, released roughly a year after the
Arab uprisings began, had just as much gloom. As in 2010, it similarly found
that “democracy has been under intense pressure in many parts of the
world,” and that the quality of democracy had regressed on nearly every
continent in 2011.
Like Freedom House and the Bertelsmann Foundation, the EIU found
that, with only a few exceptions, backsliding was occurring in nearly every
developing region of the world. It found that authoritarianism was becom-
ing more entrenched in Central Asia, demo cratization was being reversed
in Africa, authoritarian populists were emerging in Latin America, and
po liti cal participation was plummeting in the former Soviet states of East-
ern and Central Eu rope, undermining the region’s demo cratic transitions.
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 11
Assessing the data, and the severe reversals, the EIU was glum about the
future, though it recognized that the Middle East had nowhere to go but
up, given its long- entrenched authoritarianism. “The threat of backsliding
now greatly outweighs the possibility of future gains [in demo cratization
worldwide],” the survey concluded.
Old- fashioned coups also have returned. In Latin America, Asia, and
even most of Africa, coups, which had been a frequent means of changing
governments during the Cold War, had become nearly extinct by the early
2000s. But between 2006 and 2010 the military grabbed power in Guinea,
Honduras, Mauritania, Niger, Guinea- Bissau, Bangladesh, Thailand, Fiji,
and Madagascar, among other states.
In many other developing nations, such as Mexico, Pakistan, and the
Philippines, the military did not launch an outright coup but managed to
restore its power as the central actor in po liti cal life, dominating the civilian
governments that clung to power only through the support of the armed
forces. Freedom House, in fact, notes that the global decline in democracy
in the past fi ve years has been the result, in part, of weakening civilian
control of militaries across the developing world. The civilian Thai prime
minister in the late 2000s, Abhisit Vejjajiva, who took power in 2008, owed
his survival in offi ce to the military’s backing, and se nior army offi cers made
clear to him, in private, that if they withdrew their support, his government
could easily collapse. Unsurprisingly, the Thai military’s bud get more than
doubled between 2006 and 2011, with much of the expenditures going to-
ward tools to control Thailand’s own population, rather than toward fi ght-
ing potential foreign enemies. After Thaksin’s sister became prime minister,
the armed forces negotiated a deal with her that gave the military total
control over its own bud get, with little civilian authority— and which es-
sentially preserved its ability to interfere in politics indefi nitely. Philippine
president Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo relied upon the armed forces to enforce
a crackdown against opponents. According to several local human rights
groups, more than a thousand left- leaning activists, opposition politicians,
and other government opponents were killed between 2001 and 2010, and
one comprehensive study found that “the [Philippine] military [is] an im-
portant veto actor in the competition among the country’s po liti cal elites.”25
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12 Democracy Goes into Reverse
“It’s almost like we’ve gone back to the [Ferdinand] Marcos era,” prominent
rights activist and lawyer Harry Roque Jr. said as he waited in his offi ce for
the security forces to come and interrogate him.26 “There’s the same type of
fear, the same abuses, the same attitude by the military that their actions
will never face consequences.” Within months of the election of Arroyo’s
successor, Benigno Aquino, in 2010, the Philippine military seemed ready
to bolster its power even more. Several prominent former military offi cers
reportedly launched a new movement called “Solidarity for Sovereignty,”
designed to step in if the president’s government, as one of them put it, “self-
destructed.”27
Similarly, in Pakistan, though General Pervez Musharraf, who took
power in a coup in 1999, eventually returned leadership to a civilian govern-
ment nearly a de cade later, Pakistan’s army clearly had reestablished itself
as the central power in policy making. After interludes of civilian control in
the 1990s, the army has again “assumed control as well as oversight of pub-
lic policy. . . . The military has carved out a role and position in the public
and private sectors, including industry, business, agriculture, education and
scientifi c development, health care, communications, and transportation,”
reported military analysts Siegfried Wolf and Seth Kane. In early 2010, when
the Pakistani leadership held talks in Washington on the future of the bilat-
eral relationship with the United States, there was no doubt about who was
the key player on the Pakistani side: not civilian president Asif Ali Zardari
but army chief of staff Ashfaq Kayani.28 Similarly, after American Spe-
cial Forces swooped into Pakistan in the spring of 2011 to kill Osama bin
Laden, it was Kayani who essentially enunciated the Pakistani govern-
ment’s response to America.
Indeed, in another recent comprehensive study, this time of Asia, re-
searchers from the Institute for Security and International Studies in Thai-
land concluded, “Any short- term prospects for civilian control in the young
democracies of South and Southeast Asia are gloomy indeed.” Yet support for
democracy has become so tepid in many parts of the developing world that
many of these coups or military interventions were cheered. After the coup
against Thaksin in Thailand in 2006, many urban Thais openly celebrated.
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 13
“Academic contacts [of U.S. diplomats] could only be described as ebullient
[about the coup,]” reported the American embassy in Bangkok in one cable
written after the coup.
Across the Middle East, armed forces also have dominated the Arab
Spring and Summer, putting the lie to the idea that the Arab uprising is
going to bring democracy to the region. Instead, in the near term the Arab
uprisings appear to be entrenching the power of militaries in the region,
sparking massive unrest, scaring middle- class liberals into exodus, and po-
tentially empowering Islamists. Protesters may have challenged leaders from
Yemen to Egypt, but the loyalty of the military has determined whether these
rulers stay in power, and during any transition the militaries have, by de-
fault, become the dominant— and sometimes only— national institutions.
In Bahrain, the military’s willingness to continue to support the regime of
Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al- Khalifa allowed the royal family to crush pro-
tests, to enlist the support of armies from other Gulf states, including Saudi
Arabia, and to maintain a tight grip on power after antigovernment protests
fl ared in early 2011.
As in Bahrain, armies have used this power to ensure that they will re-
main at the center of politics for years to come, in part because middle classes
in the region fear that the end of dictatorships like Hosni Mubarak’s could
usher in chaos, insecurity, and bloodshed if the military does not step in.
Egypt’s generals, write po liti cal analysts Jeff Martini and Julie Taylor, “are
determined to . . . protect their privileged position. . . . The generals now
hope to create a system of carefully shaped [institutions] that will preserve
their power and reduce the chances that any single po liti cal group can chal-
lenge them.” Indeed, they note, during Egypt’s transition the generals have
insisted the military be exempted from parliamentary scrutiny, enjoy power
over an elected president, and maintain the legal right to intervene in poli-
tics under a broad array of circumstances.
By the summer and fall of 2011, as this book was being written, the
Egyptian military increasingly demonstrated that it had no interest in giv-
ing up the power it had amassed over de cades, and that it had learned how to
use a po liti cal vacuum to bolster its own power, as it had many times in the
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14 Democracy Goes into Reverse
country’s past. In 2011, the Egyptian military controlled nearly every aspect
of the country’s supposed transition. It passed legislation outlining the terms
of potential new elections without consulting with the public, a move that
led some protesters to rally again, in central Cairo, to demand that the mili-
tary remove itself from politics. The army also has expanded laws used to
jail dissidents, imprisoning many who have criticized the military since the
fall of the Mubarak regime, and has helped ensure that the armed forces’
business interests, which are vast, will remain protected under any future
Egyptian government. When liberal Egyptians, including some Christians,
protested against the military’s power in post- Mubarak Egypt in early
October 2011, chanting, “The people want to bring down the fi eld mar-
shal,” riot police and other armed security forces beat protesters mercilessly
and ultimately opened fi re, killing at least twenty- four people and wound-
ing some two hundred.29 Ultimately, the antiarmy sentiment grew so fi erce
that, in November, crowds gathering once again in Tahrir Square in down-
town Cairo battled with riot police and other security forces, as they de-
manded that the military release its hold on power and ensure that, in the
future, it could not dominate an elected government. Thousands, possibly
even tens of thousands of demonstrators, packed into the square, which had
been the site of the initial protests that toppled Mubarak nearly a year earlier.
The security forces attacked the crowds with rubber bullets, tear gas, and
batons, killing at least one person and injuring more than a thousand, ac-
cording to press reports.30 Though the military appeared to cede some
ground after these protests, allowing the constitution to be altered to place
the military formally under civilian control, it retained broad powers that
seemed inimical to democracy, including, essentially, the right to overturn
civilian governments if it desired.
Meanwhile, in the autumn of 2011 Islamists made signifi cant gains
nearly everywhere in the region. The fi rst elections held, post- Arab Spring,
in Tunisia, were a triumph for democracy in the Arab world. People across
Tunisia waited patiently in long lines to vote, and monitors reported that
polling was free, fair, and peaceful, which was hardly expected— anticipating
chaos, Tunisia had deployed some forty thousand policemen at polling sites.31
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 15
Following the voting, many Tunisians took to public spaces to celebrate the
fact they voted, despite diffi culties in the year since they had toppled their
autocrat: Tunisia’s economy had weakened, partly because of the war next
door in Libya, and in a freer po liti cal climate grievances about economic
in e qual ity increasingly bubbled to the surface in poorer parts of Tunisia.
But in October 2011, Tunisians defi ed many predictions of a disastrous elec-
tion. Overall, nearly 90 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, a huge turn-
out. Because of quotas imposed in the electoral laws, some 30 percent of
seats in the new parliament would go to women. Still, when the results
came in, it was clear that Al Nahda, the main Islamist party, had won a siz-
able victory, mostly at the expense of the secular, liberal Progressive Demo-
cratic Party. Al Nahda’s leadership, which openly styled themselves after
Turkey’s progressive Islamists, said all the right things about their commit-
ment to building Tunisian demo cratic institutions, upholding individual
freedoms, and separating mosque and state.32 (Before the election, the transi-
tional government had banned parties that theoretically did not demonstrate
a commitment to democracy, and so prevented a more avowedly Islamist and
Salafi st party from even contesting the poll.)33
But unlike Turkey, where Islamists took de cades to demonstrate their
allegiance to the secular state, and today have been governing for more than
ten years, in Tunisia, which was less than a year from autocratic rule, many
middle- and upper- class Tunisians had doubts about Al Nahda’s real long-
term commitment to the secular state. (Al Nahda had been banned under
Tunisia’s dictatorship.) Before the election, groups of activists allied with Al
Nahda had stormed a private Tunisian tele vi sion station, trying to close it
down for showing what they deemed sacrilegious content; in the past, Al
Nahda activists had attacked rivals by throwing acid in their faces, among
other tactics.34 And in the run- up to the election, hard- line Salafi sts clearly
enjoyed something of a re nais sance in Tunisia, making their presence felt
throughout society. In June radicals attacked people attending a fi lm in
Tunis, and they also have attacked some artists whom they have deemed
“un- Islamic.”35 Many liberal, middle- class Tunisians continued to express
doubt about Al Nahda despite its leadership’s vows to uphold democracy;
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16 Democracy Goes into Reverse
applications to leave Tunisia and gain passports more than doubled in 2011.
These doubts boded poorly for the country’s future, since these middle classes
and elites would be critical for growth, development, and demo cratic con-
solidation.
Perhaps Al Nahda’s success would be fl eeting. A study released in early
2011 in the Journal of Democracy found that, by surveying parliamentary
elections in twenty- one countries, Islamic parties tended to do best in
the initial elections after the end of authoritarian rule, a period when they
tended to be the most or ga nized group in the country. Over time, as elec-
tions became more regular, their support tended to wane, and wound up
averaging about 15 percent of the vote.36 Islamist parties also tended to
become more moderate over time, as they tried to appeal to less religious
swing voters, in order to possibly gain enough votes to govern. Still, this
study does not necessarily predict the future: Islamist parties in the post—
Arab Spring countries tend to be better entrenched, better or ga nized, and
even more dominant than in places where they have competed in the past,
such as Indonesia, where religious- oriented parties were hardly as power-
ful as a group like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Salafi sts, who adopted a
harder- line position than the Brotherhood. In the initial rounds of Egypt’s
parliamentary elections, held in December, the Brotherhood and the more
extreme Salafi sts gained overwhelming victories, even in areas long consid-
ered some of the most liberal parts of Egypt, such as Cairo; liberal and sec-
ular parties generally placed very poorly, split among themselves and unable
to sometimes garner even enough votes to make it into Parliament. The
Islamists’ dominance of the voting set them up in prime position to write
Egypt’s new constitution.
In Libya the death of Muammar Qadaffi led, in the short run, to chaos
in Tripoli and other towns, and a clear rise in the power of Islamists in what
was already the most religiously conservative country in north Africa. The
post- Qadaffi interim leadership quickly brought up the possibility of legal-
izing polygamy in order to create a more pious nation, infuriating some
Libyan women’s groups.37 They further suggested that sharia should be the
basis of law in the new Libya, and many Libyans agreed that, in post-
Qadaffi elections, Islamists would dominate, since as in Egypt they had built
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 17
a strong underground or ga ni za tion in Libya during the authoritarian
period. Youssef Sherif, a leading Libyan intellectual, told reporters, “Every
day the Islamists grow stronger. When there is a parliament, the Islamists
will get the majority.”38 Indeed, despite having worked through NATO to
end Qadaffi ’s regime, many se nior American offi cials essentially accepted
that by ousting the Libyan dictator they were likely to empower an Islamist
government, given Libya’s religious conservatism— and they had little trust
that Islamists in Libya would uphold a semblance of a secular state. Militias
wielding Soviet- designed Kalashnikov assault rifl es and rocket launchers
roamed the country, often engaging in banditry to support themselves, and
the weak transitional government had trouble disarming anyone.39 One of
the most powerful post- Qadaffi leaders to emerge, with his own group of
armed backers, was a man who previously had led a hard- line or ga ni za tion
linked to Al Qaeda.40 As in Egypt, some Libyan liberals now are wonder-
ing whether the Libyan transitional government will turn into an autocracy
of its own— or whether perhaps it actually should, since holding elections
anytime soon could lead to more chaos or to an Islamist takeover.41
The strengthening of military rule in many developing nations has been
disastrous for reform, despite the militaries’ contention that they are the
only institutions standing in the way of civil strife or Islamist rule. Indeed,
human rights groups such as Amnesty International found that, since the
winter of 2010– 11, human rights abuses actually have increased in nearly
every Middle Eastern nation, including Syria, Egypt, and Bahrain, where
at least fi ve hundred people were detained for protesting between February
and September 2011.42
Despite the fact that militaries could hardly be called agents of reform,
middle classes in many developing nations, both in the Middle East and
in other parts of the world, often continued to support the armed forces
as potential antidotes to pop u lar democracy— democracy that might em-
power the poor, the religious, and the less educated. In this way, Egyptian
liberals’ concerns about the fruits of democracy were not unique. Overall,
in fact, an analysis of military coups in developing nations over the past
twenty years, conducted by my research associate Daniel Silverman and
myself, found that in nearly 50 percent of the cases, drawn from Africa,
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18 Democracy Goes into Reverse
Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, middle- class men and women
either agitated in advance for the coup or, in polls or prominent media cov-
erage after the coup, expressed their support for the army takeover.
Although the uprisings in the Middle East have led to unrest, civil
strife, and renewed military rule, they have had little impact on other parts
of the world— a sharp contrast to 1989, when the revolts in Eastern Eu rope
helped catalyze change in other parts of the Soviet Union, as well as in
China. Picking up from the Tunisian uprising, a small group of Chinese lib-
erals in early 2011 attempted to launch their own “jasmine revolution,” be-
ginning with an online manifesto calling for protests. But their numbers
likely never exceeded a few hundred people, and the Chinese government
quickly quashed their movement, closing down websites and arresting
organizers. More important, these protests gained little traction with the
Chinese public, which knew relatively little about the demonstrations in
the Middle East and, as we will see later, is far more satisfi ed with their
country’s leadership than Egyptians or Tunisians were with theirs. In sub-
Saharan Africa, too, the Arab uprisings ultimately had minimal impact;
protests broke out in places from Malawi to Burkina Faso to Uganda, but
none succeeded in toppling rulers; in response to the uprisings, the militar-
ies in many of these African countries were able to further entrench their
power. In Zimbabwe, the military has come to dominate the power struc-
ture of Robert Mugabe’s regime, making him and his allies even more
indebted to the armed forces. Overall, concluded Northwestern Univer-
sity’s Richard Joseph in a survey of the current state of politics in sub-
Saharan Africa, “the electoral authoritarian regime,” not democracy, has
become the most prevalent po liti cal system in Africa— a system that in-
cludes not only Mugabe but some of the other most entrenched autocrats,
such as Angola’s Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has ruled his country
since 1979.43
In addition to these studies showing the return of coups, opinion polling
from many developing nations shows not only that the quality of democ-
racy is declining but also that public views of democracy are deteriorating
as well. The international public opinion group Program on International
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 19
Policy Attitudes uses extensive questionnaires to ask people in a range of
Latin American, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations about their
views on democracy, as compared with other potential po liti cal systems.
The regular “Afrobarometer” survey of the African continent has found
declining levels of support for democracy throughout much of sub- Saharan
Africa; in Nigeria, the largest nation on the continent, support for democ-
racy has plummeted over the past de cade. In several polls only 16 percent of
Rus sians said that it was “very important” that their nation be governed
demo cratically. Even in Kyrgyzstan, which despite its fl aws remains the
most demo cratic state in Central Asia, one comprehensive Gallup poll found
that a majority of the population did not believe that a po liti cal opposition is
very or somewhat important, and a sizable plurality said democracy was not
important to their country. Shortly after Kyrgyzstan’s presidential elections
in the fall of 2011, this disinterest in demo cratic politics became clear: losing
candidates and their supporters massed in public areas around the country,
trying to use protests to bring down the supposed victor.44
“Latinobarómetro” polls and studies of South America showed similar
dissatisfaction with democracy. In Ec ua dor, Guatemala, Paraguay, Colombia,
Peru, Honduras, and Nicaragua, either a minority or only a tiny majority
of people think democracy is preferable to any other type of government.
Overall, in the most recent Latinobarómetro survey, only a small majority
of people across Latin America supported democracy as a po liti cal system,
and less than 40 percent said they were satisfi ed with the way that democ-
racy works in practice in their country.45 In most countries in Latin Amer-
ica, these fi gures have either remained stagnant or slumped from where
they were a de cade ago. Many Latin Americans now say they do not even
have a functioning democracy at all.46 Meanwhile, in Pakistan, roughly
60 percent of respondents in a comprehensive regional survey said that the
country should be ruled by the army, one of the highest votes of support for
military rule in the world.
The global economic crisis, which continued to hit Eu rope hard in 2010
and 2011, only weakened public support for democracy in new democracies
in Central and Eastern Eu rope. A comprehensive study of Central and East-
ern Eu rope by the Eu ro pe an Bank for Reconstruction and Development
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20 Democracy Goes into Reverse
(EBRD), released in 2011, found that the crisis had severely lowered people’s
support for democracy.47 “The more people were personally hit by the cri-
sis, the more they turned away from democracy,” it found.48 Support for
democracy had declined, since 2006, in all of the new Eu ro pe an Union
nations except Bulgaria. In some of these countries, such as the Slovak
Republic and Hungary, support for democracy fell, in the EBRD’s surveys,
by as much as twenty percentage points compared to 2006. This decline
provided an opportunity for stronger, even authoritarian, leaders. “Those
who enjoyed more freedoms wanted less democracy and markets when
they were hurt by the crisis,” the EBRD report noted.49
Even in East Asia, one of the most eco nom ical ly vibrant and globalized
regions of the world, polls show rising dissatisfaction with democracy.
In fact, several countries in the region have developed what Asian demo-
cratization specialists Yu- tzung Chang, Yunhan Zhu, and Chong- min Park,
who studied data from the regular “Asian Barometer” surveys, have termed
“authoritarian nostalgia.” “Few of the region’s former authoritarian regimes
have been thoroughly discredited,” they write, noting that the region’s aver-
age score for commitment to democracy, judged by a range of prodemo-
cratic responses to surveys, has fallen in the most recent studies. An analysis
of the Asian Barometer data by Park found that, even in South Korea, one
of the supposed success stories of democracy in the developing world, the
percentage of South Koreans saying that under certain circumstances an
authoritarian government was preferable doubled between 1996 and 2006.
“An upward trend is unequivocal,” Park writes. “In times of crisis these
halfhearted citizens may not be mobilized to defend demo cratic institutions
and pro cesses.” Similarly, in Taiwan, another supposedly stable democracy,
the Asian Barometer survey found that only 40 percent of respondents agreed
that democracy was “preferable to all other kinds of government,” a low fi g-
ure. Only slightly more than 50 percent of Mongolians and Filipinos, two
other supposedly vibrant democracies, thought democracy was preferable to
all other kinds of government.
Even in developing nations where democracy has deeper roots, and
seems to be stronger, disillusionment with its po liti cal pro cesses, and with
demo cratically elected leaders, has exploded in recent years, as these leaders
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 21
have seemed unable to develop effective solutions for global and local eco-
nomic crises, other than biting austerity mea sures. From Indians demon-
strating in Delhi in support of hunger strikers attacking corruption in
Indian politics, to Israelis camping in the streets of Tel Aviv in the biggest
demonstrations in the country’s history to protest their leaders’ lack of inter-
est in basic economic issues, to the Occupy movement across the United
States and countries of Western Eu rope, people in even more established
democracies are increasingly turning to street protests to make their points,
since they believe they cannot be heard at the ballot box. They have become
convinced, they say, that the demo cratic pro cess has become so corrupted,
so dominated by entrenched interests, and so disassociated from pop u lar is-
sues, that they can change their countries only through massive rallies, even
if those protests use the street to bring down leaders fairly elected. “Our
parents are grateful because they’re voting,” one young woman told report-
ers in Spain, where tens of thousands of young people also have launched
full- time street protests against politicians’ lack of interest in the country’s
long- term unemployment crisis, which has led to unemployment of nearly
40 percent for recent university graduates of both sexes. “We’re the fi rst
generation to say that voting is worthless.”
This demo cratic decline is not concentrated in one region or one continent,
and, unlike previous waves of democracy regression such as those occurring
in the 1920s and 1930s, today’s decline includes a far wider array of nations,
from more regions of the globe, and is much less likely to be stopped. More
important, many of the countries that are regressing from democracy are
regional powers, including Rus sia, Kenya, Thailand, Argentina, Senegal, the
Philippines, Hungary, Venezuela, Mexico, Nigeria, and many others. Their
examples matter more to their regions than those of smaller, less infl uential
states. One of the key factors in determining whether a country will demo-
cratize is the international and regional climate, according to a study of de-
mocracies’ endurance by po liti cal scientists Adam Przeworksi, Michael
Alvarez, Jose Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi. So, when powerful countries
fail to demo cratize, this diffusion effect works in reverse, hindering the
cause of demo cratic change in their entire regions.
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22 Democracy Goes into Reverse
In many of these regionally important countries, the decline of democ-
racy has been so sharp that it has shocked people who lived through the
initial period of demo cratization. In the Philippines in the 1980s, crowds of
nonviolent Filipinos thronging Manila’s Edsa Avenue invented the “people
power” movement that inspired uprisings from the “color revolutions” in
Eastern Eu rope and Central Asia to the Ira ni an Green Movement of 2009,
to the Arab Spring of 2011, which swept through Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and
other nations. Now, as one demo cratically elected Philippine government
after the next becomes mired in corruption and self- dealing, Filipinos are
increasingly disenchanted with demo cratic rule.50
African nations that had made major progress in the previous de cade
also have regressed badly. Kenya, where, after the rule of longtime dictator
Daniel arap Moi, many people believed that the country— the wealthiest
and most globalized in east Africa— would become a vibrant democracy,
has collapsed into interethnic battles and newly repressive governments.
This decline is being repeated in Nigeria, the most vital nation in west
Africa. In Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, who had amassed enormous pop u lar
goodwill for ending confl icts and rebuilding the economy after the disas-
trous regimes of Milton Obote and Idi Amin, had promised to only serve
only four years when he became president in 1986. Yet he kept fi nding
reasons to stick around, until he fi nally forced through a constitutional re-
write in 2005 that removed presidential term limits altogether.51 By 2011,
after he won another presidential term in a fraudulent election, his security
forces had to repeatedly clear the streets of Kampala with massive shows of
force.
Under Vladimir Putin and his protégé Dmitri Medvedev, Rus sia,
which in the 1990s had developed a vibrant media and a robust if chaotic
democracy that provided an example to many other former Soviet states, has
discovered a nostalgia for Soviet repression. The last truly in de pen dent Rus-
sian po liti cal party, the Union, or Right Forces, merged with pro- Kremlin
parties several years ago, leaving virtually no opposition in the Duma.52
“Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the basic idea that po liti cal
opposition is a useful, legitimate po liti cal phenomenon remains remarkably
weak in much of the [post- Soviet] region,” noted Thomas Carothers of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in a study of democracy’s
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 23
global challenges. “Dominant po liti cal elites treat po liti cal opposition as
inherently disloyal.”53
By 2009, according to an analysis by Freedom House, the former Soviet
Union was one of the least free regions of the world—- even before Putin
announced that he would again be taking total control of Rus sia, the most
important post- Soviet state.54 Belarus, the country closest to Rus sia po liti-
cally and culturally, fl irted with reform but, by the end of the 2000s, had
retreated into an authoritarian, statist regime little different from the
Belarus of the early 1990s. Its long- serving leader, Alexander Lukashenko,
won reelection in 2010 with a farcical 80 percent of the vote; protesters who
gathered to demonstrate, sometimes simply by standing in public places and
sarcastically clapping their hands, were beaten and jailed.55 Two of the
greatest hopes for the former Soviet states, Georgia and Ukraine, also are
going backward, with Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, installing
Putinesque policies that crushed any opposition and resulted in the arrests
and jailing of many politicians, including, in the summer of 2011, the oppo-
sition leader and former presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko, who was
given seven years in prison in a trial that was clearly predetermined. Along
with Tymoshenko’s trial, the Ukrainian government passed new mea sures
giving the president nearly unlimited powers and curtailing the country’s
vibrant civil society, and launched investigations of eleven other opposition
fi gures. Yanukovych simultaneously emasculated the Ukrainian parliament,
made much of the country’s court system subordinate to his decrees, and had
the country’s constitution altered to give the president domineering power.56
In Asia, other supposed success stories have regressed as well. The
Malaysian government, which once had vowed to uphold total freedom for
online media in order to promote the country as a high- tech hub, began
developing new ways to censor both the print and the online media. The
regime started arresting po liti cal opponents, whistleblowers, and civil soci-
ety leaders, including opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who himself faced
jail on dubious charges of sodomizing an aide.57 (Anwar ultimately was
acquitted and then hit with new charges related to or ga niz ing a po liti cal
protest.) Once such people are in custody, strange things can happen. In July
2009, a man named Teoh Beng Hock visited the offi ces of the country’s
anticorruption commission in order to testify about witnessing the misuse of
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24 Democracy Goes into Reverse
public funds. The next day, he was found dead on the roof of the adjacent
building. Offi cials said he’d jumped from the anticorruption headquarters
to his death. In de pen dent forensic scientists later found evidence that Teoh
had been beaten and sodomized with an object before he “leaped” to his
death.58 In Cambodia, after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge and the end of
years of civil war, some 93 percent of eligible voters came to the polls in a
landmark fi rst free election in 1993, and the international community, which
oversaw— and paid for— the largest reconstruction effort to that time in
Cambodia, exulted in the turnout. But since then the country’s po liti cal
system has gone steadily downhill. Prime Minister Hun Sen, a rugged sur-
vivor of the Khmer Rouge years, has silenced nearly every opposition group,
intimidated the media, and overseen beatings and outright killings of many
po liti cal rivals.59
Meanwhile, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, like Thaksin an elected leader
with little dedication to constitutionalism or the rule of law, has pushed
his “Bolivarian revolution” closer to outright authoritarianism, as has Evo
Morales in Bolivia and Peruvian president Ollanta Humara.60 And in Mex-
ico, the security forces, working in collaboration with the president, have
taken advantage of the war on drugs to basically take over many Mexican
states, turning them into essentially army- run fi efdoms. Military personnel
now occupy hundreds of positions traditionally held by civilian personnel,
especially those in law enforcement. “The military is becoming the su-
preme authority— in some cases the only authority— in parts of some
states,” said Mexican po liti cal analyst Denise Dresser.
So many countries now remain stuck between authoritarianism and
democracy, reported Marc Plattner and Larry Diamond, co-editors of the
Journal of Democracy, that “it no longer seems plausible to regard [this
condition] simply as a temporary stage in the pro cess of demo cratic transi-
tion.”61
Despite the demo cratic recession of recent years, and the destructive impact
of the global economic crisis on democracy, even today most Western lead-
ers more or less unthinkingly assume that democracy will eventually tri-
umph worldwide. At the end of the Cold War, nearly all Western leaders
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 25
and po liti cal scientists believed demo cratic values had triumphed. The no-
tion of demo cratic victory was captured most famously in Francis Fuku-
yama’s essay “The End of History,” in which he claimed, “The triumph of
the West, of the Western idea, is evident fi rst of all in the total exhaustion of
viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”62 This view, though
seldom so baldly stated, dominated most Western discourse on po liti cal
change in the 1990s and early 2000s and, despite the changes in the world,
still dominates today. The enormous relief triggered by the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the end of fi ve de cades of tightrope diplomacy between
the great powers seemed, as Robert Kagan noted, “to augur a new era of
global convergence. The great adversaries of the Cold War suddenly shared
many common goals, including a desire for economic and po liti cal integra-
tion.”63 Human progress, constantly marching forward, would spread de-
mocracy everywhere.
Of course, there is no consensus on the defi nition of democracy, but
nearly all such defi nitions include certain components of democracy. In
discussing democracy, this book uses a relatively widely accepted defi nition
also utilized by the Economist Intelligence Unit in its analyses of the quality
of democracy around the world. As the EIU notes, democracy means “gov-
ernment based on majority rule and the consent of the governed, the exis-
tence of free and fair elections, the protection of minorities and respect for
basic human rights. Democracy presupposes equality before the law, due
pro cess and po liti cal pluralism.” This book adds another component not
included in this basic defi nition: demo cratic po liti cal culture, which includes
respect for the concept of a loyal opposition, support for demo cratic po liti cal
institutions, and interest in and access to po liti cal participation, among
other components.
For a time, the rosy predictions of global demo cratization seemed
warranted. Po liti cal freedom indeed blossomed in a “fourth wave” of
demo cratization in the developing world in the 1990s and the early part of
this century. The old great- power adversaries, the United States and Rus sia,
worked together on challenges ranging from the fi rst Gulf War to the safe
decommissioning and storage of nuclear weapons. While authoritarians still
ruled most of Africa, Eastern Eu rope, and Asia in 1990, by 2005 democracies
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26 Democracy Goes into Reverse
had emerged across these continents, and some of the most powerful develop-
ing nations, including South Africa, South Korea, and Brazil, had become
solid democracies. By 2005 more than half the world’s people lived under
demo cratic systems.64 With the color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and
Kyrgyzstan, the fall of Saddam Hussein, the overthrow of the Taliban, the ap-
parent end of military interventions in Turkey, the stirrings of reform in small
Persian Gulf nations like Bahrain, and even a reformist presidency under
Muhammad Khatami in Iran, the Middle East and Central Asia, long the
exception to global demo cratic change, seemed ready to make the transition.
Increasingly confi dent Western leaders came to assume that liberal
demo cratic capitalism would conquer every nation on earth. President George
H. W. Bush promised a “new world order” in which “freedom and respect
for human rights fi nd a home among all nations.”65 George W. Bush declared
in his second inaugural that the United States would promote the demo-
cratization of the world, saying, “We will per sis tent ly clarify the choice
before every ruler and every nation— the moral choice between oppression,
which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.”66 In a meet-
ing with China president Jiang Zemin, Bill Clinton told Chinese leaders that
they stood “on the wrong side of history” by perpetuating authoritarian rule,
and later warned the Chinese leadership that trying to control the liberating
effects of new technologies was like trying to “nail Jell- O to the wall.”67
Of late, the Jell- O has been nailed. Not only has democracy experienced
its longest and deepest rollback in forty years, a confl uence of po liti cal, eco-
nomic, and social changes could halt global demo cratization indefi nitely.
Autocracies seem to be gaining not only strength but legitimacy, with au-
thoritarian regimes like China posting high growth rates and powerful
new democracies like Brazil and South Africa unwilling to join the West in
pushing for demo cratic change in the developing world.68 From Thailand
to Rus sia, middle classes and many leaders in developing nations that have
regressed from real democracy appear to have little appetite for a return to
demo cratic rule. Seeing the rise of Islamist parties, new sectarian rifts, and
the fl ight of many religious and ethnic minorities, the middle classes in
many of the countries in the Middle East and Africa where new revolts
have occurred in the past two years already have begun to doubt the value
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 27
of democracy, leading them to support renewed types of authoritarian rule,
including continued powers for the military.
To be sure, when viewed against the entire expanse of the twentieth and
twenty- fi rst centuries, or against even longer periods of human history, the
world today appears to be highly demo cratic. At the start of the twentieth
century, as we will see in the next chapter, only a tiny fraction of the coun-
tries in the world could have been called true democracies. Nearly all of
these democracies were in Western Eu rope, North America, and the for-
mer overseas territories of the British Empire.69 Together they constituted
no more than one- tenth of the world’s population. Empires ruled much of
Eu rope, Asia, and Africa. Even as recently as 1988, before the collapse of the
Berlin Wall, a small minority of the world’s people lived under democracy;
Central Asia and Eastern Eu rope had no democracies, and sub- Saharan
Africa had virtually no true democracies as well.
Compared with those bleak periods, the number of democracies in the
early twenty- fi rst century seems like a great advance. Many African nations
have made the beginnings of a transition to demo cratic rule, and real de-
mocracy is increasingly entrenched in Eastern Eu rope, the Baltics, and many
parts of East Asia. No one expects that democracy will backslide to its
weak global position in 1900; the prospect of democracy being wiped away
completely, as seemed possible in the 1930s, now appears all but impossible.
Indeed, the point of this book is not to suggest that democracy is in its death
throes, but that it is in decline over the past decade— a decline that should
be worrying because of its vast impact on human rights, economic free-
doms, and the international system. If policy makers do not recognize this
decline, and understand the complex reasons, examined later on, for de-
mocracy’s current weakness in many developing nations, they will fail to
reverse this trend. Worse, as the economic crisis lags on, publics in many
developing regions may become far more distrustful of demo cratic rule— a
prospect that could indeed help set the world back to the situation in 1988
or before.
Choosing to look at democracy’s decline over the past de cade is not arbi-
trary. Just as 1974, and then 1989, were watershed years for demo cratization,
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28 Democracy Goes into Reverse
so too was 2001 such a year, although not in a positive way. Over the subse-
quent de cade certain trends, which were less apparent in the 1980s or 1990s,
clearly indicated weakening democracy throughout the developing world.
Those trends began to materialize in 2001, and they would grow stronger
throughout the 2000s and into the early 2010s, as surveys such as those done
by Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit, as well as my own
research, would show this distinct decline in democracy in many nations.
The global landscape that had begun to be transformed in 2001 in-
cluded the weakening of American power. In the months after the Septem-
ber 11, 2001, attacks, American power seemed to be at its zenith, but as the
United States became entangled in two long wars stemming in some ways
from that day, its power would ebb, with signifi cant consequences for Amer-
ica’s ability and willingness to attempt democracy promotion in the devel-
oping world. In 2001, too, both Rus sia and China would begin to consolidate
their leadership transitions, and in that year the foundations would be set
for the authoritarian great powers to reassert their dominance both at home
and in their near neighborhoods, where they would lead a backlash against
democracy. Also in 2001, broadband Internet began to become available to
a growing number of homes in developed countries, the fi rst step toward
what would become its widespread use, and would impact demo cratic
change in many developing nations. The early 2000s also saw the height of
the antiglobalization movement and the questioning of the Washington
consensus regarding economic liberalization, a change that would reverber-
ate through young democracies, as many citizens who had linked economic
and po liti cal reform would come to question whether democracy was nec-
essarily the best system to produce growth and development. Finally, in 2001
the initial signs of conservative, middle- class revolts against electoral democ-
racy would begin to emerge in many key developing nations, including
Pakistan, the Philippines, Venezuela, Rus sia, and others.
Though Thailand is not as unusual as many Thais seem to believe,
every country certainly has its own po liti cal history and circumstances.
Democracy was imposed by an occupier in Japan, midwifed by a king in
Spain, and fought over for de cades in Timor- Leste. Reversals of democracy
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 29
in each nation likewise have unique characteristics. In Thailand the king’s
prolonged illness has hurt demo cratic consolidation, while in Rus sia the
anarchy of the Boris Yeltsin era, in which a proud country teetered on the
brink of bankruptcy while oligarchs plundered its wealth, soured many
Rus sians on the freedoms of democracy. But the broad— and dangerous—
reasons for the global demo cratic rollback today differ relatively little.
Democracies have faced many challenges in the past, and at other
times countries that seemed to have demo cratized suffered serious rever-
sals, occasionally regressing, as in the case of Germany in the 1930s, to out-
right totalitarianism. But those reversals tended to be relatively isolated, and
eventually global democracy progressed once again. That progression can
no longer be taken for granted: today a constellation of factors, from the rise
of China to the lack of economic growth in new democracies to the West’s
fi nancial crisis, has come together to hinder democracy throughout the de-
veloping world. Absent radical and unlikely changes in the international
system, that combination of antidemo cratic factors will have serious staying
power.
Yet Western leaders do not seem to recognize how seriously democracy
is threatened in many parts of the developing world. Though some observ-
ers, like Freedom House, have begun to recognize how democracy has be-
come endangered, few have systematically traced how a form of government
once thought to be invincible has been found lacking in so many places
and consequently tossed aside, often by the very middle- class reformers who
once were democracy’s vanguard. Among se nior American offi cials, few
are willing to accept that the current climate is anything more than a blip in
democracy’s ultimate conquest of the globe, that the Arab Spring and Sum-
mer might not turn out to be like 1989’s year of demo cratic revolution— or
that a prolonged demo cratic rollback would have severe consequences for
global security, trade, and American strategic interests, not to mention the
well- being of millions of men and women across the developing world.
The offi cial national security strategy developed by the George W. Bush
administration, which enshrined democracy promotion as a central value of
U.S. foreign policy, carried the unstated assumption that, with U.S. backing,
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30 Democracy Goes into Reverse
democracy would continue to spread around the world. Although the
Obama administration’s 2010 national security strategy acknowledged
that this progress had met obstacles, experts within the administration
seemed to assume that, given the right adjustments in American policy,
the United States would soon be leading a renewed wave of global demo-
cratization.70
The United States is not the only entity that does not comprehend that
democracy’s progress may have stalled. In 2008, the Association of South-
east Asian Nations (Asean), the main regional grouping in Southeast Asia,
passed a new charter that made respect for human rights a core component
of membership. Even in private, se nior Asean offi cials argue that the region
is moving toward shared demo cratic values.71 This despite the fact that,
except in Indonesia, demo cratization and human rights have regressed
throughout Southeast Asia in the past ten years, as well as the fact that the
region is still no closer to having real shared values than it was when Asean
was formed more than four de cades ago.
African nations in 2001 agreed to a “New Partnership for Africa’s De-
velopment,” a continent- wide compact to instill norms of human rights and
good governance that was greeted with much celebration by Western do-
nors and many African leaders. Capturing this mood in 2006, the Sudanese
communications entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim launched a prize for the Afri-
can leader who best focused on development, governance, and education of
his or her people. Ten years into the “New Partnership,” African offi cials
continue to cite the compact and claim that the continent is moving toward
shared values of good governance and democracy, but this trend is hardly
evident. In 2010, unable to fi nd a leader who exemplifi ed reform and good
governance, the Ibrahim board decided not to award its annual gift.72
Prolonged demo cratic rollback will have serious implications. Evidence
suggests that one of the major reasons countries demo cratize is that nations
around them are demo cratizing.73 A halt to this process— particularly if
middle- class men and women lead this demo cratic breakdown or fl ee places
like the Middle East and Africa rather than standing for democracy—
could call into question many of the assumptions of the post– Cold War
world and could lead to a new era of confl ict. Though there have been ex-
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 31
ceptions, in general the theory that democracies do not go to war against
other democracies has held true, while authoritarian states fi nd it much
easier to go to war, whether against democracies or against other autocra-
cies. Even without actual war, a divergence of core po liti cal values will make
it harder for nations around the world to make progress on critical inter-
national issues, from climate change to free trade. Demo cratic rollback could
impede commerce: despite the facile assumption by some Western business
leaders that authoritarian regimes provide more stable environments for
investment, in reality autocracies generally fail to provide the rule of law
and impartial judiciary that most Western investors require; prolonged
demo cratic rollback could thus worsen the global business climate. Finally,
a global demo cratic rollback will undermine perhaps the most critical foun-
dation of American soft power— its ideology— as competing ideologies like
China’s model of development grow more powerful.
Perhaps most important of all, a prolonged demo cratic rollback could
condemn the citizens of many of these countries, from Rus sia to Cambodia
to Venezuela, to increasing repression under ever more confi dent autocrats.
Already, over the past four years, activists not only in China but in Viet-
nam, Thailand, Venezuela, Rus sia, and many other countries whose gov-
ernments once allowed greater degrees of freedom have seen a much tighter,
less predictable po liti cal climate.
Grappling with this demo cratic decline and its potentially severe inter-
national consequences will require not only outlining the problem but also
gaining a deeper understanding of why democracy has faltered. To do so,
we must fi rst look back at the previous three waves of demo cratic change in
the twentieth century, as well as at the post– Cold War era of optimism and
Western triumphalism in the 1990s and early 2000s, the time of the fourth
wave of demo cratization in the developing world. By examining mistakes
made during the high point of the global demo cratic revolution, we may
understand how democracy has declined so rapidly and dramatically in a
number of developing nations across several continents. This decline has in-
cluded not only the rise of elected autocrats but also stark shifts in the views
of the general public about democracy in many countries— even those in the
Middle East. (We will not, however, examine the weakening of democracy
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32 Democracy Goes into Reverse
in the established democracies of North America and Western Eu rope; even
though these nations’ po liti cal systems have many fl aws, unlike many devel-
oping nations they do not face regression to autocratic rule, and a full study
of the United States and Western Eu rope is well beyond the scope of this
book, though we will examine Central and Eastern Eu rope.)
To be sure, we must recognize that, particularly in the Middle East,
revolt and reform are in progress and sometimes can be hard to predict; this
book was written as the Arab Spring and Summer began to curdle, but its
outcomes remain very much uncertain.
Just as the demo cratic decline extends to nearly every part of the devel-
oping world, so too the reasons for the demo cratic rollback are diverse and,
often, intertwined. To understand why democracy has struggled over the
past de cade, and to consider ways to put global demo cratization back on
track, we have to examine not only why leaders like Putin and Chavez were
able to destroy demo cratic institutions, but also why the middle class allowed
these elected autocrats to do so, or accepted militaries reasserting their po liti-
cal power. The fact that the middle class, long considered the linchpin to
successful demo cratization, actually has turned against democracy in many
countries is perhaps the most striking and unsettling trend in democracy’s
global decline, and later on we will see in great detail how the middle class
has changed from a force for reform to an obstacle. In many countries, the
middle class acquiesced for a number of reasons: fear that democracy would
produce chaos, corruption, and weak growth; anger at the rise of elected
populists who disdain the rule of law; and worry that their own power will
be diminished. And as the middle class revolts, the working class often
fi ghts back, only further damaging demo cratic politics.
We also have to understand the international system. We have to ask
why today, even as middle- and working- class men and women in devel-
oping nations have allowed democracy to fail, many established democra-
cies, including the United States and emerging powers like South Africa
and Brazil, also have abandoned democracy promotion and human rights
advocacy. Indeed, with authoritarians like China wielding more power,
with established democracies in the West and the developing world reluc-
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Democracy Goes into Reverse 33
tant to stand up for their values, or pursuing democracy promotion strate-
gies that too often focused on rhetoric, elections, and pro cess, the inter national
environment has become far more complicated and challenging for democ-
racy in the new millennium. And far too often, men and women in the
developing world have paid the price for these failures of democracy pro-
motion.
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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: How We Got Here

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Democracy in Retreat
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O
nly ten years ago, few po liti cal leaders or theorists would have
predicted democracy’s decline. Even as late as the early 2000s, the
fourth wave of democracy, which in the 1990s and early 2000s
had swept through parts of Asia, Latin America, and— most notably—
Sub- Saharan Africa, still seemed to be holding up. And the fourth wave
built on three earlier waves of demo cratization, making it seem like the
natural extension of democracy’s global spread.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, democracy had been con-
fi ned to tiny islands of freedom in a generally repressive globe, dominated
by colonies, monarchies, and warlords. At the start of the twentieth cen-
tury, only twelve countries, nearly all in Western Eu rope and North Amer-
ica, could truly be called democracies, though roughly thirty nations had
established minimal demo cratic institutions and cultures, including Italy,
Argentina, Germany, Japan, and Spain. Po liti cal scientist Samuel Hunting-
ton would call this initial group of democracies, which gained freedoms in
the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries and the early twentieth century, the
“fi rst wave” of democracy. These democracies— Britain, the United States,
the Scandinavian nations, France, Switzerland, and British dominions like
Canada and Australia— had their origins in the American and French
revolutions. This small group of countries generally shared long histories of
gradual demo cratic development, born in the theories of the Enlightenment,
the Eu ro pe an wars, and the civil strife of the early nineteenth century, and
the legal systems drafted in Eu rope and the United States after the French
and American revolutions.
Many of the fi rst wave democracies that came of age last, in the early
twentieth century, did not survive the First World War and the economic
How We Got Here
2
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How We Got Here 35
chaos of the 1930s. Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, and many others crum-
pled in the face of a reverse wave of fascism and communism, and, as Hun-
tington notes, the initial demo cratic institutions that were germinating in
Poland, the Baltics, and in other parts of Central and Eastern Eu rope, as
well as in Brazil and Argentina, were snuffed out. Those countries that had
not already succumbed gave way to the military takeovers by fascist Ja-
pan, Italy, and Germany. Even at the end of the Second World War, de-
mocracy remained mostly limited to the same small club of countries in
Scandinavia, Western Eu rope, North America, and former British domin-
ions like Australia.
But the Second World War unleashed what would become known as
the second wave of global demo cratization. The Allies’ victory and occu-
pation of nations like Germany, Austria, and Japan allowed the occupiers
to foster a rebirth of demo cratic institutions and culture in those countries—
indeed, the new constitution drafted for Japan by its American occupiers
was far more liberal than Japa nese society would have accepted if Japa nese
leaders had drafted such a document themselves at that time. The defeat
of fascism, the triumph of the Anglo- American po liti cal model (at least in
areas not controlled by the Soviets), and the removal of Italy and Germany
as military powers provided space for Greece and Turkey to strengthen their
demo cratic institutions. In Latin America, meanwhile, Argentina, Venezu-
ela, Colombia, and Peru held demo cratic elections in the mid- 1940s.
By exhausting the British, German, Dutch, and French empires, the war
also triggered a wave of decolonization around the globe. A few of the newly
in de pen dent states, like India, Israel, and Malaysia, already had relatively sub-
stantial traditions of opposition politics and freedom of association, and were
able to build on those. Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia,
among other newly free states, held initial elections and seemed to be put-
ting into place demo cratic institutions.
Countries like India, however, turned out to be the exception. As new states
emerged in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, many
Western po liti cal scientists and leaders believed that these new nations were
not fertile ground for democracy, at least not anytime soon. These countries
had little previous experience with elections and very few educated men
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36 How We Got Here
and women, and they faced many challenges, from establishing education
systems to simply feeding their people. “Parliamentary democracy has a
dim future in Africa,” predicted a typical 1961 article titled “The Prospect
for Democracy in the New Africa.”1 In the late 1970s, in her famous Com-
mentary article “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” in which she pushed
the White House to back right- wing dictatorships as a bulwark against
revolutionary left- wing authoritarian regimes, Jeanne Kirkpatrick made a
similar argument, writing, “In the relatively few places where they exist,
demo cratic governments have come into being slowly, after extended prior
experience with more limited forms of participation.”2 Even as late as 1980,
then mayor of Paris (later president of France) Jacques Chirac told a group
of African leaders, “Multi- partyism is a po liti cal error, the type of luxury
that developing countries cannot afford.”3
With a few exceptions, like India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, who held a deep
and intense belief in Indian democracy, leaders of the former colonies es-
sentially echoed Kirkpatrick’s theme, publicly arguing that they could not
be expected to develop democracies overnight— not when they had so many
other priorities. Of course, postcolonial leaders in Africa and Asia had ulte-
rior motives for claiming that their people were not ready for democracy.
But without a doubt, most of the fi rst generation of postin de pen dence lead-
ers displayed little interest in democracy. Malawi’s fi rst postin de pen dence
leader, a Scottish- trained doctor named Hastings Banda who maintained
an intense love for all things Scottish and an obsession with Malawians’ per-
sonal grooming— his government banned long hair for men and pants for
women— named himself “Life President” of the country and had his picture
plastered inside every offi ce building and movie theater, as well as in most
homes.4 Banda, one of the most controlling of the postin de pen dence African
big men, certainly believed that his people couldn’t be trusted with the fran-
chise. Malawians, he told reporters, were “children” and needed a powerful
ruler to guide them.5
Theorists Huntington and Seymour Martin Lipset, meanwhile, ar-
gued that countries needed to attain a certain level of economic develop-
ment to create the conditions for successful democracy— a level of development
that virtually none of the postcolonial states had attained. The exact level of
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How We Got Here 37
development at which democracy solidifi es was diffi cult to pinpoint, but
many proponents of this modernization theory have argued that, once a
country reaches the income level, per capita, of a middle income nation, it
rarely returns to authoritarian rule. (Exceptions were states totally depen-
dent on oil wealth, in which a small elite could use oil simply to solidify its
control of power.) Economic development, these theorists argued, would
create such features as a sizable middle class, an educated populace, and
greater integration with the rest of the world.
In par tic u lar, development theorists like Huntington placed their bets
on the middle class as the primary moving force behind demo cratic change.
As the middle class grew in size, middle class men and women would build
new networks of business and society outside of the control of the state.
They would gain more education, build more ties to the outside world of
demo cratic ideas, and increasingly demand more social, po liti cal, and eco-
nomic freedoms. In addition, development would promote higher levels of
interpersonal trust, seen as critical to civic engagement in politics, to open
debate, and to forming opposition po liti cal parties. “In virtually every coun-
try [that had demo cratized] the most active supporters of demo cratization
came from the urban middle- class,” Huntington wrote.
For the most part, until the early 1970s, the theory that these poor, newly
in de pen dent nations could not support democracy seemed correct. Even
India suffered its own dramatic demo cratic reversal, when in the mid- 1970s
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution and declared a
state of emergency, essentially making herself dictator. Indeed, in the 1960s
and 1970s democracy suffered another reverse wave, though this reverse did
not cancel out all the gains of the previous two waves. Military regimes took
power again in Greece and Turkey. Nearly every postcolonial African state
developed into some kind of authoritarian regime, often ruled by a domi-
neering in de pen dence leader like Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta or Ghana’s Kwame
Nkrumah. Many of these nations also adopted highly centralized economic
policies, which not only failed to produce high growth rates but also con-
tributed to a general centralization of power in the hands of the ruling re-
gime. Postcolonial states that had seemed to offer prospects for democracy,
like Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Burma, disintegrated into civil war
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38 How We Got Here
or fell prey to military takeovers, such as the bloody civil confl ict in Indone-
sia in 1965– 66, where in the aftermath of a military takeover communal
riots killed as many as one million Indonesians.
And if Asia’s postcolonial leaders proved more successful eco nom ical ly
than their counterparts in Africa, opening their countries to international
trade and using the power of the state to support industrialization and pri-
mary education made them no less dictatorial than their African peers. The
leaders of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore— Park Chung Hee, Chiang
Kai- shek, and Lee Kuan Yew, respectively— established spartan, tightly con-
trolled states. Thailand’s military generals might allow American companies
and American soldiers into their country, but not American- style democ-
racy. When a group of prodemocracy opposition politicians criticized the
ruling Thai junta in 1949, the security forces grabbed four men from the
opposition, who never made it out of police custody. When the police fi nally
released their bodies, the corpses were pocked with bullet holes and showed
signs of torture, including swollen eyes and ears, burns over their bodies
(likely from lit cigarettes), and shattered legs.6 Overall, in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, in the second reverse wave, as many as one- third of the countries
that had been democracies in the early 1960s had reverted to authoritarian
rule by the early 1970s. The reverse wave, Huntington noted, sparked broad
pessimism that stable democracy could take hold anywhere in the develop-
ing world.
The international system enabled authoritarian rule and, generally,
posed a major obstacle to demo cratic change during the Cold War. The
Soviet Union crushed stirrings of demo cratic reform in Hungary, Czech o-
slo vak i a, and other Soviet satellites. Meanwhile, not only did many Western
leaders tolerate anticommunist autocracies, by the 1970s— with oil shocks
staggering the U.S. economy and the retreat from Vietnam denting Amer-
ican military confi dence— they also openly wondered whether democ-
racy could actually defeat communism around the world. In 1977 Henry
Kissinger, the former secretary of state and a believer in détente with the
Soviet Union, wrote, “Today, for the fi rst time in our history, we face the
stark reality that the [communist] challenge is unending.”7 Kissinger’s views
were widely shared among American policy makers and intellectuals, most
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How We Got Here 39
of whom in the 1970s and early 1980s accepted that the Soviet Union would
not reform, that communism and democracy would have to coexist indefi –
nitely, and that democracy might eventually turn out to be the historical
accident, restricted to a few societies of the West and perhaps doomed even
there.8
Even when Western allies crushed potential young democracies, Cold
War realities dominated. In 1975, as Portugal released its last colonial
possessions, the leaders of one of those possessions, East Timor, developed
plans to build an in de pen dent democracy on their tiny half- island. But that
year giant Indonesia invaded Timor with the tacit consent of the United
States and other powers, including the regional power, Australia. In a meet-
ing with Indonesian dictator Suharto, President Gerald Ford and Secretary
of State Kissinger made clear they would not stand in the way. “What ever
you do,” Kissinger told Suharto, according to documents later released
under the Freedom of Information Act, “We will try to handle it in the best
way possible.”9 Indonesia launched a brutal military occupation of East
Timor. According to an estimate by Geoffrey Robinson of the University
of California at Los Angeles, as many as 200,000 East Timorese— close to
half the population— died from the occupation in the late 1970s.10
In April 1974, in an event that was only later recognized as having launched
the third wave of demo cratization, leftist military offi cers in Portugal, frus-
trated with the government’s continued commitment to expensive and bloody
colonial wars, deposed the authoritarian regime that had ruled the country
for fi ve de cades. Thousands of Portuguese fl ocked into the streets of Lisbon,
gathering near the fl ower market, where they began waving carnations and
sticking them into soldiers’ gun barrels to show their support for the rebels.
The coup paved the way for an opening of the Portuguese po liti cal system,
and within a year of the “Carnation Revolution,” Portugal had held a free
election.
Beginning with the Carnation Revolution, democracy spread in the
third wave across southern Eu rope, to parts of East Asia and Latin Amer-
ica, and, after 1989, to much of post- Soviet Eastern Eu rope. Between the
mid- 1970s and the early 1990s, some thirty authoritarian nations would
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40 How We Got Here
become demo cratic, and more would develop at least some trappings of
democracy. Of course, the idea of a “demo cratic wave”— political science
shorthand for sweeping change— could be overstated. Specifi c domestic
factors in each nation precipitated demo cratization, and it would be im-
possible to claim that po liti cal change in one nation necessarily sparked
change somewhere else. But in certain regions and at certain times, like
Latin America in the late 1970s and early 1980s, or Eastern Eu rope in 1989,
the sheer number of countries undergoing change in a short time meant that
reforms in Brazil or Poland did have a demonstration effect, infl uencing the
po liti cal situation in Argentina or Czech o slo vak i a. The Carnation Revolu-
tion, for instance, was watched carefully in neighboring Spain. Shortly after-
ward, with the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, Spain embarked
on its own transition, in which King Juan Carlos helped manage a demo-
cratic opening.11 Reforms in Brazil and Argentina in the late 1970s and early
1980s encouraged the reformers in Chile, who had already begun pushing
back against dictatorship. Chile restored democracy in 1990 and built what
is now arguably the most stable demo cratic system in Latin America.12
Many of these third wave nations also had experienced rapid economic
growth in the 1970s, seemingly adding support to Huntington’s theory that
growth helps build a middle class and, thus, demo cratic change. In the late
1960s and early 1970s, economic reforms helped usher in high growth in
Spain and Greece and other southern Eu ro pe an nations, and several of the
Asian nations that would demo cratize in the third wave, including the
Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan, also posted high growth
rates in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the case of Korea, Thailand, and Tai-
wan, these growth rates were some of the highest in the world. The military
regimes running these nations often played a role in sparking the growth
through free market policies, but in Greece, Spain, and other nations, they
proved incapable of managing some of the challenges of growth, including
infl ation, higher public debt, migration to urban areas and the need for
greater social ser vices, and macroeconomic instability. This lack of economic
management hurt the autocrats’ legitimacy, particularly with the middle
class businesspeople.
In addition, these nations’ middle classes seemed to respond to growth
exactly as Huntington and Lipset had predicted. Demanding greater eco-
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How We Got Here 41
nomic, social, and po liti cal freedoms, urban middle class men and women
led demonstrations in the Philippines, Argentina, Chile, Taiwan, South
Korea, and many other nations. In countries like Bulgaria or Burma, where
the urban middle class was much smaller, demo cratization during the third
wave faced many more challenges, and had a harder time laying founda-
tions for demo cratic consolidation.
In the Philippines, it was primarily Manila’s middle class, over a mil-
lion men and women, who formed the bulk of the People Power movement
that forced dictator Ferdinand Marcos to step down in 1986 and fl ee into
exile. In South Korea in the late 1980s, middle class urbanites in Seoul, in-
cluding many university students, led angry and sometimes violent protests
against dictator Roh Tae Woo, forcing him to concede to demo cratic re-
forms and, ultimately, paving the way for the presidencies of former dissi-
dents Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung, who’d once been hunted and
nearly killed by the military regime.
Looking to the Philippines example, Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka,
and Bangladesh also built fl awed but increasingly reformist governments,
while demonstrators in Burma in part modeled their massive 1988 prode-
mocracy protests on the People Power movements in Manila.
The middle class did not always act so forcefully, but it invariably
played a major role. In Chile, Turkey, and Brazil, gradual economic develop-
ment and slow pressure for reform from an emerging middle class ulti-
mately forced leaders to negotiate transitions to democracy and to return
the military to the barracks. In apartheid South Africa, middle class white
liberals, tired of their country’s isolation and its negative impact on com-
merce, subtly pressured the ruling National Party to liberalize. Many of
these middle class attempts at po liti cal reform began with mea sures to so-
lidify demo cratic institutions. In South Africa, leaders backed by the urban
middle class passed one of the most progressive constitutions in the world,
recognizing a vast array of human rights including the right to healthcare,
housing, and education. In Thailand, idealistic young Bangkokians, some-
times working with reform- minded foreign NGOs, wrote and passed a
forward- thinking constitution with broad protections for rights and clauses
that created in de pen dent institutions to oversee po liti cal competition and
prevent vote buying.13
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42 How We Got Here
Later in the third wave, when coups threatened nascent democracies,
middle class men and women stood up for reform. As the Argentine mili-
tary threatened the civilian government in 1985 and 1987, the civilian lead-
ers called hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets of Buenos
Aires to support the government’s legitimacy. In the Philippines, post–
People Power leader Corazon Aquino faced down multiple coup attempts,
including a serious one in late 1989 by Marcos loyalists. Each time, Aquino
called upon her support among middle class Manila residents, using tele-
vised speeches to rally her faithful, and staving off all of the military’s
attempted putsches.
The middle classes’ re sis tance to demo cratic rollback was not the only
sign, during the third wave, of their seemingly deep commitment to de-
mocracy. Numerous polls taken during the third wave across Latin Amer-
ica, Asia, Southern and Eastern Eu rope, and other demo cratizing regions
showed extremely high levels of support for democracy. In one such study
cited by Huntington, around 75 percent of Peruvians in 1988 believed that
democracy was the most desirable po liti cal system. In another series of
polls, taken in a range of former Soviet satellites, overwhelming majorities,
primarily in urban middle class areas, declared that democracy was prefer-
able to all other forms of government.
Broader public demands for democracy also challenged authoritarian lead-
ers across the third wave at a time when many of these authoritarians no
longer could count on the backing of the Soviet Union or the United States
as the Cold War came to a close. The Solidarity protests at Poland’s ship-
yards in the early 1980s did not immediately force an end to Polish com-
munism, but they helped set the stage for the revolutions of 1989, which
quickly spread from the more developed Eastern Eu ro pe an nations to even
the least developed, like Bulgaria and, eventually, Albania, which had been
kept in near isolation during the Cold War by its paranoid, xenophobic
ruler, Enver Hoxha. Facing its own economic challenges, the Soviet Union
had less capacity to repress dissent in its satellites, while, in the United
States, support for democracy and human rights was beginning to build.
The People Power movement in the Philippines indeed not only pushed
Ferdinand Marcos out of power but also helped reshape American thinking
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How We Got Here 43
about the strategic benefi ts of authoritarian regimes, a shift that would
add fuel to global demo cratization in the third wave. As crowds gathered in
Manila to call for Marcos’s ouster, the outpouring prompted some offi cials
within the administration of President Ronald Reagan to begin aggressively
promoting the idea that demo cratic governments in developing nations like
the Philippines ultimately would prove better partners for Washington than
even the friendliest authoritarian regimes— and that the United States thus
should reduce its support for even avowedly anticommunist autocrats. Paul
Wolfowitz, who was assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs dur-
ing the anti- Marcos protests, wrote in 2009 following the death of People
Power leader Corazon Aquino, “Some U.S. offi cials in the mid- 1980s de-
fended Marcos on the grounds that ‘there’s no real alternative’ . . . but that
ignored the fact that continued U.S. support for Marcos was itself discourag-
ing opposition.” In fact, Wolfowitz wrote, Washington fi nally made a crucial
decision that would help push forward the third wave of democratization—
that demo cratic government, not a conservative autocrat, was the best anti-
dote to communism: “In the end, the conclusion was that it would be more
dangerous if Marcos continued on his current course.”14
Wolfowitz played a central role in pushing the Reagan administration,
still wedded to a policy of backing conservative dictatorships, to abandon its
support for Marcos and embrace the prodemocracy movement in Manila.
Beginning with a Wall Street Journal article he wrote in 1985 calling for
American democracy promotion to counter communism, Wolfowitz advo-
cated, in public and in private administration interagency meetings, for
the White House to embrace demo cratic reforms in the Philippines. Em-
bracing the democracy movement would be a sharp change for the United
States and a risk in the Philippines, which at that time was a critical Amer-
ican ally and home to important naval bases. Though a de cade earlier Wol-
fowitz would have found few allies for his cause, by the mid- 1980s pressure
to make democracy promotion a part of American and Western Eu ro pe an
policy had begun to build among a community of academics, writers, con-
gressional representatives, and a few policy makers, both neoconservatives
like Wolfowitz and, later, liberal internationalists like Samantha Power and
Michael Ignatieff, as well as many West German, British, and Nordic activ-
ists and writers. What’s more, the coming end of the Cold War, a de cade
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44 How We Got Here
later, would give their arguments greater resonance, because it would be-
come harder for American realists to use the confl ict with the Soviet Union
as a reason to prop up pro- Western dictators like Marcos or Mobutu, or for
Western Eu ro pe an realists to advocate their own détente with the nations
of the Warsaw Pact.
Wolfowitz and his allies had argued during the Manila protests that,
in the long run, the global spread of democracy would be in America’s
interest. Demo cratization, they believed, would minimize the possibility of
global confl icts that might necessitate American intervention, reduce the
corruption and rent- seeking that added burdens to American companies
investing abroad, enlarge the sphere of countries committed to free trade
and free markets, and generally enhance America’s prestige abroad. It was
an idea that already had begun to gain traction in the Carter administration,
which had made human rights a focus. The rhetoric of demo cratization also
appealed to Carter’s successor, who usually sought broad visions rather than
policy details, and it gained traction in Washington and other Western capi-
tals. As Reagan declared in a speech to the American Conservative Union,
“America’s foreign policy supports freedom, democracy, and human dig-
nity for all mankind, and we make no apologies for it. The opportunity so-
ciety that we want for ourselves we also want for others, not because we’re
imposing our system on others but because those opportunities belong to
all people.”15
The democracy advocates had help. In 1983 the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED) was founded in Washington, funded through an
annual congressional grant and given a mission to support demo cratic insti-
tutions around the world, including free media, unions, and po liti cal parties.
Partner democracy- promotion organizations like the National Demo cratic
Institute and the International Republican Institute, also established in the
early 1980s, were designed to augment NED’s overseas work.16 From the
beginning, much of NED’s work was pop u lar with civil society organiza-
tions in developing nations, and extremely unpop u lar with rulers, though
by the 2000s that would change: as American democracy- promotion efforts
during the George W. Bush era became increasingly unpop u lar in regions
like the Middle East and South Asia, NED grantees from civil society
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How We Got Here 45
organizations would hide their affi liation with the group.17 But earlier on,
NED grants helped speed transitions to democracy in countries like Poland,
where the group invested heavily in the Polish trade unions that played a
major role in criticizing the communist regime.18 Private organizations that
performed similar functions, like George Soros’s constellation of Open
Society initiatives, also would add to the investments in demo cratization in
the third wave nations.
With the end of the Cold War, demo cratization moved to the forefront of
American policy making, and the third wave of demo cratization expanded
beyond the post- Soviet states to include parts of Latin America and Asia
and even some African nations. Democracy advocates on both the right
and the left gained infl uence and power. Some, like Madeleine Albright,
took high- profi le positions in the administration of President Bill Clinton.
The United States, now an unrivaled superpower with a soaring economy,
enjoyed the luxury of making democracy promotion a central pillar of for-
eign policy; America could embark on armed foreign interventions to save
nations trying to build new democracies, even when those countries were
tangential to American strategic interests. The American public, riding the
economic boom of the mid- and late 1990s, would tolerate a more interna-
tionalist foreign policy; American liberals, who since the Vietnam War had
linked military intervention to overaggressive, even brutal, American power,
could now support the use of force to prevent crimes against humanity and
to save beleaguered potential democracies like East Timor or Kosovo. And
if the United States wanted to promote democracy and help build a new
class of po liti cal leaders, even close to the traditional spheres of infl uence of
Rus sia or China, who was going to stop it? By the mid- 1990s, Moscow was
on the verge of bankruptcy and Beijing still had not fully recovered from
the stain of the Tiananmen massacre.
As president, Clinton decided to make democracy promotion a core
part of his foreign policy. Searching for a theme that would convey a foreign
policy for the post– Cold War era and would be remembered by history,
Clinton had settled on one phrase: demo cratic enlargement.19 Demo cratic
enlargement, he decided in meetings with his National Security Council,
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46 How We Got Here
would form the center of his foreign policy and would be a successor to
the containment policy of the Cold War. It would capture the optimism
and hope of the post– Cold War era and would wed optimism to strategic
purpose. Enlargement would mean that America’s priority now would be
to help expand the number of free states in the world, because, as National
Security Advisor Anthony Lake told historian Douglas Brinkley, “as free
states grew in number and strength the international order would become
both more prosperous and more secure.”20 The Clinton administration, he
said, would help consolidate young democracies, help counter the aggres-
sion of states hostile to democracy, and support the liberalization of undemo-
cratic nations.21 Of course, there would be exceptions, such as China and the
Middle East, but from early in his fi rst term, and even in his speeches on the
campaign trail, Clinton aggressively highlighted democracy promotion as
vital to American national interests. His fi rst National Security Strategy
stated that “all of America’s strategic interests— from promoting prosperity
at home to checking global threats abroad before they threaten our territory—
are served by enlarging the community of demo cratic and free market
nations.”22 In studying the Clinton administration’s record, Thomas
Carothers, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, found that
Clinton had for the fi rst time institutionalized democracy promotion in the
U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy— every U.S. embassy now had to submit
an annual report on its democracy promotion efforts— and the White
House, in its bud geting requests, clearly made democracy promotion one of
its strategic priorities.23 Between the early 1990s and 2000, U.S. government
spending on democracy promotion grew from around $100 million annually
to over $700 million annually.24 Clinton attempted to support what he con-
sidered the most important nations on the verge of demo cratization, includ-
ing Rus sia and Mexico; under Clinton, the United States became Rus sia’s
largest investor, American democracy- promotion organizations like NED
expanded their Rus sia programs, and the Clinton administration pushed
the International Monetary Fund, G7, and World Bank to use their re-
sources to foster demo cratization in Rus sia.25 The White House drastically
expanded funding for demo cratic institution building and market reforms
in the newly free nations of Eastern Eu rope, and, on the campaign trail in
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How We Got Here 47
1996, Clinton boasted, “With our help, the forces of reform in Eu rope’s
newly free nations have laid the foundations of democracy.”26
East Timor, which in 1975 had shown the limits of what Washington
would do to protect a nascent democracy during the Cold War, served as an
example again in 1999. As in 1975, a brutal bloodletting exploded in Timor.
After the majority of Timorese voted to separate from Indonesia, militias
with links to the Indonesian armed forces began a campaign of slaughter
that would not have been out of place in the Rwandan genocide. Gangs of
militiamen wielding machetes and automatic weapons hacked, disembow-
eled, and beheaded known in de pen dence supporters, aid workers, journal-
ists, and anyone else who happened to be in their way. Thousands died, and
70 percent of Timor’s infrastructure was destroyed. But this time the world
responded. Despite having minimal strategic interests in East Timor, major
powers like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia backed
an armed humanitarian intervention that, under the auspices of the United
Nations, ultimately stemmed the violence, allowed relief workers to avoid a
total catastrophe in East Timor, and ultimately helped Timor to fi nally
break from Indonesia and build a fragile and in de pen dent democracy.27
The Timor triumph, along with successful Western intervention in
Kosovo, only further emboldened Washington. With the end of the Soviet
Union, Western fears that democracy would not survive and that commu-
nism would last forever suddenly vanished. Few had predicted the Soviet
collapse, but in its wake a Western triumphalism quickly emerged. Francis
Fukuyama later protested that he never intended his “End of History” arti-
cle to express this conviction that liberal democracy had triumphed forever,
but the piece captured the victorious Western mood. Democracy, Clinton
administration offi cials now argued, had a universal appeal, and would
spread, well, universally— a belief, as Robert Kagan noted, rooted in the
Enlightenment concept of the inevitability of progress, of history constantly
moving forward toward human improvement.28 In aid conferences and
missions to developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, offi cials
from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Na-
tions, U.S. government agencies, and other Western organizations preached
the new gospel of economic and po liti cal liberalization.
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48 How We Got Here
Kishore Mahbubani, a former se nior Singaporean foreign ser vice offi –
cial, remembered meeting a top Belgian offi cial in 1991, the year that prob-
ably marked the apex of post– Cold War triumphalism. Before a group of
Asians, the offi cial declared, “The Cold War has ended. There are only two
superpowers left: The United States and Eu rope.”29
Post–Cold War haughtiness even fi ltered into bilateral relations with
powers like Rus sia and China. In the 1990s Western scholars like Gordon
Chang predicted the coming collapse of the Chinese Communist Party and
took bets on when it would fall to a demo cratic uprising. American offi cials,
seeing in Yeltsin’s Rus sia the opposite of the Soviet Union— Russia would
now be a close friend, an American- style democracy— pushed to expand
NATO closer to Rus sia’s borders, ignoring warnings from experts that
Rus sian nationalism had hardly just vanished, and that Russians— and
Chinese— might resent this dramatic American intervention in their
backyard.30
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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: The Fourth Wave

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Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Democracy in Retreat
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T
he outskirts of blantyre, the commercial capital of Malawi,
are some of the most forlorn suburbs on earth. Years of on- and-
off drought and famine in the countryside have gradually de-
stroyed Malawi’s farming families, driving many people to settle in Blantyre,
where the men take odd jobs as guards at stores or as part- time bus drivers.
Rows of shacks made from scraps of metal and scavenged wood cover the
denuded hills outside the city, and, at night, if you are brave enough to walk
in these neighborhoods, you can see young men posted as guards in front of
the families’ tiny dwellings, since Malawi’s urbanization and deep poverty—
GDP per capita is roughly $800— have sparked a rise in violent crime. In
wealthier parts of the city, residents employ private security companies and
equip their houses with “panic rooms,” which don’t always work— home in-
vasions remain common, and the thieves often seem to be in cahoots with
the security guards assigned to watch the properties.
In the early morning, the sides of the rutted roads are so thick with
people walking to their jobs from the shantytowns that cars can fi nd these
routes diffi cult to negotiate. Nearly all the land outside Blantyre has been
ripped up. Wood has been stripped for houses, and edible plants taken for
food on the formerly lush hills above the green valleys of Thyolo, the tradi-
tional tea- growing region north of the city. In se nior housing in Thyolo,
el der ly planters, who settled in Malawi from Britain when it was still a
colony, still take afternoon tea and tiny British- style fi nger cakes. But out-
side of the carefully tended gardens of these residences, and beyond the lush
tea plantations owned by large companies, across Thyolo one can see only
arid scrub, razed buildings, and fruit plants ripped apart in search of food.
The Fourth Wave
3
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50 The Fourth Wave
Women with babies tied on their backs with brightly colored chitenge cloths
jostle for space on the sides of the road with sickly vendors carry ing bat-
tered trays of avocados and bananas.
Children are everywhere. Malawi has one of the highest birthrates in
the world, and its fi fteen million people are jammed into a country the size
of Pennsylvania, with cities that resemble the packed metropolises of South
Asia more than the archetypical open landscapes of Africa. It also has a
staggeringly high rate of HIV/AIDS infection. The United Nations’ AIDS
program estimates that 14 percent of Malawians are infected, an epidemic
that, even in the era of antiretrovirals, has orphaned many kids, leaving
them to be cared for by grandparents, or by no one.1 At intersections in
Blantyre proper, packs of orphans clad in torn clothes and with matted hair
often waylay stopped or slow- moving cars to beg for food or a few kwacha,
the nearly worthless Malawian currency that piles up in stacks in mer-
chants’ shops.
And yet, for all its destitution Malawi was, until recently, a demo cratic
success story. After the country’s longtime dictator stepped down in the
early 1990s, the country held free, multiparty elections. The fi rst demo-
cratically elected president, Bakili Muluzi, was later accused of massive
corruption— but after Malawi’s top court upheld the constitution and barred
him from seeking a third term in the 2009 presidential election, he complied
with its ruling. His former protégé, Bingu wa Mutharika, now leading an
opposition party, won the presidency.
Beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Malawi also developed a
culture of largely peaceful, vigorous po liti cal campaigning. The presiden-
tial election of 2009 exemplifi ed this trend. At one point during the winter
campaign a large crowd dressed in red, the color of John Tembo, was hol-
lering wildly for their candidate in front of an overgrown soccer fi eld next
to a divided highway. Across the road a smaller group of Mutharika back-
ers, all dressed in his party color, blue, had taken position, screaming into
the sky, clapping and singing, and thrusting massive posters of their candi-
date’s face at passing cars, nearly causing an accident. After a while some
Mutharika supporters crossed the street toward the Tembo group, yet they
didn’t make any effort to stir up violence— a common occurrence during
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The Fourth Wave 51
election campaigns in neighboring nations like Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Instead, several of the younger men dropped their Mutharika posters, pulled
out a ragged soccer ball, and started an impromptu dribbling exhibition
with two Tembo men. Later that year, Malawi would hold a relatively peace-
ful presidential election, marking another seeming transition to stable
democracy. The campaign was covered extensively in the local newspapers,
which suffered from lack of resources— reporters were paid little, and the
papers themselves often looked like they had been printed on rags— but
which reported on the candidates with boldness and style, chronicling nearly
every po liti cal battle that went on across the country. Despite some threats
from angry politicians, reporters rarely backed down, and each day’s paper
usually contained a scandal sheet rapping all the major politicians’ foibles.
Even as Malawi welcomed democracy, its leaders, and its citizens, also
came to associate po liti cal change with promises of economic prosperity.
Throughout the fourth wave of demo cratization, in the late 1990s and early
2000s, foreign donors and many local leaders who pushed the “Washington
Consensus” prescriptions of open markets and open societies, increasingly
made this association. But it was a dangerous link. No evidence had really
shown that open societies were more likely to create economic growth. In
fact, Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute has shown that, in
recent years, many authoritarian nations have outperformed freer coun-
tries.2 But in the late 1980s and 1990s, many developing world leaders—
and their advocates in the West— linked the two.
In the late 1980s, Malawi might have seemed a remote prospect for democ-
racy, but it was joined by many other demo cratizing nations from similar
levels of development. The fourth wave of global demo cratization, which
built on the gains of the third wave, began to crest in the late 1990s and con-
tinued into the early 2000s. While the third wave had swept through South-
ern Eu rope and parts of Eastern Eu rope, Latin America, and Asia, the
fourth wave included much of sub- Saharan Africa and many other coun-
tries that were poorer, more prone to confl ict, and, often, more remote, than
those in the third wave: East Timor, Cambodia, Mexico, Mozambique, and
Malawi, among many others.
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52 The Fourth Wave
In many ways, the uprisings in the Middle East in 2011 seemed to fi t in
with that fourth wave. The Middle East revolts took place in countries like
Yemen or Egypt— nations that were often as poor, authoritarian, or confl ict-
ridden—or all three— as those in the fourth wave nations. Before the Arab
Spring, just as in sub- Saharan Africa before the 1990s, many observers, and
indeed many Arabs, had all but written off the prospect of real change in
the Middle East for generations.
Just as in the third wave, a kind of positive diffusion effect took place
in which demo cratic change— sometimes backed by powerful advocacy by
established democracies, as in East Timor— in one fourth wave country
spilled over to neighboring nations. The revolts in Tunisia in December
2010, broadcast on satellite tele vi sion and social media, inspired reformers
fi rst in Egypt, and then in Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and other nations in the
Middle East. The dramatic end of apartheid in South Africa in the early
1990s, as well as liberalization in neighboring nations like Mozambique
and Zambia, helped create currents of change that autocratic leaders like
Malawian dictator Hastings Banda ultimately could not ignore. Throwing
off most of the remaining postcolonial dictators, many other poor African
nations, like Benin, held multiple free and fair elections.
In the former Soviet sphere, the progress toward democracy of former
communist states like Poland and Kyrgyzstan began to spill over into harder
cases, like Ukraine, Central Asian nations, and Georgia. New states carved
from the Soviet Central Asian republics, some of the poorest and most
ethnically heterogeneous parts of the former Soviet Union, held elections.
After the vicious Balkan wars of the 1990s, nearly every part of the former
Yugo slavia held real, competitive elections, with several, like Slovenia, ap-
proaching Western Eu ro pe an standards of stable democracy. Overall, by
the early 2000s, nearly half of the world’s population lived in countries that
were either full or partial democracies, up from less than half in the mid-
1970s.3
Sub- Saharan Africa made perhaps the greatest demo cratic gains in the
1990s and early 2000s, seemingly disproving arguments, sometimes made
by African leaders, that the region was too poor, too ethnically divided, and
too uneducated to make democracy work. From Malawi to postapartheid
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The Fourth Wave 53
South Africa, the continent disposed of so- called big men, held elections,
and paid lip ser vice to new demo cratic norms. Long- ruling parties in many
countries fi nally lost elections and willingly transferred power. Western
leaders, including President Bill Clinton, touted a “new generation” of Afri-
can leaders, men like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Ethiopia’s Meles
Zenawi, who would commit themselves to reform and to priorities that
the fi rst postcolonial generation had often ignored.4
In Kenya, the era following Daniel arap Moi had begun exuberantly
in 2002 with the frenzied inauguration of former longtime opposition
leader Mwai Kibaki, who vowed to clean up, and open up, Kenyan politics.
At Kibaki’s inauguration, where the new president declared, “The era of
anything goes is now gone forever: Government will no longer be run on
the whims of individuals.” Africa journalist Michela Wrong tried to pay a
small bribe to a local driver, but he refused her money, saying that a new,
cleaner era had come to Kenya.5 Kibaki appointed John Githongo, a prom-
inent, outspoken local journalist who had bitterly criticized Moi’s autocratic
and venal style, as his anticorruption czar.
Like Kibaki, Olusegun Obasanjo, a former general with a relatively
clean reputation who won the Nigerian presidency in 1999 after the dictator
Sani Abacha died, took offi ce amid a wave of optimism. Obasanjo touted
himself as a reformer after the predation and outright thuggery of the
Abacha era; the day of his inauguration was called “Democracy Day,” and
a national holiday was declared.6 In the following months U. S. Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright called for greater American aid to Nigeria, prais-
ing Obasanjo for launching a demo cratic revolution that could rival “the
Czechoslovak ‘Velvet Revolution’ and South Africa’s long walk to freedom”
in its power and infl uence.7
The fourth wave of demo cratization, which had seemed so improbable
just a de cade earlier, cemented in many Western leaders’ minds the idea
that democracy eventually would come to every country. If a place as poor
and as confl ict- ridden as Malawi or Mozambique could build a viable demo-
cratic system, what nation could not? Critical international developments,
including the rapid expansion of communications technology, the end of the
Cold War, and the birth of Western democracy promotion, also seemed to
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54 The Fourth Wave
foster the global spread of democracy. By the beginning of the 2000s, this
belief in the essential triumph of democracy had become a kind of religion
among Western leaders.
The color revolutions of the early 2000s capped off the fourth wave,
and only added to Western leaders’ demo cratic triumphalism. Beginning
with the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 (some would add the protests
in Serbia in 2000), the term “color revolutions” came to mean peaceful,
pop u lar movements for demo cratic change, initially in the former Soviet
Union and old Eastern bloc.
To be sure, some fourth wave nations seemed, even in their best moments,
to be the “illiberal democracies” that prominent intellectual and writer
Fareed Zakaria has described— places like Cambodia, whose leaders never
really upheld what Zakaria calls “constitutional liberalism,” meaning pro-
tections of individual autonomy and dignity against coercion, including
the potential tyranny of a demo cratic majority.8 As Zakaria outlined in his
book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad,
many young democracies, led by popularly elected leaders who had little
interest in creating demo cratic institutions, trampled on minority rights,
religious freedoms, and economic rights. “In many developing countries,
the experience of democracy over the past few de cades has been one in
which majorities have— often quietly, sometimes noisily— eroded separa-
tions of power, undermined human rights, and corrupted longstanding
traditions of tolerance and fairness. . . . Demo cratization and illiberalism
are directly related,” he wrote.9 In India, where Zakaria was born, the mid-
1990s BJP government, popularly elected and supported by many Hindus,
fostered pogroms against Muslims, a religious minority, in states like Guja-
rat, and apparently set back India’s commitment to liberalism, which had
been enshrined at the time of in de pen dence by unelected Indian elites or by
leaders, like Jawaharlal Nehru, who were far more tolerant than most Indi-
ans. In Indonesia, where for thirty years relative interreligious and intereth-
nic peace had prevailed under Suharto’s iron grip (though, when he came to
power in the mid- 1960s, Suharto unleashed massive bloodshed), demo cratic
change in the late 1990s led to new waves of violence between Muslims and
Christians, Javanese and non- Javanese, and many other groups within In-
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The Fourth Wave 55
donesian society.10 Unlike leaders like Suharto or Singapore’s Lee Kuan
Yew, who could “make shrewd choices for the long term,” demo cratic lead-
ers also would inherently be pulled into populist economic policies focused
on short- term gains at the expense of development.11
Zakaria argued further that the problem with these “illiberal democ-
racies” was not that they were insuffi ciently democratic— that their institu-
tions and po liti cal cultures needed to continue to mature, like those in the
West that had developed for de cades. This was a critique that had been made
by many demo cratization specialists, and even by demo crats in many devel-
oping nations themselves. Instead, he argued that they had too much democ-
racy, and that the only solution was authoritarian rule, or at least a kind of
oligarchic rule by the “best people”— the elites, like Nehru and other Indian
founding fathers, who had attended En glish boarding schools and then
Oxford or Cambridge. He celebrated leaders like Indonesia’s Suharto and
Pervez Musharraf, the military ruler of Pakistan throughout most of the
2000s who, by Zakaria’s reckoning, instilled greater tolerance of religious
and ethnic diversity than any civilian politician in that country could or
would have done.12 He seemed to even suggest that no Muslim- majority
nation was capable of real democracy, since illiberal Islamists would always
dominate an election and crush people’s freedoms— thus, a “liberal” dicta-
tor like Musharraf or Tunisia’s Zine Al- Abidine Ben Ali was the best alter-
native. He longed for earlier periods even in American history, when politics
was essentially decided by a small group of men who came from the “right”
background, attended the “right” universities, and then governed together at
the State Department, CIA, and the White House.
Some of Zakaria’s argument about illiberalism made inherent sense,
such as the critical observation that democracy means more than simply
elections; U.S. policy too often has focused on one relatively free election in
a developing nation while ignoring other signs suggesting that demo cratic
institutions are not being put into place. As we will see later, some “elected
autocrats”— popularly elected leaders in fragile democracies like Rus sia or
Thailand— have shown little commitment to the rule of law or to freedoms
of association, press, or religion, and a democracy promotion policy focused
primarily on elections, or a one- size- fi ts- all type of pro cess, can hardly be suc-
cessful. And in some instances, development- minded dictators like Suharto
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56 The Fourth Wave
or Augusto Pinochet of Chile were able to pass economic reforms that set
the stage for sustained growth.
Yet a wide range of comprehensive studies has shown that it is impossi-
ble to fi nd a clear link between autocracy and growth. These dictators also
usually did little to set the stage for any demo cratic transition, since the
foundation of their rule was a desire to stay in power for life— when Suharto
was overthrown, he was focused on concentrating more wealth and power
into the hands of his family, not liberalizing the po liti cal environment or
opening up Indonesia’s cartelized markets. More important, these elected
autocrats alone, whom Zakaria despises, did not undermine these democra-
cies; as we will see, when this fourth wave crested these nations were neu-
tered by a combination of poor leadership, weak institutions, a complacent
middle class, slow growth, and corruption. This fourth wave also was not
helped by Western democracy promotion strategies heavy on rhetoric, elec-
tions, and pro cess, and it was light on actual funding on the ground, or an
understanding of how to make democracy more attractive to both middle
classes and working classes in the developing world.
But despite Zakaria’s legitimate concerns about young democracies,
some of which are echoed in this book, and even though many of these
elected autocrats often took their countries’ democracies backward, they
almost never left their nations more repressive than they had been under pre-
vious true dictatorships. In Thailand, for instance, Thaksin Shinawatra did
set the rule of law back during his prime ministership between 2001 and
2006: he intimidated the Thai media, bent the court system to his priorities,
and essentially sacked supposedly in de pen dent bureaucrats who defi ed his
policies. But only someone with no historical memory would argue that
Thaksin’s period as prime minister even began to compare to the bloodiest
days of Thailand’s past dictatorships, such as the late 1940s, when dictator
Phibul Songkram disappeared or simply murdered po liti cal opponents,
or the mid- 1970s, when under a series of right- wing regimes state- backed
vigilantes attacked Thammasat University, the Thai equivalent of Har-
vard, where they raped female students and then doused students with
gasoline and immolated them, leaving their charred bodies swinging
from trees.13
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The Fourth Wave 57
Indeed, even if they were incomplete democracies, all of the fourth wave
nations that later regressed were freer in every respect during their more
demo cratic periods than they had been earlier, during their truly authoritar-
ian periods. Vladimir Putin, in the 2000s, did indeed set back Rus sian de-
mocracy, often with the consent of many Rus sians; its scores on Freedom
House rankings fell compared to the Yeltsin era during the 1990s. But the
country hardly had reverted to the terrors of the Soviet Union, in which
none of Zakaria’s individual liberal rights received any protections.
Zakaria’s notion of illiberal democracy is inherently fl awed in other
ways. He chooses many examples in his book that do not even fi t the defi ni-
tion of democracy at all, countries like Kazakhstan that, according to the
international monitoring or ga ni za tion Freedom House and other ranking
organizations, are simply autocracies. For every Pinochet or Lee Kuan Yew,
there were tens of Mobutus or Malawi’s Hastings Banda, who used their
cults of personality to signifi cantly restrain personal freedoms and individ-
ual liberties. In nearly every country he surveyed, many of the problems he
outlined were indeed a result of not enough, rather than too much, democ-
racy. As Harvard’s Sabeel Rahman writes in an analysis of Zakaria’s book,
“On closer inspection, one fi nds that the culprits [in illiberal democracies]
are not the public, who are the supposed benefi ciaries of demo cratic em-
powerment, but rather special interest groups”— groups that could be
minimized through greater, not lesser, democracy.14
Meanwhile, as they have become more autocratic, the fourth wave na-
tions have not developed any of the supposed positive attributes of authori-
tarian rule that Zakaria writes about: benign dictators promoting liberal
social and economic freedoms that would have been impossible in a pop u-
lar democracy, or making farsighted economic decisions, since they are not
accountable to the broader public. Instead, after the coup in 2006 Thailand’s
new military leaders badly bungled economic policy, sparking panic among
investors and leading to runs on the Thai currency. In Cambodia, where the
prime minister has suffocated the demo cratic reforms of the 1990s, the
government has done little to promote sustained economic growth, instead
turning into a kind of mafi a state designed to enrich se nior government
offi cials and their allies.15 Overall, a comprehensive study of fourth wave
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58 The Fourth Wave
nations by Council on Foreign Relations researchers found that economic
growth did not improve as they veered back toward autocracy, and that
protection of these types of liberal freedoms also did not improve, even
under supposedly “enlightened” autocracies like the Thai generals who de-
posed the elected autocrat Thaksin, or Musharraf.
In earlier demo cratic waves, countries had pursued a wide range of develop-
ment strategies. Many third wave nations, especially those in East Asia,
actually pursued highly state- directed strategies of economic growth, which
some economists later would call the East Asian model. Eventually, these
countries, like Taiwan and South Korea, also built vibrant democracies.
While participating in global trading regimes, nations like Taiwan, Thai-
land, Malaysia, South Korea, and, earlier, Japan protected critical industries
until they were more internationally competitive, invested heavily in primary
education, and directed banks and other fi nancial institutions, including citi-
zens’ pension plans, to support certain sectors of the economy. Some of
these high- powered economies, like Malaysia (and later China), used capital
controls to protect themselves from international capital markets. In Thai-
land, a small cadre of government bureaucrats in the Bank of Thailand and
Ministry of Finance oversaw these government economic plans; in Japan,
the powerful bureaucrats of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry
played this role. In Thailand, import substitution and protections of critical
industries would ultimately be responsible for nearly half the growth in the
export manufacturing sector, while in South Korea such supports and
protections nurtured a generation of companies that would become world-
beaters, including automaker Hyundai and technology giant Samsung.
These state- directed mea sures were actually not so different from those
employed by earlier, fi rst wave democracies in North America and Western
Eu rope when they, too, were developing economies. During the early years
of its existence, the United States, for example, used high tariffs and other
import restrictions to protect many of the young country’s industries from
competition with Eu ro pe an fi rms.
Other second and third wave nations pursued different strategies of
growth, with less success, yet managed at the same time to build solid de-
mocracies. After in de pen dence, India created a highly protected economy,
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The Fourth Wave 59
using a wide range of tariffs and nontariff barriers to keep out foreign
investment in most sectors, and to actually hinder domestic companies
from growing too large. Many other postcolonial states also adhered to a
socialist economic strategy, with highly mixed economic results— India
grew by around 3– 4 percent most years, and many African nations barely
grew at all in the 1970s and early 1980s. Yet some of these nations, such as
Greece and India, still managed to consolidate their democracies. Very few
nations in the second or third waves adopted wholly free market policies—
even countries later championed by free market advocates, like Chile, still
used a sizable degree of state planning and support to buttress certain sec-
tors. The one place often cited by free market advocates as an example of
the power of economic liberalization, Hong Kong— annually ranked as the
“freest” economy in the world in the Heritage Foundation think tank’s In-
dex of Economic Freedom— was neither a country nor a democracy, and its
prosperity actually depended, in no small mea sure, on a massively infl ated
local property market tightly controlled by the government.
But in the fourth wave Western leaders, policy makers, and institutions
like the World Bank were caught up in a kind of post– Cold War hysteria.
The West’s triumph over communism was proof, as Francis Fukuyama fa-
mously argued in The End of History, that liberal democracy, combined with
market economics, represented the direction in which the world would in-
evitably evolve. The hard sell of democracy barely took account of the uncer-
tainty about the actual conditions for growth in developing nations. It did
not seem to matter that earlier wave nations had employed many different
economic models of growth, or that many of the governments that collapsed
in 1989 and in the early 1990s did so not because of economic liberalization
but for a variety of reasons, ranging from international pressure (apartheid
South Africa) to internal leadership dynamics that spiraled out of control
(the Soviet Union under Gorbachev). At the time, this nuance was ignored:
economic change was linked to po liti cal change, and a program of free mar-
kets and free politics was the only item on the menu. As candidate George
W. Bush declared in 2000 on the presidential campaign trail, “Economic
freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of
democracy.”16 The man he was hoping to replace, Bill Clinton, made essen-
tially the same point many times. In one typical phrase from his book- length
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60 The Fourth Wave
vision for America, Between Hope and History, he wrote, “Just as democracy
helps make the world safe for commerce, commerce helps make the world
safe for democracy.”17
By the 1990s a large cadre of development experts, housed at the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, ministries of Western govern-
ments, and universities and think tanks, were ready to dispense advice about
the proper route to po liti cal and economic liberalization. The model advo-
cated by many of these experts became known as the “Washington Con-
sensus.”18 Its author, economist John Williamson, originally intended it to
mean a discrete and limited set of economic initiatives particularly devel-
oped to address many of the economic problems facing Latin American
nations in the late 1980s and in the 1990s, including fi scal discipline, tax
reform, liberalizing exchange rates, privatization, and trade liberalization,
among other changes. But the term soon took on a far broader meaning
among many development experts and world leaders: it came to signify
broad reforms, promoted not only for Latin America but for the entire devel-
oping world, and designed to open markets, increase fi nancial transparency,
and reduce government intervention in the economy, along with po liti cal re-
forms that would also foster freedom by shrinking the role of the state.19
Proponents of the Washington Consensus made swaggering boasts about
the potential results, and brooked little criticism of their proposals. In per-
haps the most famous example, World Bank offi cials throughout the 1990s
promised that these policy reforms, if implemented throughout the devel-
oping world, would slash global poverty in half.20 Later, in an internal as-
sessment of its policies during this de cade, the Bank admitted that it still
didn’t know “how to improve institutional per for mance [i.e., how to pro-
mote economic growth]” and that the Washington Consensus had been “the
dominant view, making it diffi cult for others to be heard,” even though
these proposed reforms actually had had a mixed impact on growth and
po liti cal change.21 Another retrospective comprehensive analysis of the
Washington Consensus, by former World Bank chief economist Joseph Sti-
glitz, found that proponents of its reforms made little effort to tailor its pre-
scriptions to individual countries and, even if it produced growth, actually
paid little attention to whether that growth alleviated poverty or really ad-
dressed in e qual ity at all. Worse, Stiglitz also concluded that the Washington
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The Fourth Wave 61
Consensus failed to even promote signifi cant growth in most of the nations
where it was applied, even as it ignored the balanced, important role that a
state can play in development.
The lack of another obvious alternative model in the late 1990s and early
2000s only emboldened advocates of free markets linked with free politics.
Compared with the Cold War, no major powers now dissented loudly from
this new orthodoxy. After the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, China adopted
a more modest public approach to foreign policy and spent most of the 1990s
and early 2000s wooing foreign investment, building its own industries
(using many of the statist models pioneered by other Asian nations), and
refusing to publicly offer any alternative to the Washington Consensus. Rus sia,
decimated eco nom ical ly by the fall of the Soviet Union, and nearly bankrupt
in the mid- 1990s, also was in no position to offer any alternative.
The sheer number and diversity of countries in the fourth wave of
demo cratization, as compared with earlier waves that took place mostly in
the West, also added to pressure among many leaders and donors to de-
velop a single model that could be applied in developing nations. After the
fall of the Berlin Wall, many leaders, both in the former Soviet states and in
the West, feared that if radical mea sures were not taken rapidly in the old
Soviet bloc, these states would be unable to jettison the legacy of communist
economic planning, and might wind up with hyperinfl ation and highly
uncompetitive economies, which could lead to a stalling, or even a reversal,
of po liti cal reforms and potential links to the West. These countries, many
economists and donor agencies believed, needed to embark on quick trans-
formations. Led by economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, many IMF and Bank
offi cials promoted a kind of economic shock therapy, consisting of rapid
freeing of the economies of countries like Poland.
The Bank was hardly alone in its hard sell of free markets and free
politics. Sub- Saharan Africa and much of Latin America had suffered
badly in the 1980s, a period of capital fl ight and economic policies that too
often saddled Latin American and African nations with greater debts. In
the worst years of the 1980s, sub- Saharan Africa’s total GDP actually
shrank, and even in the best years overall growth in Africa barely topped 4
percent; many Latin nations also ended the de cade of the 1980s poorer than
they’d begun.22 By the early 1990s, most African and Latin leaders were
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62 The Fourth Wave
looking for any solutions that would halt a death spiral of underdevelop-
ment and isolation from the global economy. Many had failed with the social-
ist economic planning and import- substitution strategies of the postcolonial
era, and at the time few understood the potential of the gradualist approach
of the East Asian nations, which slowly weaned themselves off of many of
the state subsidies and protections they had used in the 1960s and 1970s.
(Later, as we will see, as China became a major world power again, and
began highlighting its growth model, many other developing nations would
try to copy the gradualist approach.) Compared with the weak growth and
stasis of the 1960s and 1970s, and facing balance of payments problems,
weak growth, and high unemployment, many developing nations as-
sumed that the Washington Consensus could not help but improve their
economies.
The savviest leaders of developing nations also realized that decent
growth rates could bring stability to a young democracy. Growth, after
all, would mollify members of the old regime— friends of the old dicta-
tor, the military, se nior civil servants used to comfortable lifestyles, local
traditional leaders— by expanding the pool of potential spoils and, possi-
bly, convincing the most recalcitrant former regime insiders to support a
demo cratic transition.
Malawi, like many sub- Saharan African nations, received the full mea sure
of Washington Consensus advocacy. Stephen Carr, an economist, worked
for the World Bank for years, and then retired to Malawi, where he lived
on a small mountain outside of Blantyre. He had worked at the Bank dur-
ing the height of the Washington Consensus era and then watched, even
after he had left, as Bank specialists continued to descend upon the country.
“You’d have economists come in here, never been to Malawi, knew nothing
about how the country worked, and they’d make predictions, projections. . . .
No follow- through, but if anyone disagreed with them, well, you just
couldn’t,” he said. “It would be put that there was no other choice, really.”23
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Malawi was confronted with one crisis
after another: declining world prices for its staple crops of tea, coffee, and to-
bacco, and growing competition from new producers like Vietnam. Between
1980 and 2000, global prices for eigh teen major commodities plunged by
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The Fourth Wave 63
nearly one- quarter. Several times in the 1990s, droughts in the maize-
planting regions, possibly caused by shifting global climate patterns, caused
famines. Many Malawian families were left without enough maize even to
feed themselves the staple porridge of nsima, much less enough maize or
any other crop to sell; the ever- present deep- fried potatoes sold by street
vendors throughout the country were luxuries they could not afford.
The World Bank’s specialists proposed that Malawi privatize its agri-
cultural sector, slashing state subsidies for fertilizer and feed. These policy
recommendations came on the heels of Bank- and International Monetary
Fund– led structural adjustment policies for Malawi, begun in the late 1980s,
and they have launched a wave of privatization and macroeconomic liberal-
ization in the country. Some Malawian government offi cials wanted to tell
the Bank, politely, to shove off. They worried that, with even less of a gov-
ernment cushion of maize surplus and seeds, a drought would leave average
Malawians in an even more precarious position. But Malawi relies on donors
for more than half of its annual bud get, and so the Bank, and other Western
donors, wield enormous infl uence over government policy. “There was not
much [of a] way they [the Malawian government] could really stand up to
the donors,” said Carr. In the late 1990s, the government did begin to imple-
ment many of the Bank’s recommendations. As it did so, both Bank offi cials
and many Malawians politicians who realized that strong growth was needed
to maintain social stability aggressively advertised these policies.
Then, in the 2000s, disaster struck. Each season seemed to bring a
drought worse than the previous one. Malawi’s farms withered, and the
country had to start importing food from neighboring nations. Maize pro-
duction dropped by nearly half between 1998 and 2004, and in October
2005 Malawi’s president declared that the famine was a “national disaster.”
Malnutrition soared in a country where many people already could not
obtain enough food, and in the early 2000s hundreds died every year from
starvation. But the government had sold off much of its grain reserves, and
so it could do little to help its suffering farmers; it had to rely even more
heavily on handouts from aid agencies and other African nations. Private
traders who had amassed stocks of grain jacked up prices, and farmers
complained bitterly. Malawi’s economy contracted by nearly 5 percent in
2001, and by another 4.4 percent in 2002.
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64 The Fourth Wave
Eventually, the devastating famine forced the Malawian government to
reassess its strategies. Defying the Bank’s recommendation, the government
instead launched a program in which roughly half of Malawi’s small farm-
ers were given coupons that allowed them to buy fertilizer and seed at a rate
far below the market price. World Bank experts initially disdained the
Malawian government’s strategy, and the Bank may even have threatened
to cut assistance if Malawi went forward with its plan.24 Still, the Malawian
government insisted on its strategy and ultimately was seemingly proven
correct. The subsidized fertilizer and seeds helped Malawian farmers
produce some of their best harvests in the late 2000s. Once the farmers pro-
duced, the Malawian government created funds designed to buy a percent-
age of the maize crop and store it for future emergencies, thereby averting
the threat of empty grain silos in a future famine. Leaders from other Afri-
can nations, and even from some Latin American countries like Costa
Rica, began traveling to Malawi to study its turnaround. At one point, Ma-
lawi’s farmers became so productive that some government offi cials wor-
ried whether they might be producing too much, and thereby driving down
the price of their crops. Eventually, by the late 2000s the World Bank’s own
internal watchdog concluded that the demands by the Bank and other aid
donors to privatize agriculture in countries like Malawi had actually hurt
African nations. The Bank, and other Western donors, decided to cautiously
back the Malawian subsidies.25
But by the time of the Bank’s reevaluation, donors already had pursued
more than a de cade of in effec tive and dangerous policies in Malawi, despite
many warnings by local specialists that the donors were actually making
the situation worse.26 And even with the new subsidy policies, years of
privatization, combined with changing climate patterns and new competi-
tors for coffee, tea, and tobacco, weakened the country’s economy and led
to far greater fl uctuations in unemployment than that in the 1960s, 1970s,
or 1980s. As the economy stalled and hunger grew, further worsening the
HIV/AIDS situation in the country, many Malawians began to wonder
whether democracy, which had been promoted as part of the new economic
model, was not also to blame.
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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: It’s the Economy, Stupid: The Consensus Fails

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Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Democracy in Retreat
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B
y the early 2000s, outside donors and many fourth wave nations like
Malawi had little to show for the linking of rapid economic and po-
liti cal liberalization. The tough reforms of democracy and the tough
reforms of market capitalism supposedly went hand in hand. Together, they
would bring freedom of speech and free elections but also growth, which
would trickle down to working class men and women. But in reality, the
correlation, or lack thereof, between democracy and economic growth has
been the subject of many studies, which have yielded inconclusive results.
Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has examined a wide range of case studies
and concluded that democracies historically neither outperform nor under-
perform dictatorships in promoting economic growth.1
Rodrik’s fi nding is supported by most other macroscopic literature stud-
ies, though other researchers, like the American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin
Hassett, have found short- term advantages for dictatorships.2 Another re-
cent comprehensive study analyzed countries that shifted from dictator-
ship to democracy, and vice versa. It found that the average rate of GDP
growth for the dictatorships was 4.37 percent a year and the average rate for
the democracies was 4.49 percent— virtually no difference.3
Authoritarian regimes can offer some advantages for growth if the
leadership, such as Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore or Augusto Pinochet in
Chile, pursues consistent and wise economic policies: dictatorships tend to
suffer less po liti cal instability, allowing authoritarian regimes to pursue
more farsighted economic policies without being captured by the po liti cal
pro cess. These policies can also impose more hardship on more people,
since they do not have to survive the test of elections— think of China’s
It’s the Economy, Stupid:
The Consensus Fails
4
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66 It’s the Economy, Stupid
willingness to implement infrastructure projects that force people to move,
a far harder feat in demo cratic India, where every new infrastructure project
requires signifi cant po liti cal negotiation.
Democracies, meanwhile, offer other advantages: They can create more
rule- based economies and can offer investors and local businesspeople more
outlets to pursue grievances, including outlets that are less opaque and easier
for foreign companies to navigate. Of course, some authoritarian states,
such as Pinochet’s Chile, or even today’s China, have welcomed foreign
investment and have created a relatively hospitable environment for it, but
overall democracies tend to provide the rules- based environment that facili-
tates investment. Several studies also have suggested that democracy tends
to reduce population growth, since demo cratic governments invest more in
public education, thereby boosting women’s earning potential by giving
them access to a greater range of jobs, expanding the country’s potential
workforce, and also likely helping bring down high fertility rates since
women’s growing education tends to be linked with declines in population
growth. Still, as Rodrik found, it can be diffi cult to trace economic success
to any clear policies adopted by a government.4
Some states in the third and fourth waves of demo cratization did pros-
per after opening up their po liti cal systems, but many of these countries—
including Taiwan, South Korea, and Chile— already had been succeeding
under authoritarian rule, and so continued economic growth did not help
much in selling the public on the merits of democracy. In other new de-
mocracies, the 1990s did become an era of decent growth— overall, Latin
America grew by just over 3 percent annually during the de cade, and Af-
rica grew by 2.2 percent— but these modest gains were not enough to make
up for the enormous losses suffered in the 1980s, especially with high fertil-
ity rates resulting in more and more young people entering the job market.
And, in Africa and parts of Asia, increased government and private sector
revenues quickly were consumed by the costs of a spiraling HIV/AIDS
crisis, which had not abated well into the 2000s.5
By the end of the 1990s, fi nancial crises in Rus sia, Argentina, and East
Asia reversed many economic gains made earlier in the de cade by young
democracies; overall, the Washington Consensus failed to deliver on many
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It’s the Economy, Stupid 67
of its promises of higher growth, or it produced growth that still did not
make signifi cant inroads into unemployment in the developing world. In
fact, growth overall was lower in the developing world in the late 1990s and
early 2000s than it had been in the 1950s and 1960s, the postcolonial era of
import substitution and protectionism. Rus sia’s GDP shrank in 1998, as did
that of the Philippines and Malaysia; Argentina’s GDP shrank in 1999 and
2000; Thailand, where the Asian fi nancial crisis began with attacks on the
Thai currency in May 1997, suffered huge economic reversals as well. Latin
America and sub- Saharan Africa began to grow somewhat more strongly
in the late 2000s, but again much of this growth wound up being absorbed
by rising costs for pandemic disease— particularly HIV, which hit working
class men and women hard— spiraling prices for essential items, and declin-
ing terms of trade for many primary commodities produced in the poorer
fourth wave nations, which faced many nontariff barriers from Eu rope, the
United States, and other wealthy nations. Sub- Saharan nations like Zambia,
Mozambique, Malawi, and many others saw the economic gains they had
made further diminished.
When another global economic crisis hit in the late 2000s, many of
these fourth wave nations would be battered again, while the privatizations
of the 1990s and early 2000s had left states with fewer resources to absorb
this latest economic downturn through large- scale social welfare programs
or job creation schemes. In Central and Eastern Eu rope, growth averaged a
solid 4– 5 percent between 2003 and 2007, these nations were then decimated
by the global economic crisis. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the height of the
crisis in Latvia, the country’s economy shrunk by over 10 percent year- on-
year, and unemployment rose to over 20 percent. In neighboring Estonia,
the economy contracted by 9 percent year- on- year in the fourth quarter of
2009 alone. Asia’s developing nations, many of which were highly dependent
on exports to the West, suffered too: Singapore’s economy contracted by
nearly 20 percent in the fi rst quarter of 2009, in the wake of the global
economic crisis, with Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and the
Philippines hit hard as well.
Meanwhile, in many of these fourth wave countries, radical economic
restructuring in systems that still had not developed strong rules of law often
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68 It’s the Economy, Stupid
resulted in old regime insiders morphing into fl ashy new oligarchs con-
trolling former state companies. This was particularly true among former
Soviet states, where the rapid economic liberalization frequently led to the
stripping of state assets and other dubious types of privatization. In Rus sia,
polls showed that the public had an intensely negative view of the oligarchs,
the big businessmen who had taken control of state companies in the post-
Soviet period, often gaining the assets at fi re sale prices. In one study, by the
ROMIR polling agency, only 19 percent of Rus sians held positive views of
the oligarchs’ actions in the 1990s, the height of the post- Soviet privatiza-
tion.6 In a more telling, and sad, statement, a Pew Research poll of many of
the former Soviet and Eastern bloc states taken to coincide with the twenti-
eth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall found that, “in many nations,
majorities or pluralities say that most people were better off under commu-
nism.” Other studies by the New Eu rope Barometer survey group found
rising levels of dissatisfaction with government in most former Eastern bloc
states in the two de cades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, often because of
dissatisfaction with their governments’ economic per for mance, a dissatisfac-
tion that would, for many, refl ect poorly on democracy as a po liti cal system.7
Even when the demo cratic era produced decent growth, various factors—
rising in e qual ity in a more globalized world, a decrease in state social welfare
policies in most nations, disease, urbanization, environmental degradation,
migration, and other changes wrought by the pace of modernization— often
made working class men and women’s lives harder, in some ways, than they
had been during earlier years of authoritarian rule. Overall, the United Na-
tions Human Development Program reports, the 2000s witnessed rising
income in e qual ity in nearly every developing nation. As a result, perceptions
that the standard of living was declining— or, at least, that it was not keep-
ing pace in countries that were becoming more unequal— often mattered
more than the actual facts of a par tic u lar nation’s economic growth or
decline. “A crucial paradox— that of growth without prosperity— besets
Africa’s new democracies,” writes Peter Lewis of Johns Hopkins University.
Macroeconomic reforms instituted by governments in Africa, Latin Amer-
ica, and parts of Central Asia, did deliver stronger economic fundamentals
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It’s the Economy, Stupid 69
and higher growth. Yet except in a few rare exceptions like Brazil, which
combined macroeconomic stabilization with an innovative cash transfer
antipoverty program, in most of these developing nations growth seemed
to mean little to the lives of average citizens, and governments also cut social
welfare programs that, in the 1970s and 1980s, had helped prevent hunger
and homelessness.8 In Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania,
Lewis concluded, indicators of public well- being—such as a rising incomes,
decreasing infant mortality, or home buying— lagged in the 1990s behind
strong overall economic per for mance in all of these new democracies.
And though politicians often expected that citizens would “evaluate po liti cal
and economic ‘goods’ separately,” in Lewis’s words, as we have seen this did
not happen— with such high expectations, many citizens of developing
nations judged the two “goods” together, and increasingly concluded that if
democracy could not deliver economic per for mance and public well- being,
its strengths had been greatly oversold.
Expectations seemed to matter enormously in Central and Eastern
Eu rope as well. The Eu ro pe an Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s
(EBRD) survey of the region in 2011 found that the economic crisis batter-
ing Eu rope in the late 2000s and early 2010s led to a decrease in support for
democracy among much of Central and Eastern Eu rope. Many house holds,
it found, had linked markets and democracy, and blamed the two for the
decrease in their living standards. But the EBRD also found that people
living in countries that had experienced previous serious downturns, and
that seemed to have lowered expectations for the relationship between de-
mocracy and growth, were less dissatisfi ed with the downturn of the late
2000s and early 2010s, and tended to remain stronger supporters of both
democracy and free market systems.9 In other words, if they had not linked
the “goods” of democracy and markets together so explicitly, they were less
likely to condemn democracy when the economy soured.
In Malawi, the 2000s contained several years of solid growth, at least
according to year- end economic fi gures. In 2005, Malawi grew by over 4
percent; two years later, it grew by over 8 percent. These fi gures suggested
that the country actually was becoming one of the stronger economic per-
formers in Africa.
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70 It’s the Economy, Stupid
But few working class Malawians felt they had benefi ted much from
this growth; almost to a person, they complained that their standard of
living had declined, whether or not the national economic growth fi gures
showed such a decline. And few understood that, whether Malawi liked it
or not, its government could not, in a globalizing world, keep the economy
closed and provide the type of social welfare it had delivered in the 1960s or
1970s. Back then, Malawi, willing to defy other black- run newly in de pen-
dent nations, had benefi ted from the largesse of apartheid South Africa, had
a much smaller population, and had enjoyed high world prices for its to-
bacco and coffee. Now, working class men and women saw that economic
liberalization had undercut the prices for their maize, tea, and tobacco, and
po liti cal liberalization had allowed more freedom of movement in the 1990s
and 2000s from farms to urban areas. This movement was resulting in
intensive crowding in Blantyre and other cities, where all land was being torn
up by squatters arriving every day, trucks choked the sky with unfi ltered
diesel gas, and new roads and truck routes linking Malawi to the rest of
Africa contributed to the spread of HIV, which killed brothers, fathers,
mothers— nearly every Malawian personally knew someone who had died
from an AIDS- caused illness. The Malawian government, which had por-
trayed itself as a paternalistic, caring father during Banda’s time, could do
little for most of these suffering people. “The government has no resources
to take care of people, with all the problems that are coming up,” said Peter
Kazembe, a well- known and outspoken Malawian doctor who worked at
times for government agencies. “We are more open [in politics] but that
doesn’t mean we are able to deal with all these new, modern problems. . . .
But people can talk more than in the past [than under the dictatorship] so
maybe it also seems like there are more problems.”
A country with very little economic in e qual ity during the 1960s and
1970s now had become more unequal, and the in e qual ity far more visible
than in the past, when the country had been a primarily rural society, and
foreign consumer goods had been diffi cult to obtain. Imported cars, cell
phones, computers, and other items were coming in from South Africa and
put on display to average Malawians in a way they had not been during the
1960s or 1970s— but few could afford these new luxuries. Outside one com-
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It’s the Economy, Stupid 71
puter and electronics store on a main street in Blantyre, young boys dressed
in rags peered into the windows, where inside a tiny group of wealthy Indi-
ans and Malawians pored over torn- apart keyboards, wireless mice, and
motherboards. Across town, at the upscale Blantyre restaurant Greens, a
favorite watering hole nestled in the hills above the city, obese businessmen
and local offi cials, their bellies hanging over the waists of their too- tight
polyester slacks, ate skewers of lamb and chicken and other grilled meats
dripping with fat, and washed them down with South African wines. Later
in the eve ning, their drivers would shuttle them, in Range Rovers, over to
the South African– owned Protea Ryalls Hotel, where they could sip scotch
at the long bar or lounge on pillows on the terrace outside. Meanwhile, as
birthrates soared and HIV decimated families in the early 2000s, the United
Nations estimated that roughly 65,000 Malawian children were malnour-
ished, more than 10 percent of the country’s children. These hungry chil-
dren gathered outside the Ryalls Hotel or the upscale South African– owned
Shop Rite supermarket on the outskirts of town, where the sons and daugh-
ters of wealthy Malawians stocked up on cell phone cards and low- fat yo-
gurt imported from South Africa, as well as on other items they could now
see advertised on satellite TV stations airing shows from South Africa, fi lms
from Nigeria, and other programming that never would have been available
during the dictatorship. Outside the supermarket, guards wielding trun-
cheons shooed away the children.
Perhaps, Malawians remembered, the era of authoritarian rule had
been po liti cally harsh, but at least they had enjoyed stability and a decent
quality of life— regular meals, land to farm, government handouts for the
very poorest. Of course, part of the past quality of life simply had to do with
a smaller population, and thus more arable land— something that was hardly
related to the type of government running Malawi. Part of this memory was
simply a willful forgetting of the past: as years separated them further
from the era of the dictatorship, many Malawians forgot its most repressive
elements. They remembered instead— somewhat oversympathetically— a
simpler time, in the way that people all over the world often romanticize
the past. “It might have been more repressive, but at least under [former
dictator Hastings] Banda we always had enough to eat, and the country
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72 It’s the Economy, Stupid
was safe,” one Malawian offi cial said, a sentiment echoed by many of his
peers who actually once fought the dictatorship as opposition activists.
Numbers revealed this shift in attitudes toward Banda’s dictatorship,
especially among the poorest Malawians, who believed they had fared the
worst as the country had become more open, and also more unequal. In-
deed, in the 1980s, when Malawi was still ruled by Banda, more than 80
percent of Malawians rejected the idea of authoritarian rule, though they
were still living under it. By 2005, that number had fallen dramatically:
only about half the population rejected the idea of authoritarian rule as the
best solution for the country.
When asked why they had become willing, again, to consider the
possibility of authoritarian rule, many Malawians said, like the government
offi cial, simply, that under Banda the country had enjoyed more stable and
prosperous growth. This was not necessarily true: During Banda’s time,
GDP growth fl uctuated from over 13 percent in the mid- 1960s, in the early
days of in de pen dence, to as little as roughly 1 percent annually in the early
and mid- 1980s. After in de pen dence Banda, like many other postcolonial
leaders, pursued a policy of import substitution designed to make Malawi
self- suffi cient in many industries. Banda’s policy worked, for a time, but in
the 1970s and early 1980s, as it became clear that Malawi could not indefi –
nitely protect its industries, and as the price of oil and other inputs rose,
Malawi’s economy weakened. Still, the smaller population at that time, and
the lack of environmental degradation, meant that even the poorest Mala-
wians usually had some family land to farm, and could raise a few chickens
for eggs, or some fruit trees. In a less globalized world, without donor agen-
cies pushing for privatization, and with signifi cant aid fl owing in from
South Africa, which built the country an entire new capital in the town of
Lilongwe, Banda could afford to cushion any economic downturns with
job creation programs or price supports for farmers’ crops.
What ever the reality, Banda, like many leaders in the developing world
in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, also had not tied growth as closely to his po-
liti cal legitimacy as would later occur with the wave of Malawian demo-
cratic politicians who emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, or with the
donors who funded the country’s bud gets. Like many other postcolonial
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It’s the Economy, Stupid 73
leaders, Banda, unlike his successors, also could rely on his credentials as an
in de pen dence leader to build pop u lar support for himself. He created a kind
of new Malawian nationalism, albeit one closely centered around him and
a fabricated new Malawian national culture, one that might tie together
the country’s language groups, tribes, and regional differences. In this way,
Banda’s efforts echoed those of many other postcolonial leaders, from
Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah to India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, who could use
their history as in de pen dence campaigners, as well as their po liti cal ideolo-
gies, to shore up their government’s legitimacy. Some postin de pen dence
leaders, such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, were able to utilize the legiti-
macy they obtained from fi ghting the colonists to remain in power even as
they ran their nations’ economies into the ground.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Banda’s demo cratic successors could not call
upon their credentials as in de pen dence heroes, and in a far less ideological
era than the 1960s, they could hardly fashion grand po liti cal ideologies de-
signed to remake the country. So, they did make the explicit link between
growth and their po liti cal system, over and over again, and thus rested
much of their legitimacy on the ability to deliver that growth. “Malawians
thought that these types of changes would raise their standard of living, so
it was these higher expectations that couldn’t be lived up to,” said Stephen
Carr, the longtime World Bank economist who lives in Malawi. Even if, in
reality, the demo cratic era had produced decent growth, high expectations
had gone unmet. And so, many working class Malawians wondered whether
po liti cal openness really was best for their country, a question that would
be repeated increasingly among people in other fourth wave nations.
In the early 2010s, Malawi’s leaders seemed to draw on this authoritar-
ian nostalgia. President Mutharika, who had been elected as a reformer,
turned increasingly authoritarian, sometimes justifying his more autocratic
rule by claiming he needed more power to right the economy. When demon-
strators gathered in July 2011 to protest in the streets of the capital, Lilongwe,
and in other cities about the rising cost of staple foods and fuel, Mutharika
had hundreds of them arrested, with many badly beaten and reportedly
shot by security forces. At least eigh teen people were killed in the crack-
down. The government banned broadcasters from showing the protests,
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74 It’s the Economy, Stupid
and after the crackdown Mutharika toured the affected cities and vowed
that any future opponents would feel the “wrath of government.” Although
many Malawians protested this crackdown, particularly in urban areas,
Mutharika seemed to believe— with some reason— that if he could get the
country’s economy under control, while amassing more power for himself,
many people would forgive his abuses. Though ultimately Mutharika died
in the spring of 2012, the autocratic culture he had instilled survived, as his
supporters at fi rst refused to acknowledge his death publicly, apparently
hoping to launch a coup or some other intervention that would prevent the
vice president, not known as a Mutharika loyalist, from succeeding him in
offi ce as president.
Across the developing world, when economies did not take off, the sales
pitch of the Washington Consensus worked in reverse, actually subverting
demo cratic progress. The failure of growth fell hardest on working class
men and women, who often were barely getting by under the old authoritar-
ian regime, and who did not have the skills, education, and capital to take
advantage of international trade and economic liberalization. Often, as in
Malawi, the working classes were employed almost solely in agriculture, and
so were also hurt badly by declining terms of global trade for developing
nations’ textiles, commodities, and other products, as Western nations used
tariffs and subsidies to support their own farmers, and to keep out cheaper
agricultural goods from places like Africa, Vietnam, or Thailand.
These working class men and women began associating economic fail-
ures with democracy, even though economic globalization, changing terms
of international trade, or many other factors also could explain weak growth
in the developing world. To be sure, middle classes and elites also were
unhappy with weak growth, but they could more easily take advantage of
economic liberalization and freer trade, and they tended to reap what ever
economic gains were made in developing nations. Over the past de cade
they would turn against democracy for other reasons.
For working classes, though, the failure of growth, or at least the fail-
ure to live up to the kind of expectations created in Malawi, was critical. In
Latin America, for example, the Latin Barometer surveys showed that, in
the early 2000s, support for democracy across the region closely tracked per
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It’s the Economy, Stupid 75
capita growth; when regionwide growth went up, support for democracy
rose, and when it declined, support for democracy did as well, particularly
among lower- income men and women.10 In Ukraine, one of the most
notable examples of this working class alienation, the country’s economy
shrank by a staggering 15 percent in 2009, the victim of the global eco-
nomic crisis as well as the poor national leadership by Viktor Yushchenko,
the hero of the country’s 2004 and 2005 Orange Revolution. By the end of
his term, in 2010, Yushchenko was, according to polls, the most unpop u lar
leader in the world, in large part because Ukrainians were im mensely dis-
satisfi ed with how poorly he— and Ukraine’s democracy— had done in fos-
tering growth.11 The urban middle classes of Kiev still generally supported
Yushchenko and other Orange Revolution leaders, despite the tepid growth;
they were still faring relatively well eco nom ical ly. But among lower- income
Ukrainians Yushchenko had essentially become a pariah. In 2010, Ukraine
would elect a new president, Viktor Yanukovych, who would roll back many
of the nation’s freedoms. But he seemed, to many Ukrainians, a better bet for
promoting lasting growth, a fi gure modeled on Vladimir Putin, who had
slowly whittled away Rus sians’ po liti cal and social freedoms in the 2000s
while presiding over a period of strong growth. On the campaign trail, Yanu-
kovych promised that he would bring Ukraine stability and sustained growth,
the kind of growth that the previous, more demo cratic government had
failed to provide. He did not exactly hide his po liti cal intentions. Kremlin
aides advised Yanukovych’s campaign. Many Ukrainians understood that,
if Yanukovych were elected, their country would both move closer to Rus-
sia and also probably see its po liti cal freedoms curtailed— a tradeoff that,
by voting Yanukovych into offi ce, many accepted in exchange for what they
believed would be stronger economic growth. Indeed, after Yanukovych
won he was able to negotiate more favorable terms on energy imports from
Rus sia.
In fact, by analyzing a range of surveys from the Barometer series, results
of local polling organizations in developing nations, and the Pew Research
or ga ni za tion’s regular results, Council on Foreign Relations researchers, in-
cluding myself, found that nearly every study of developing nations reported
that, by the end of the 2000s, satisfaction with democracy had dropped, even
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76 It’s the Economy, Stupid
in countries where citizens still preferred democracy to other alternatives;
they also found that in most of these countries the majority of survey re-
spondents, and particularly those from lower- income house holds, thought
that transitions to democracy had brought no improvement to their lives.
In Africa, where foreign donors probably exert the most infl uence, and
the link of growth and po liti cal liberalization was pushed the hardest, sat-
isfaction with democracy also dropped in large part because of perceptions
that democracy had not brought promised material gains. In a broad study
of African nations taken between 2000 and 2006, satisfaction with democ-
racy fell from 58 percent of the population to 45 percent; over roughly the
same period, the percentage of Africans saying the economy in their nation
was fairly good or very good fell to only 28 percent.12 Overall, my analysis of
the 2009 data from the Afrobarometer surveys, the most recent data, re-
veals that satisfaction with democracy is negatively correlated with “present
living conditions.” In these surveys, people who thought their living condi-
tions had become “very bad” were most likely to say that their nation was
not becoming a democracy and that they were unsatisfi ed, while those
people who said that their living conditions had become “very good” were
much more likely than anyone else to say that they were “very satisfi ed” with
democracy.13 As we will see, just as in Ukraine, this dissatisfaction would
provide an opportunity, in many of these developing nations, for a more
authoritarian leader who could promise better, more equal growth, to make
inroads.
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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: The Middle Class Revolts

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Democracy in Retreat
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I
n the late 1990s and early 2000s, the lack of economic growth began
to sour working class men and women on demo cratization. But in
many developing nations the middle classes turned against democracy
too. The Washington Consensus prescriptions had been, in many ways,
predicated on the modernization theory of experts like Huntington and
Lipset; for economic liberalization to be linked with po liti cal liberalization,
an economic opening had to produce a middle class that then would help
push for po liti cal change. Yet over the past de cade, the middle class has, in
many developing nations, subverted those predictions, just as the growth–
political change linkage has, more broadly, subverted demo cratic progress.
Perhaps nowhere has the middle class turned so clearly, and disas-
trously, against the modernization theory’s predictions as in the Philip-
pines. To a traveler arriving from more orderly cities in East Asia, dropping
into Manila feels like descending into some combination of Blade Runner
and a Broadway musical. Rutted roads lead into the city, many lined with
twisted pieces of discarded metal that could be confused with modernist
sculptures. “Jeepneys”— converted jeeps overstuffed with paying passen-
gers and decorated with garish murals of Christ— crowd each other in the
traffi c, which stretches for miles in the polluted and soupy air. The jeepneys
meander past mountainous garbage dumps and hastily erected slums of tin
shacks and tiny wood homes that look like they were made from packing
crates. Occasionally, amid the slums sits a heavily guarded gated commu-
nity where Manila’s elites can live as if they were in suburban Los Angeles
or Houston, ignoring the squalor as they head off to shop at nearby air-
conditioned malls.
The Middle Class Revolts
5
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78 The Middle Class Revolts
With turbocharged economies surrounding it, the Philippines has in
recent years grown at only 3 or 4 percent per year, a rate not high enough to
provide jobs for all the new workers in a country with one of the highest
birthrates in Asia.1 In a country naturally blessed with abundant fi sh and
produce, nearly 15 percent of Filipinos do not have enough to eat. Virtually
every other nation in the region has made strides in eradicating poverty and
hunger, but the Philippines has made none.2
Most Filipinos would not have anticipated this failure back in 1986,
when they thronged the streets of Manila not only to force out the dicta-
tor Ferdinand Marcos but to demand a better life for themselves and their
countrymen— a protest led, as we have seen, by the city’s urban middle
classes. Benigno Aquino, the opposition leader whose assassination by Mar-
cos security forces set off the People Power movement that carried Aquino’s
wife to power, had made “The Filipino is worth dying for” his motto.3 Amid
the jubilation of that era, many Filipinos, and particularly the urban middle
classes who possessed skills and college educations, thought that with Marcos
gone, all aspects of their lives would improve. “The optimism of that time, it’s
hard to imagine now,” remembered Roel Landingin, a Filipino journalist
who has worked for years in Manila. “It wasn’t just getting rid of Marcos, we
really thought those things that seemed unchangeable in the country would
change now.” 4
After Marcos fl ed, and after his successor, Corazon Aquino, survived
numerous coups as president, the country did enjoy solid growth and rela-
tively stable government under her successor, President Fidel Ramos—
growth that generally boosted the incomes of middle class professionals and
small businesspeople. But in the de cade and a half since Ramos left offi ce,
the economy has stagnated badly. Though the Philippines always had been
a stratifi ed society— a legacy of Latin America– Spanish colonialism— in the
post- Ramos era the in e qual ity has become far worse, with a tiny elite gar-
nering an ever- larger share of the wealth, and both the poor and the middle
class falling further and further behind. Homelessness and violent crime
have skyrocketed, turning Manila into one of the most dangerous cities in
Asia— a condition made worse by a corrupt and incompetent police force.5
This crime falls harder on middle class businesspeople, who cannot afford to
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The Middle Class Revolts 79
live in the gated communities of the rich, with their armed guards and high
walls topped with barbed wire. One politician after another has succumbed
to corruption scandals, and an annual study conducted by the Asia Founda-
tion found that fewer than 20 percent of businesses in the country reported
paying their taxes honestly.6 The speaker of the Philippine House of Repre-
sentatives undertook a charity drive for the national trea sury, asking people
to donate to the state bud get like it was a Salvation Army fund drive. The
Philippine ombudsman’s offi ce reports that the country lost $48 billion in
revenue in graft over the past twenty years, and companies needing contracts
roam the halls of Congress there with envelopes full of cash to stuff into con-
gresspeople’s desks. In such a climate, vote rigging becomes the norm: a sur-
vey before the 2007 Philippines elections found that nearly 70 percent of
voters expected vote buying in the election, and more than half anticipated
that the vote counting would involve cheating.7
Though Aquino’s son, Benigno, was elected in 2010 partly on a mandate
to clean up corruption, in offi ce he could do little to halt such entrenched
practices. His government fi led several high- profi le corruption cases, and
he made numerous speeches about addressing graft, but payoffs and hand-
outs remained the norm throughout the po liti cal system. After only one year
in offi ce, Aquino’s popularity ratings had fallen, partly because of his failure
to fi ght corruption. The head of one of the country’s biggest business groups
dedicated to good governance admitted, “[The Aquino] administration has
failed in its fi ght against corruption.”8
For years, leaders of the Philippines’ neighbor Singapore, essentially a
one- party state, have publicly contrasted Manila’s chaos and stagnant growth
with their gleaming, high- tech city, where every roadside shrub seems to have
been manicured by a gardening master, and you can whiz from the airport to
the central business district in minutes. The difference is more than superfi –
cial. Though the two countries had relatively equal standards of living in
1965, today Singapore boasts a GDP per capita more than ten times that of
the Philippines.9 In a speech in the Philippines in 1992, Lee Kuan Yew, mod-
ern Singapore’s founding father, delivered a direct insult to the host country.
“I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development. . . . The
exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions.”
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80 The Middle Class Revolts
Lee did offer a backhanded compliment: “The Philippines is im mensely bet-
ter off compared to Af ghan i stan or Lebanon or Sri Lanka”— three states
decimated by bloody civil wars.10
For years, many middle class Filipinos, proud of their hard- won de-
mocracy and their free— if wild— media, shrugged off Lee Kuan Yew’s
barbs. But as the divide between the two states has turned into a chasm,
and as more and more Filipinos head overseas just to fi nd jobs— more than
10 percent of the population lived abroad in 2009, and their remittances
keep the country’s economy afl oat— they can’t ignore the criticism so eas-
ily.11 In surveys taken by the Asia Barometer project, which primarily inter-
views urban middle class men and women, nearly half of the respondents
in the Philippines now agree with the statement “The nation is run by a
powerful few and ordinary citizens cannot do much about it.” Most Filipi-
nos, the survey showed, distrust virtually every institution of the state and
have little hope that it will improve.12 “Middle- class Filipinos who’ve been
outside the country, who see what’s happening in other nations in Asia,
they come back here, and it’s just disappointment, hopelessness,” says Land-
ingin. “We have too much democracy here,” agreed Jose Romero Jr., a for-
mer Philippine diplomat who, along with other educated Filipinos, had led
the revolt against Marcos.
Some middle class Filipinos even yearn for the return of the dictator,
seemingly having forgotten the thuggery and personality cult of the dicta-
tor’s later years and instead remembering the order and growth of his early
period in offi ce. According to the Asia Barometer study, the Filipino public
had a high degree of “authoritarian nostalgia” for the Marcos era.13 The old
dictator is still around, but he doesn’t get out much: His waxy body is dis-
played in a refrigerated mausoleum, like a Southeast Asian Lenin, in the
family compound in Ilocos Norte, the Marcos’s home province. Still, even
though Ferdinand cannot serve anymore, in 2010 Filipinos elected his son,
Ferdinand Jr., to the Philippines Senate, and his daughter, Imee, as gover-
nor of Ilocos Norte.14 Ferdinand Jr. might well seek a higher offi ce in the
next election, completing the Marcos restoration.15
The Philippines middle class has, in another important way, demon-
strated its growing disillusionment with the lack of growth and the in e qual-
ity, graft, and poor governance of the country’s young democracy. In 1998,
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The Middle Class Revolts 81
after the end of Fidel Ramos’s presidency (Philippine presidents are allowed
only one six- year term), the presidential election was won by Joseph Estrada,
an actor- turned- politician famous for his many roles playing action heroes.
Estrada was beloved by the poor in the Philippines for his rugged charm,
his easy, down- to- earth manner, and his promises of populist policies, but he
was hardly a deep thinker, and in offi ce he soon proved both incompetent
and corrupt. His administration squandered many of the economic and
management reforms made under Ramos, foreign investors fl ed to other
countries, and graft allegations soon swirled around his administration and
around Estrada himself, who was known to be personally friendly with sev-
eral or ga nized crime leaders. By 2001, three years into his presidency, the
Philippine defi cit had nearly doubled since 1998, and Estrada stood accused
of taking payoffs from illegal gambling syndicates while serving as president.
(After leaving offi ce, he would later be convicted of plunder and sentenced
to a maximum of forty years in jail, though he was ultimately pardoned after
serving six years in detention because of his age and infi rmities.)
Urban middle class Filipinos, many of whom had not voted for Estrada,
instead supporting other candidates, could have stuck to demo cratic means
to try to remove the president for his many alleged crimes. Indeed, the Phil-
ippines legislature did begin impeachment proceedings against Estrada.
But middle class Filipinos had little patience for them. They had watched,
during Estrada’s term, as the country’s democracy produced an incompetent
and corrupt president. They had seen how Estrada could maintain support
from the poor masses who constitute the majority of voters, and they wor-
ried he might whittle away both the rule of law and the economic, social,
and po liti cal privileges long enjoyed by the middle class. True to his macho
fi lm image, Estrada had pursued increasingly tough policies, toward both
dissent in urban areas and separatist movements in the country’s Muslim
southern provinces, launching a massive offensive against one of the Muslim
rebel groups, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, that ultimately resulted in
a bloody stalemate.
So, in late 2000 and early 2001, middle class Filipinos took to the streets
of Manila, launching large scale street protests designed to push Estrada
out. In some ways, these protests mimicked the 1986 People Power move-
ment that ultimately overthrew the Marcos regime. Many Filipinos took to
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82 The Middle Class Revolts
calling the 2001 protests “People Power Two,” except that now the demon-
strators were trying to remove an elected president, by resorting to the
street, a practice that ultimately would only weaken the country’s demo-
cratic institutions like the legislature and the judiciary, which had been
designed to address just such serious breaches by the president.
As protests swelled in the streets of Manila, hundreds of thousands of
people, mainly middle class, university- educated Filipinos, joined in. Many
demonstrators, who once had battled Marcos’s armed forces for years, and
who had stood up for Corazon Aquino in the face of coups, now called for
the military to resolve the situation. And indeed, behind the scenes the
armed forces made clear to Estrada that they were withdrawing their sup-
port for him, implicitly threatening that, if he did not leave, the army
would make a move. Estrada’s supporters, later learning of the army’s deci-
sion, called it a kind of silent coup, but at the time the president realized
that he could not hang on to power. He agreed to vacate the presidency. His
vice president, Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo, a U.S.- trained economist and tech-
nocrat preferred (at the time) by the middle classes, quickly was sworn into
offi ce, before Estrada’s large base of poor supporters around the country
could mobilize in response.
Though the anti- Estrada protests did force the president to fl ee, spark-
ing a short period of jubilation in Manila, they hardly quieted the Filipino
middle class’s anger over incompetent and corrupt government, or its fear
of losing its rights and privileges to a populist president. Three years later,
middle class men and women camped in the streets of Manila once more,
trying again to use protests— rather than demo cratic institutions like the
ballot box or legislative maneuvering or impeachment— to force the presi-
dent to leave offi ce. Though Macapagal- Arroyo once had seemed a compe-
tent technocrat, she too had earned the ire of the urban middle class after
she allegedly had overseen highly corrupt national elections and increas-
ingly had cracked down on any opposition, proposing tougher legislation
akin to martial law and arresting many civil society activists. After Iraq the
Philippines became, under Arroyo, the second most dangerous place in the
world for journalists; in some years more than thirty were killed, in murky
circumstances in which the murders seemed to be linked to the journalists’
critical reporting.16
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The Middle Class Revolts 83
Unlike Estrada, the savvier and smarter Macapagal- Arroyo survived,
partly through maintaining the support of the army, but she was not yet safe.
Filipino middle classes returned to the streets again and again in the follow-
ing years in attempts to make her resign or even possibly provoke a coup.
Even Corazon Aquino herself, the old symbol of Filipino democracy, joined
the protesters trying to oust Macapagal- Arroyo, marching in the streets to
push out the president.
In some areas of the city these protesters became a kind of permanent
encampment, though the president would manage to serve out her term.
“The people in Manila are just giving up on democracy, that’s why they
take to the streets to try to force out an elected leader,” said Landingin, the
longtime Filipino journalist who had covered People Power One as well. “It
seems like a demo cratic protest, but it’s actually hurting.”17 And as we will
see, in many other developing nations, middle class men and women are
turning against democracy in similar ways, striking perhaps the biggest
blow to democracy’s survival.
In the Philippines, it took fi fteen years for the urban middle class to move
from leading the country’s battle for democracy to leading the battle against
democracy. In other developing nations, across Asia, Latin America, and
Africa, the shift has taken place even faster, as Huntington’s theory has
been turned on its head. Now it appears that once that po liti cal transition
began, a sizable middle class actually became a primary impediment to
demo cratic consolidation.18
If the middle class can no longer be taken for granted as a force for
demo cratic change, it will mark an enormous shift that will challenge the
accepted wisdom about demo cratization. This new understanding of the
middle class calls into question predictions that powerful authoritarian states
like China will eventually demo cratize, and forces policy makers and democ-
racy activists to question who their real allies are.
The middle class in emerging markets is still growing rapidly. The
World Bank estimates that, between 1990 and 2005, the middle class tripled
in size in developing countries in Asia, and nearly doubled in Africa. Today,
according to an estimate by Goldman Sachs, roughly seventy million people
worldwide begin to earn enough to join the middle class (defi ned as making
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84 The Middle Class Revolts
between $6,000 and $30,000 annually) in emerging markets each year. By
2030, Goldman estimates, the global middle class will have added another
two billion people, with particularly strong growth in Brazil and other large
emerging democracies. While $6,000 a year may be a poverty- level income
in a wealthy democracy like the United States or Japan, in developing
nations like Thailand it puts a family in the middle class. And unlike, say,
the United States, where more than 50 percent of adults classify themselves
as middle class, the middle class in most developing nations remains a
minority— usually no more than 30 percent of the population.19 Yet in these
nations the middle class does not mean the wealthiest elites, either— the top
1 or 2 percent of the population that actually controls the largest companies
and enjoys lifestyles that would be considered rich by any standard. Instead,
these middle classes normally comprise professionals, small businesspeople,
and other educated men and women.
The fact that the middle class does not actually constitute a majority
of the population in these nations matters greatly, since it means demo-
cratization often empowers the poor more than it empowers the middle
class. At the same time, though, the middle class is not so small that demo-
cratization threatens to foster intense hatred against it, in the way that ana-
lysts like Yale’s Amy Chua believe po liti cal change can boomerang against
wealthy ethnic minorities.20 Chua argues that entrepreneurial but demo-
graphically tiny minorities— the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, or the
Lebanese in West Africa— face physical danger, and even massacres, in
countries that demo cratize rapidly. There are examples of this trend, such
as the killings of Lebanese in West Africa or of Chinese in Indonesia after
the fall of longtime dictator Suharto— but these mass killings have tar-
geted small groups of elite minorities, and not the broader middle classes.
Still, in many emerging democracies, the middle classes have valued growth
over freedom and stability over change, giving little reason to believe these
middle class men and women have any real commitment to democracy.21
In theory, educated middle class people in most developing nations possess
strong commitments to democracy: recent polling by the Pew Research
Center found theoretical support for democracy especially strong among
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The Middle Class Revolts 85
the global middle class.22 But that theoretical commitment to democracy has
meant little in practice.23 In many developing nations, middle class reform-
ers have been badly let down by the fi rst generations of demo cratic leaders.
Some, like Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine, have demonstrated woefully
poor economic management, alienating not only working classes but also
middle class businesspeople who need economic stability to thrive. But be-
sides managing the economy poorly, the fi rst generation of elected leaders
has not demonstrated much real commitment to democracy— a lack of
commitment that has resonated among urban middle classes. Urban mid-
dle class men and women who had spent years fi ghting an authoritarian
regime simply assumed, perhaps naively, that when opposition leaders fi –
nally gained power, they would govern more inclusively than the deposed
autocrats. The Demo cratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Taiwan, made up of
many former po liti cal prisoners from during the Nationalist dictatorship of
Chiang Kai- shek and his son Chiang Ching- kuo, had fought for two de-
cades to challenge the power of the ruling Kuomintang. The party also had
stood up for Taiwan’s separation from, and even formal in de pen dence from,
the People’s Republic of China, in part because it believed that only real
separation could guarantee Taiwan’s demo cratic freedoms. Many DPP poli-
ticians had deep ties to labor unions, environmental groups, and other pro-
gressive causes, and in opposition had suffered badly for their beliefs. DPP
leader Chen Shui- bian himself had served time in prison for his beliefs, and
in 1985 his wife became paralyzed after being hit by a truck in what Chen
and his supporters believed was an attack by progovernment forces.
As Chen rose up the po liti cal ladder in an increasingly open and demo-
cratic Taiwan, from local councillor to mayor of Taipei to, eventually, presi-
dent, he brought with him a bright young circle of advisers who had also
suffered as opposition activists. These DPP politicians, many educated in
America’s Ivy League schools, promised, if they were elected, to usher in
Taiwan’s most open era. They vowed to work for equal rights in a country
with a highly patriarchal traditional culture, to reduce in e qual ity after Tai-
wan’s long economic boom, and to guarantee women a certain number of
cabinet seats, putting them at the policy- making table in Taiwan for the
fi rst time. “The DPP is for progress— on women’s issues, on labor rights— it
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86 The Middle Class Revolts
can be slow, but it’s far better than it was a de cade ago,” said Hsiao Bi- khim,
one of the DPP’s leading minds and, in the early 2000s, one of the youn gest
members of Taiwan’s legislature.
When the DPP fi nally won the 2000 election, opposition politicians,
activists, labor union leaders, and journalists rejoiced. Taiwan’s po liti cal
system seemed to have morphed into a stable two- party democracy, con-
tested between the Kuomintang, no longer a dictatorial regime but a nor-
mal po liti cal party, and the DPP, which now held the presidency for the
fi rst time. Many also believed that having come from po liti cal exile, and
suffering themselves at the hands of an oppressive government, the DPP
would strengthen Taiwan’s young democracy. Thousands gathered after
the election results were in to hear Chen speak. In the country’s fi rst legisla-
tive elections after Chen was elected president, a record number of women
won seats. The party quickly passed a series of progressive environmental
and labor laws.
Several weeks after Chen’s victory he was sworn in as president on May
20, 2000. During his inaugural speech he shouted “Long live freedom and
democracy!” as if he were still leading a street rally rather than giving a
formal address. During the inauguration, DPP activists danced at parties
in strongholds in Taipei and the south, its base in the country, while foreign
observers, from the New York Times editorial board to American diplomats
stationed in the country, praised Taiwan’s transition as a model of democ-
racy. When Chen traveled to America in spring 2001, he was greeted in
New York City and Houston by an outpouring of support from Bush
administration offi cials, and he held meetings with se nior American
congressmen— even though nearly every previous Taiwanese leader since
the U.S. had cut diplomatic ties with the island in 1979 had been treated like
pariahs even if they stopped in the United States only to refuel their plane.
In some cases— though not, unfortunately, in Taiwan— longtime opposi-
tion leaders who fi nally gained the presidency or the prime ministership
did remember past struggles and made real attempts to foster compromise
and tolerance, even toward their old enemies. Nelson Mandela famously
reached out to South Africa’s white minority as president, not only publicly
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The Middle Class Revolts 87
supporting their beloved rugby team but also retaining se nior offi cials who
could reassure white businesspeople and investors. More often, however, the
fi rst generation of elected leaders only fueled middle class rage. From Ven-
ezuela to Bolivia to Kenya to Thailand to Taiwan, these leaders too often
have turned into elected autocrats, dominating young democracies whose
institutions are not strong enough to restrain a powerful leader uninter-
ested in compromise, negotiation, and tolerance of opposition. To this fi rst
generation, many of whom came of age po liti cally under authoritarian re-
gimes, votes are referendums on their rule; having triumphed, they can
then use all the powers of the state to crush opposition and favor their per-
sonal, po liti cal, and ethnic allies.
In other words, these elected autocrats, though fulfi lling one function
of democracy— winning the most votes— do not uphold constitutional
liberalism, or ensure that the rule of law is maintained and that individual
liberties and minority rights are protected. They follow the form of democ-
racy but are weakening its practice.
It is not hard to see why this fi rst generation of elected leaders so often
regressed in this way. Holding an opposition movement together in the face
of a repressive regime requires a high degree of cohesion, even autocracy,
within that movement; serving in opposition for so long also can make a
leader intensely fearful. In South Africa during apartheid rule, the African
National Congress viciously attacked, and sometimes even killed, members
of its own movement whom it perceived as too conciliatory toward the gov-
ernment, or as simply working against the ANC’s aims. (Nelson Mandela
was in jail on Robben Island during much of this internal bloodletting,
but his wife, Winnie, was accused of promoting the beating and murder of
ANC members accused of being government informers.)24 Chen Shui- bian,
the Taiwanese DPP leader, exhibited many of the same traits while the
DPP was in opposition— tight control of his party and paranoia regarding
outsiders. These were survival skills in opposition during the Kuomintang
dictatorship, when Chen could never trust whether anyone beyond his inti-
mate circle had been coopted by government agents, but later this course
would doom his administration once he gained the presidency and the
country had transitioned to democracy.
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88 The Middle Class Revolts
Like Chen, many former opposition leaders can fi nd it especially diffi –
cult to jettison these survival traits when the transition to democracy is ex-
tremely rapid, as happened in many African nations in the 1990s. These
circumstances leave little opportunity for former opponents to forgive the
crimes and mistakes of the past. Instead, having fi nally attained power, lead-
ers who’d seen authoritarian rulers enrich their own tribes, ethnic groups,
families, and supporters would then often use their new power simply to
reward their own— who can justly claim that they were shortchanged under
the previous regime. By comparison, in a more gradual transition, such as in
Spain after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, conservative and liberal
po liti cal opponents had more time to build trust and jointly agree on the
norms and rules that would govern Spanish democracy.
Taking offi ce in 2000, Taiwan’s DPP movement soon dashed hopes
that it would usher in an era of greater democracy and freedom on the
island. True to its election promises, the DPP did take a harder line against
China, defending Taiwan’s right to govern itself, and to protect its free-
doms. (China initially responded harshly but eventually came to a kind of
frosty détente with the DPP leaders.) But on the island itself, Chen Shui-
bian, and a circle of party leaders around him who had developed a siege
mentality in exile, brought their almost authoritarian style to governing in
Taipei. Two years into Chen’s term as president, party activists who op-
posed anything Chen did soon found themselves ostracized, cut off from
circles of power. Some DPP insiders began to murmur that Chen and his
wife were increasingly using the power of his offi ce, which is one of the
strongest presidencies in the world, to direct favors, jobs, and cash to family
members and friends.25
Later, Chen’s wife would admit to laundering over $2 million from a
government contractor. Chen himself would go to jail on corruption charges,
after allegations that he had personally stolen millions in campaign money
and other government funds. And as we will see later on, Chen and his
wife’s corruption were hardly unusual— in Taiwan and in new democra-
cies, graft seems actually to worsen as the po liti cal system opens up, at least
at fi rst, further alienating average men and women, and besmirching the
concept of demo cratic reform.26
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The Middle Class Revolts 89
In the early 2000s, stories of Chen’s corruption were only whispers;
DPP supporters were far more shocked to witness his insular, domineering
style. Many believed that, once in offi ce, Chen would naturally give up some
of the secrecy and paranoia that had served him during his time in opposi-
tion, but they were wrong. Chen angrily fi red aides who refused to carry out
his wishes, and he brought family members into his inner po liti cal circle—
at least eleven family members would face corruption charges similar to
those made against the president, and his son would face charges of insider
trading. Several se nior ministers, including the foreign minister, would
resign after charging that Chen’s high- handed, self- dealing style had seri-
ously impaired Taiwan’s ability to hold on to its few remaining formal
allies, and had allowed Taiwan’s government to be taken advantage of by
unscrupulous middlemen with ties to Chen. “People feel humiliated by the
government’s incompetence,” George Tsai, a po liti cal analyst at Chinese
Culture University in Taipei, told the New York Times, referring to a scandal
in which one of the middlemen apparently had taken $30 million in gov-
ernment money. “It’s a joke to the outside world— how could the govern-
ment be cheated like this?”27 By the mid- 2000s, the once- supportive Bush
administration, furious with Chen’s incompetence and arrogance, simply
refused to let him stay overnight in the United States.28
In other cases, the fi rst leaders of young democracies come not from long-
time opposition movements but from within the former regime, where they
also received little education in demo cratic norms. Nearly every former So-
viet republic, for example, transitioned to a government run by former
Soviet bureaucrats; few of these leaders, save for a handful from the Baltics
and Georgia who’d lived for years in the West, had experience with democ-
racy. For them, politics had always been a zero- sum endeavor. Losers within
the Soviet hierarchy lost everything— their power, their prestige, sometimes
their lives. Had the transitions been more gradual, this lack of demo cratic
experience might have mattered less; newer, younger leaders with fewer ties
to the Soviet era might have emerged, and even old Soviet bureaucrats might
have learned that a defeat in the new po liti cal system did not send one to the
gulags. But in such a rapid transition, the former Soviet bureaucrats simply
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90 The Middle Class Revolts
brought with them the po liti cal mindsets and strategies that had served
them well in the Soviet Union.
Throughout the former Soviet Union, nearly everywhere except the
Baltics, the fi rst generation of elected leaders has revealed itself to be auto-
crats at heart. Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was one of the leaders of Kyrgyz-
stan’s 2005 Tulip Revolution against the autocratic regime of President
Askar Akayev, proved himself in offi ce to be nearly as authoritarian as his
pre de ces sor, and his tough policies ultimately sparked another bloody revo-
lution in 2010. In Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili was also a leader of a color
revolution. But as president in 2007, faced with demonstrations against him,
Saakashvili unleashed overwhelming force against the protesters and later
declared a state of emergency, allowing him to close down media outlets,
detain opposition journalists, and silence much of the protest.29 Today he ap-
pears likely, after ending his term- limited presidency in 2012, to try to run
for the prime ministership, and make parliament the center of his power,
much as Vladimir Putin shifted from president to prime minister but re-
mained the most important actor in Rus sian politics. And now, in the Middle
East, a similar pattern is emerging, with many leaders of transitional gov-
ernments and, possibly, future parliaments, coming from within systems
that for de cades allowed no dissent, and where winner- take- all internal poli-
tics were the norm.
Beyond the shock and anger that elected politicians are undermining
reforms and ignoring the rule of law, many members of the middle class
have begun to grasp democracy’s downside: If the franchise is extended to
everyone, and if the poor, who make up the majority of the population in
most developing nations, band together behind one candidate, they could
elect someone determined to reduce the economic, po liti cal, and social privi-
leges enjoyed by the middle class.
Hugo Chavez, the charismatic Venezuelan military offi cer, certainly
grasped the notion that, with the support of the poor, a politician could gain
im mense power in a developing nation. Born to a working class family him-
self, Chavez seems from an early age to have developed a deep distaste for
Venezuela’s traditional capitalists, the large landowning families and busi-
nessmen of Caracas. Chavez went into the army partly, it seems, as a means
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The Middle Class Revolts 91
of rising up into politics. As a young soldier, he traveled through Caracas
and witnessed the severe poverty of the city’s slums— the country was, at
that time, one of the most unequal in the world. It made a profound impact
on Chavez. Early in his career, he founded a group called the Revolutionary
Bolivarian Movement- 200, which aimed to topple the country’s traditional
politics, which were nominally demo cratic but also dominated by powerful
business interests and traditionally rich families.
In 1992, as Venezuela’s ruling party implemented painful neoliberal
reforms pushed by donors, including cuts in social welfare spending, Chavez
tried to seize power in a coup. His putsch failed and he was sentenced to jail,
but he had gained nationwide fame as a man willing to stand up to neoliberal
reforms. Following his jail term, Chavez launched his own po liti cal party,
and in 1998, riding massive support from the poor, who had fared poorly as
Venezuela had pursued the Washington Consensus reforms, he was elected
president.
Though Venezuela, like many Latin countries, had long been domi-
nated by politicians from a few powerful families, in 1998 the country did
boast strong demo cratic institutions and culture, including an in de pen dent
judiciary, a vibrant print and broadcast media, and a healthy tradition of
po liti cal debate.30
Chavez would change that. He soon set about advocating for the inter-
ests of the poor and the lower middle classes against the interests of the ur-
ban middle classes and the elite, while also amassing more and more power
to himself and a close circle of allies. Chavez nationalized many key indus-
tries, with private businesspeople often getting what they perceived as unfair
compensation for their assets. He launched a program called “Plan Bolivar,”
in which the state would help upgrade the physical infrastructure of poor
areas, while also providing highly subsidized health care and food, and
cheap credit to the poor to start up community projects around the country.
He launched communal councils, an experiment in direct democracy that,
in many poor neighborhoods of the country, gave the poor a greater voice
in policy making, though these council also undermined legislators in
parliament.31 While announcing these policies, he clearly positioned them
as tools for the poor and as attacks on the middle and upper classes, often
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92 The Middle Class Revolts
during rambling addresses on his pop u lar weekly radio show, Alo Presidente
(Hello, President). Using his powerful, mercurial speaking style to its fullest
extent, on his show Chavez repeatedly fulminated against his favorite
targets— local businesspeople, whom he claimed were trying to take over
the country, as well as the United States and other Western powers.
The longer Chavez remained in offi ce, the more populist his economic
policies became. In 1998 he still retained some more moderate economic
advisers, and he traveled to the United States and other countries to adver-
tise that Venezuela was still open for investment, particularly in the oil and
gas sector. But by the mid- 2000s Chavez had jettisoned most of the advisers
who had links to middle class urban businesspeople, and he had thrown out
many foreign investors, particularly in the oil sector. Government spending
continued to increase, boosting Venezuela’s debt, and Chavez handed con-
trol of many important companies to a small circle of close friends, making
them rich, even as his government’s laws, price controls, and economic mis-
management made it tougher and tougher for average small businesspeople
to earn a living.
Chavez’s policies had a mixed effect. At fi rst, they did help slash pov-
erty signifi cantly, which only further bonded the poor to him, and they also
did initially bring more of the poor into the po liti cal pro cess, clearly reduc-
ing the po liti cal power of the middle and upper classes. But they also hurt
the overall macroeconomic environment. Foreign investors bailed out of the
country, and the national oil company could not meet its production quotas
and saw its aging infrastructure deteriorate. Whenever the price of oil, the
major export, dropped, Venezuela had trouble providing even basic ser vices
to its people. By 2011, even as the price of oil had recovered and its Latin
neighbors, including Brazil and Colombia, were growing strongly, Venezu-
ela was limping, posting some of the worst growth rates in South America
and relying on loans from China to survive. Electricity blackouts hindered
business in the cities, infl ation soared, and in many parts of the country
staple goods became harder and harder to fi nd. As the economy worsened,
violent crime rose, and by 2011 Caracas had the highest murder rate per
capita of any city in the world— a staggering 233 per 100,000 inhabitants—
higher than the killings per capita in war zones like Kabul and Baghdad.
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The Middle Class Revolts 93
Many human rights organizations believed that the offi cial fi gures actually
were understated.32
Still, Venezuela’s poor repaid Chavez with their loyalty, even as he
slowly strangled the country’s relatively strong demo cratic institutions. When
Chavez toured slums in Caracas and other cities, tens of thousands turned
out to greet him like he was a god. He won election after election— united
and engaged in politics, the poor by far constitute the majority of Venezuelan
voters. Chavez kept offering job creation programs and other populist mea-
sures to keep them happy, along with new nationalizations, price controls,
and other mea sures hated by many businesspeople and other professionals.
Toward the middle classes and upper classes, Chavez practiced a harsher
style of politics. He used his domination of broadcasting licenses to replace
private tele vi sion stations, which tended to favor the urban middle class
opposition candidates, with state TV. Eventually he forced the most critical
private channel off the air.33 He introduced legislation making it a crime
for critics to offer “false” information that “harms the interests of the state”;
he locked up judges who issued rulings he did not like and packed the
courts with his supporters. Chavez and his backers in the National Assem-
bly passed laws that essentially allow Chavez to rule the country by decree,
making the Assembly meaningless.34 By the end of the 2000s, the inter-
national monitoring or ga ni za tion Freedom House ranked Venezuela, one of
the oldest democracies in Latin America, as only “partly free.” In 2010, the
Or ga ni za tion of American States (OAS), a regional grouping that included
several Latin states with left- leaning governments favorably inclined to-
ward Chavez, issued a report condemning Venezuela for widespread abuses
of media freedom, human rights, freedom of association, and other free-
doms. “The state’s punitive power is being used to intimidate or punish
people on account of their po liti cal opinions,” declared the OAS’s human
rights watchdog.35
Chavez had not totally destroyed the country’s freedoms. In the early
2000s, some newspapers and tele vi sion stations remained in private hands,
critical of the president’s policies, and if opposition politicians had been able to
unite around one platform and one anti- Chavez fi gure, they might have been
able to dislodge Chavez. But instead, many middle class Caracas residents,
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94 The Middle Class Revolts
and middle class politicians, took the easy way out. They launched street
demonstrations, general strikes, and marches on the presidential palace
starting in 2001 and 2002. Many protesters openly called for the military
to intervene and push Chavez, authoritarian but also elected, out of offi ce.
During the protests, and the run- up to the military intervention, at least
eigh teen people were killed.
In April 2002, the armed forces responded, launching a coup and threat-
ening to bomb the presidential palace if Chavez did not step down. When
he did, they took Chavez hostage on a Ca rib be an island. While Chavez was
jailed, the coup makers installed a prominent businessman as interim pres-
ident. The George W. Bush administration seemed to tacitly condone the
coup, with press spokesperson Ari Fleischer essentially blaming Chavez for
the situation; later the Central Intelligence Agency was discovered to have
known that the military was planning a coup against Chavez but did not
provide a serious warning about the plot.36
Rallying his support among the poor, who massed in the streets of the
capital, and within lower ranks of the armed forces, Chavez would prevail.
Unable to win much support outside the capital, the coup government col-
lapsed. With the president’s backers thronging the streets, he emerged from
incarceration some forty- eight hours later at the presidential palace.
From that point on, the Venezuelan leader would only sharpen his
attacks on the middle class and elites, further dragging down the country’s
democracy. But by backing the coup— and then stepping up the number of
street protests designed to force Chavez out— his middle class opponents
had showed that they cared little for the institutions of democracy, either.
Despite the early euphoria of the Arab uprisings, middle classes in the
Middle East appeared to be just as conservative as their peers in East Asia
and Latin America. Though many of the groups that helped overthrow
Hosni Mubarak’s government fear the continuing power of the military,
some Egyptian middle class men and women actually have welcomed the
army’s continued po liti cal power. Increasingly they view the armed forces as
a check against Islamists and against growing instability, crime, and urban
violence, and wonder whether the country might not be better off under
another authoritarian regime, at least one less corrupt than the Mubarak
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The Middle Class Revolts 95
regime. Though Cairo historically had been a relatively safe city, after the
downfall of Mubarak, and with much of the Egyptian police on strike or
simply at home because they are not getting paid, armed robbery, gang war-
fare, and more petty crime has become common in the city, deterring in-
vestment and scaring many businesspeople.37 Consequently, some liberals
have come to support continued military rule even after security forces killed
Coptic Christians during the October protests, provoking a wave of anger
among Egypt’s Christians. Other liberals and some minorities simply have
fl ed the country during the Arab Spring: the New York Times reported that
the number of Egyptians who successfully obtained passports doubled in
the fi rst fi ve months of 2011, compared to the previous year.38
Indeed, by the autumn of 2011 many in the Egyptian middle classes
seemed to be scared of the prospect of free elections, which, they were
convinced, would make the chaos worse, or lead to a victory by the Muslim
Brotherhood, as Islamists had triumphed in the fi rst postuprising election
in neighboring Tunisia. Some Egyptian middle class men and women even
expressed concern that the country’s military actually was moving too quickly
in turning over power and or ga niz ing elections before secular, liberal parties
could build their strength and seriously compete with the Muslim Brother-
hood and other Islamist parties that had built strong organizations under-
ground during the Mubarak era.39
Given the wariness of the middle class in Egypt and in other Middle
Eastern nations, the Arab uprisings easily could stall before countries even
or ga nize regular elections. “There seems little doubt— as protesters tire and
as the general public tires of them— in what direction the balance will tilt” in
the Arab world, write analysts Robert Malley and Hussein Agha in the New
York Review of Books.40 The militaries in these nations have the or ga ni za-
tion, po liti cal experience, and power to dominate any postdictator era, and
they will be at the forefront of the Arab experiment, they write. Meanwhile,
they note, crowds that once fervently backed the anti- Mubarak, anti- Qadaffi ,
and anti– Ben Ali protesters have become more equivocal, as Islamists, who
have built their parties for de cades, have shown themselves to be the most
capable organizations in the new po liti cal climate as law and order has bro-
ken down in places, and as ethnic and tribal divisions fl ourish. So, to many
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96 The Middle Class Revolts
Arab middle classes, a military- backed counterrevolution, an antidote to the
revolutions of the Arab Spring, does not look like such a bad idea.41
As they did in Venezuela, once the middle classes turn against elected leaders,
convinced they are actually protecting democracy, they seem willing to use
virtually any means to topple presidents and prime ministers. As we saw in
the fi rst chapter, nearly half of the military coups launched in the past twenty
years either enjoyed middle class support or were openly called for by middle
class protesters. This trend shows no sign of waning: as recently as the middle
of 2011, Thai urbanites, furious that Thaksin’s party had won yet another
national election, again were calling on the military to step in and annul the
poll. When this did not happen, the middle class anti- Thaksin groups in
Thai society relentlessly attacked Thaksin’s sister, the prime minister. Even
when massive fl ooding swamped the country in the fall of 2011, submerging
many parts of Bangkok and killing hundreds, the Thai military seemed
unwilling to cooperate with Thaksin’s sister, the new prime minister.42
This promilitary sentiment was repeated in 2011 in places as diverse as
Mexico, Pakistan, and Syria. In the case of Syria, urban middle classes and
religious minorities, like Christians, have continued to back the armed forces
and Bashar al- Assad even as the security forces have unleashed a brutal cam-
paign of violence against peaceful protesters in many parts of the country.
As we have seen, middle classes and elites in many other Middle Eastern
nations also have become more confl icted about whether to continue sup-
porting demo cratic reform, with many putting their trust once again in the
armed forces.43
Many of these elected autocrats, from Putin to Chavez to Thaksin, also
tend to be savvy politicians, retaining sizable popularity with the majority
of their country even as they undermine the rule of law, usually by embark-
ing upon populist policies that help reduce poverty, stirring up nationalism,
or some combination of the two. The endurance and survival of these lead-
ers have made urban middle class men and women only angrier, more des-
perate, and more willing to use extreme tactics, from violent protests to coups,
to remove an elected autocrat.
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The Middle Class Revolts 97
To take one example, in late 2006 and early 2007 Bangladesh’s military
essentially staged a coup, maneuvering into power an unelected “caretaker”
government that then declared a state of emergency and assumed signifi –
cant powers. During the state of emergency, the government arrested Sheikh
Hasina, one of the two powerful women who for years had dominated Ban-
gladeshi electoral politics but who allegedly had been implicated in massive
graft and extortion. But eventually the government just dropped its charges
against the po liti cal leader, who clearly retained enormous popularity among
poor Bangladeshis. In the next free election, following the demise of the
caretaker government, Sheikh Hasina’s party dominated the poll, delight-
ing Bangladesh’s poor but infuriating Dhaka’s urbanites, many of whom
had supported the military intervention.
Even in Taiwan, which, during Chen’s rule, was still considered one of
the strongest democracies in Asia, middle class activists, many of them vet-
erans of the long struggle against the authoritarian Nationalist regime, be-
gan to turn. Increasingly furious at Chen’s incompetence, alleged corruption,
and crushing of protest, thousands of demonstrators, and then hundreds
of thousands, gathered in front of the presidential palace in Taipei in Sep-
tember 2006. They were led by a man named Shih Ming- teh, himself a
longtime democracy activist who once had greatly admired Chen, and
who had been beaten badly in jail during prison stints under Taiwan’s
authoritarian rulers. In the mid- 1990s, Shih actually had served as chair-
man of the DPP, Chen’s po liti cal party. Shih had fought so long against
the dictatorship that ruled Taiwan until the 1990s that he enjoyed enor-
mous moral authority among average Taiwanese. As many reporters noted,
Shih often was locally referred to as the “Nelson Mandela of Taiwan.” 44
Still, there Shih was, in September 2006, at the front of the crowd,
made up primarily of middle class and upper middle class Taipei men and
women. Shih led the crowd in chants and catcalls at the mention of the
president’s name, and in choruses of “Chen Step Down!” before they
marched from the palace through the business district. Later, the protest-
ers fanned out into other parts of the city, holding red sparklers— red be-
ing their color of anger. In Chen strongholds, they started fi ghting with
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98 The Middle Class Revolts
his supporters, and eventually crashed several meetings Chen held with
foreign offi cials.
Although Chen had twice won elections, the demonstrators hoped to
recall him from his post, a strategy of dubious legality— but one that
some protesters had tried earlier, in 2004, holding violent demonstrations in
the capital in a previous effort to get Chen to leave. At that time they had
faced off against armored troop carriers in front of the palace and taunted
the police, daring the offi cers to attack them. The president was not in
residence— he had traveled to his heartland in southern Taiwan to ask his
supporters to pray for him and to vow never to step down— but the demon-
strators did not relent. Some openly hoped for a repeat of the silent coup that
had, in the Philippines, removed Joseph Estrada, though Shih later insisted
that he had no desire to provoke a military intervention. Still, during the
demonstrations in 2004, and ones held earlier, some 300,000 people calling
for Chen’s ouster had skirmished with police, leading to battles in front of the
presidential palace. Some of those demonstrators carried clubs, steel pipes,
bats, and other weapons to the protest, clearly looking to start violence.45
This time, in 2006, the protesters promised to turn out a million people
in front of the palace, in a rally called “Million People Depose A-Bian”
(A-Bian was Chen’s nickname). Ultimately, for all their rallies and attacks
the demonstrators did not force Chen out despite his popularity ratings,
which had fallen below 20 percent. Chen could still call on his support in
working class southern Taiwan, and he was savvy enough to evade, prevent,
or stop any larger demonstrations. He eventually was indicted and convicted
of corruption, in a decision his supporters saw as po liti cally motivated— but
the protests only added to the vitriol and distrust in Taiwanese democracy.46
To be sure, middle classes have not uniformly turned against democracy.
Within many countries still struggling for democracy, middle classes remain
the locus of reform movements. To take just two examples among many, in
Iran, middle class urbanites form the core of the opposition Green protest
against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the authoritarian/clerical
regime, while in Burma middle class men and women, including students
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The Middle Class Revolts 99
from Rangoon and Mandalay, have continued to push for democracy as the
country begins to change.
But when they do turn against democracy, the middle classes’ interven-
tion can prove utterly destructive. By inviting the military back into politics,
the middle class potentially undermines civil/military relations for generations
and sets the stage for the army to undermine civilian leaders repeatedly, a
recurring cycle from Pakistan to Thailand to Venezuela. By legitimizing the
use of street demonstrations to oust elected leaders, the middle class delegiti-
mizes elections and other legitimate demo cratic institutions. This is partic-
ularly dangerous when the middle class uses protest to oust an elected leader
pop u lar with the majority poor of a country, who themselves now have be-
come more po liti cally engaged and convinced that only street demonstra-
tions, rather than demo cratic institutions, can work to fi ght back against the
middle classes. In Thailand or Taiwan, Venezuela or Bolivia, the revolt of
the middle class has left a bitter divide that is unlikely to be healed any-
time soon— the poor, feeling disenfranchised, store up their rage for a
future showdown.
Indeed, while working class men and women in many developing na-
tions already have grown disillusioned with democracy because of the lack
of growth, the middle classes’ willingness to abrogate democracy in order to
protect their privileges only further alienates working classes. “Why do they
have the right to just outlaw our party whenever they want?” said Noppa-
don Pattama, a minister in the populist Thai governments run by Thaksin
Shinawatra, who was forced to fl ee into exile after his party was banned.47
Empowered by populists like Thaksin, Joseph Estrada, or Hugo Chavez,
and no longer willing to simply hand over po liti cal power to middle classes
and elites, as they might have done ten or twenty years ago, the voting poor
in country after country have fought back after their mandates have been
overruled. In Thailand, for example, poor supporters of Thaksin formed
the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, a mass or ga ni za tion
whose members, wearing their trademark red shirts, targeted middle class
and elite institutions with demonstrations and violent protests in 2009 and
2010. They held massive rallies drawing tens of thousands of people, but
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100 The Middle Class Revolts
they also attacked government meetings, pelted the motorcade of then prime
minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, and launched rallies in the center of Bangkok
that deteriorated into brawls with middle class shop keep ers in certain neigh-
borhoods. Ultimately, it seemed, the red shirts had decided that, if Thai-
land’s middle classes could ruin the country’s democracy, so could they.
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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: Graft, Graft, and More Graft

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Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Democracy in Retreat
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F
or many first- time visitors to Jakarta, capital of Indonesia and
the largest city on the intensely crowded island of Java, the metropo-
lis seems to be in constant motion, its incessant activity and brutal
equatorial heat wearing down travelers. Alongside the wide boulevards of
the central fi nancial district, where glass- and- steel skyscrapers jostle for space
with fi ve- star hotels, vendors peddling sticks of satay and clove cigarettes
and copies of the Indonesian tabloids push their carts past mobs of local
offi ce workers dressed in Western suits. Away from the grandiose fi nancial
areas, in the cramped side streets of newer districts that have sprung up to
accommodate migrants from other parts of the sprawling archipelago of
17,000 islands, motorcyclists weave through gridlocked traffi c, their exhaust
stinging the throat and mixing with soupy air already polluted by cars,
buses, and haze from forest fi res burning out of control across other parts of
Indonesia.
Yet compared with the late 1990s, Jakarta today has become so placid it
could resemble Oslo. At that time, the collapse of longtime dictator Suharto
and the Asian fi nancial crisis had battered Indonesia’s economy and simul-
taneously released the cork that had repressed religious, ethnic, class, and
other divides in the staggeringly diverse archipelago. The result was a po-
liti cal and social meltdown. At the time, many frequent visitors to Indone-
sia wondered whether the country was going to disintegrate into a Southeast
Asian version of Pakistan or Nigeria, a giant failing state poisoning its neigh-
bors and, potentially, the international community. The Indonesian econ-
omy shrank by 13 percent in 1998, tens of millions of Indonesians fell below
the poverty line, and rioters ransacked and burned large areas of the capital.
Graft, Graft, and More Graft
6
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102 Graft, Graft, and More Graft
Long lines formed for handouts of staple goods like rice and cooking oil,
and the value of the rupiah, Indonesia’s currency, plummeted by about 75
percent in the end of 1997 and the beginning of 1998.1
Outside Jakarta, the violence could actually be worse. Besides violent
anti- Chinese sentiment, other ethnic and religious fault lines exploded in
the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the Malukus, the famous “Spice Islands”
where Western colonists once had competed for access to valuable nutmeg
and cloves, Christians and Muslims attacked each others’ villages, burning
them to the ground and beheading survivors, whose heads were left on
skewers like a tropical Vlad the Impaler. Outlying regions like Aceh, East
Timor, and West Papua threatened to secede, potentially breaking up the
country.
To people who lived through the late 1990s and early 2000s in Indone-
sia, the turnaround to the situation today seems, on the surface, to be re-
markable. The sprawling country, with the fourth- largest population in the
world, appears to have achieved stability and defused the violence that had
threatened to tear the archipelago asunder. Rather than disintegrating into
Nigeria or Pakistan, Indonesia, to some observers, has become the demo-
cratic success story of the de cade. Indonesia has devolved much of the central
bud get and empowered local offi cials, increasing nationwide participation
in politics. It has fostered a broader and more inclusive civil society, and
has increasingly tolerated public protest, po liti cal opposition, and legisla-
tive horse- trading. Local areas have gained greater control over their natu-
ral resources and their social welfare systems, and have introduced new
forms of local- level elections and other types of voter feedback. Jakarta’s
Indonesian and English- language newspapers now give a daily roundup—
right next to the weather pages— of planned (peaceful) protests that will be
held on the capital’s streets, a sign of how normal and routine such public
participation has become.
Unlike po liti cal leaders in other countries such as Pakistan, who are
reticent to confront militancy for fear of seeming like tools of the United
States, Indonesia’s recent leaders have utilized the bully pulpit to condemn
militants, while also integrating Muslim parties into the mainstream po liti-
cal sphere. “I would like to emphasize that the country must not, and will
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Graft, Graft, and More Graft 103
not, be defeated by terrorism. . . . To the whole of the Indonesian people, let
us collectively unite in the fi ght against the acts of terrorism,” Indonesian
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono declared in one speech.2 Indeed, by
combining this public outreach with effective police work, Indonesia has
shattered Jemaah Islamiah, once the most powerful terror network in South-
east Asia, responsible for the bloody 2002 Bali bombings, which killed over
200 people, as well as for numerous attacks on Western hotels and embassies
in Jakarta. According to the International Crisis Group, the most authorita-
tive analyst of Jemaah Islamiah, the group is now splintered, weakened,
and largely in effec tive.3
Stability, engendered by public participation and devolution, has al-
lowed for investment and stronger growth; except for India and China, In-
donesia has posted some of the highest growth rates in the world in recent
years. Yudhoyono also has presided over truly free and contested elections.
After its violent birth, the in de pen dent country of East Timor did emerge.
Another secessionist confl ict, in Aceh, was resolved following the devastat-
ing tsunami in December 2004; Yudhoyono had the wisdom to try to help
negotiate an end to the decades- long confl ict in Aceh, rather than attempt
to overwhelm insurgents by force. Attacks against Indonesian Chinese have
decreased sharply as calm has been restored. Today, far from sheltering
themselves in heavily guarded enclaves across Jakarta, behind razor wire
and security checks, many ethnic Chinese businesspeople are beginning to
participate openly in politics.
In recognition of Indonesia’s supposed turnaround, the United States,
which all but ignored the country for a de cade after Suharto’s fall in 1998,
is once again courting it. The Obama administration has launched what it
calls “comprehensive partnership” with Indonesia.4 As countries in the Mid-
dle East throw off their own dictators, the White House commissioned an
internal study to examine Indonesia’s transition, and to see whether the
archipelago now could be an example to the Arab world.5 Returning in
November 2010 to the country where he spent four years of his childhood,
President Barack Obama heaped praise on Indonesia, declaring, “Indonesia
has charted its own course through an extraordinary demo cratic transforma-
tion.”6 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, meeting with Indonesian offi cials
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104 Graft, Graft, and More Graft
the following year, urged them to promote democracy in the Middle East
and in Burma, saying that Indonesia “provides an example for a transition
to civilian rule and building strong demo cratic institutions.”7
And yet, even as it supposedly goes from success to success, Indonesia
has developed what could be a fatal fl aw. As in many other young democra-
cies, the opening of politics also has opened the tap for corruption. In this
liberalization of corruption, the breakdown of a centralized system of graft,
common under authoritarian rule, leads to more bureaucrats, offi cials, and
average policemen with their hands out— so many more people for citizens
to pay in order to start a business, get their kids into school, drive on the
highway, mail a letter, or fulfi ll any number of other tasks taken for granted
by citizens of wealthy democracies. Corruption has become so common-
place that, when politicians accused the national anticorruption commission
of being penetrated by corruption and other crimes itself, few Indonesians
were surprised— though it turned out that the accusations were mostly an
attempt to undermine the commission.8 Still, in 2010 one former head of
the anticorruption commission was found guilty of masterminding the mur-
der of a rival.9
In theory, more open politics should reduce corruption, by throwing sun-
light onto the actions of politicians. This may be true in the long run, but
in the short run the opposite often seems to happen. During an era of tight
authoritarian rule, graft often remains relatively centralized and predict-
able, allowing citizens to understand and manage established networks of
corruption. The regime siphons off a certain percentage of money from lo-
cal businesses, but the number of actors involved in the corruption remains
relatively small. (To be sure, there are exceptions, like Mobutu Sese Seko’s
Zaire, in which the venality of this small number of actors was so great that
it became utterly unmanageable.) Yet as countries demo cratize, the old
channels of graft and monopolies over important information tend to van-
ish, and more actors have access to important government information that
could be sold, and so these new and different actors— local po liti cal bosses,
broader segments of the bureaucracy, staff of members of parliament— put
out their hands. This liberalization of corruption can add to business costs
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Graft, Graft, and More Graft 105
for everyone, from the largest local corporations to the smallest street ven-
dors, who now, in cities like Jakarta, have to pay a litany of small “fi nes” to
everyone from beat cops to traffi c police to small- time local offi cials.
Indeed, Indonesia provides a clear illustration of how po liti cal opening
leads to the liberalization of corruption. At the beginning of the transition
from longtime dictator Suharto, whose regime collapsed in 1998, graft be-
came decentralized, following de cades of tightly controlled networks of cor-
ruption run by the military and Suharto’s extended family.10 The central
government handed over more power to local leaders, and, in addition to
empowering local politicians, the new situation also provided many more
opportunities for corruption. “Actors in the bureaucracy, judiciary, po liti cal
parties, and in the army have reemerged as central players in a corruption
free for all in demo cratic Indonesia,” wrote economist Michael Rock in a
comprehensive study of corruption in Indonesia and several other develop-
ing countries.11
A truly competitive legislature, a sharp change from Suharto’s compli-
ant parliament, also has added to an increase in corruption. Again, in the
long run a competitive legislature could bring transparency to politics, and
studies by multiple economists have found that corruption eventually de-
creases as a democracy ages. But for now, it signifi cantly increases the amount
of money in the po liti cal system. Although Indonesian legislators no longer
can count on winning offi ce just by joining Suharto’s party, Golkar, the
young democracy has developed few rules governing how politicians should
raise money to campaign. “With the emergence of a confrontational rela-
tionship between newly empowered legislatures and embattled presidents,
members of parliament, who needed ample war chests to win re- election,
used their new po liti cal powers to extort funds. . . . Local offi cials also par-
ticipated in extorting and taxing private fi rms,” Rock wrote.12 Democracy
has provided rent seekers with many more opportunities to make money
off the state, or from elections, but Indonesia has not yet developed the
checks and balances to restrain them, he concluded.
Simply the fact that Indonesia now has more elections— for local po liti-
cal positions, for party leadership, for legislative seats— provides more op-
portunity for graft in the absence of strong traditions of clean elections or
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106 Graft, Graft, and More Graft
effective monitoring. During the 2006– 7 race for the governor of Jakarta, a
position similar to that of an American mayor, the U.S. embassy reported
that some parties were trying to sell their nominations for the post to the
highest bidder.13 Two years earlier, in the run- up to the national presiden-
tial election ultimately won by Yudhoyono, a similar problem had emerged:
powerful politician Jusuf Kalla, who would serve as Yudhoyono’s fi rst vice
president, allegedly won the chairmanship of the Golkar party by “[paying]
enormous bribes to secure votes from party branches,” according to another
U.S. embassy analysis. Since there were now so many more party branches
than during the dictatorship, and each one could exercise the kind of infl u-
ence that local party offi ces never had during Suharto’s time, the amount of
money needed to pay them off was far higher than in the past.14
Even Yudhoyono, who tried to build a reputation as a clean politician,
rhetorically supporting the nation’s anticorruption watchdog even as it
went after some of his closest associates, could not escape the country’s
growing graft problem. The trea sur er of Yudhoyono’s Demo cratic Party, a
man named Muhammad Nazaruddin, fl ed the country in May 2011 after
being accused of massive corruption in the tender of buildings in Jakarta.
Once abroad, Nazaruddin claimed that many members of Yudhoyono’s
party had been involved in his state contracts scheme, an allegation widely
believed among Indonesian po liti cal, media, and business leaders.15
Not surprisingly, despite its increasingly open politics, Indonesia has
made little headway in recent years in Transparency International’s annual
rankings of perceptions of corruption. The Po liti cal Economy and Risk
Consulting, a leading Asian survey, ranked Indonesia as the most corrupt
country in Asia, behind such paragons of clean politics as Cambodia and
the Philippines.16
This decline in Transparency International rankings is echoed in other
emerging democracies, where the enlargement of the franchise and the
decentralization of po liti cal power, at least at fi rst, seems to make graft
easier. As Thailand became more demo cratic in the 2000s, in terms of a
broader franchise, freer voting, and a decentralization of power to prov-
inces from Bangkok, its Transparency International ranking fell from sixty-
fi rst in the world in 2001 to seventy- eighth in 2010. The Philippines’s ranking
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Graft, Graft, and More Graft 107
in Transparency International’s survey of corruption perceptions declined
from fi fty- fi fth in the world in 1998 to one hundred thirty- fourth in 2010.
In fact, in analyzing over thirty developing countries that emerged from
authoritarian rule and shifted to democracy in the late 1990s and early 2000s,
Council on Foreign Relations researchers have found that the Transparency
International score for corruption perceptions actually declined in most of
the countries in the fi rst fi ve years of demo cratic rule.
In a number of cities and provinces across Indonesia, newly empowered
local offi cials— or party leaders like Nazaruddin— have built megaprojects,
like a $600- million, 50,000- seat outdoor stadium in East Kalimintan on the
island of Borneo, that allegedly have provided innumerable opportunities
for contractors, in collusion with local offi cials, to skim money from proj-
ects. Today nearly a quarter of the Indonesian leaders charged with cor-
ruption come from district and provincial- level jobs, compared with almost
none a de cade ago, when graft was controlled by Jakarta.17
This corruption is hard to miss, even for outsiders. Even as Obama
pushes for the “comprehensive partnership” with Indonesia, American in-
vestors, who have looked closely at the country, understand how graft is
spiraling out of control. Despite Indonesia’s size, it remains only the twenty-
eighth- largest trading partner of America, behind such global minnows as
Belgium. When quizzed about their interest in investing in Indonesia, most
American companies— other than large natural resources fi rms that already
have huge investments in the country— reply that they are still deferring
any investments, largely because of the country’s problem with graft.18 When,
in 2011, Google decided to launch new investments in Southeast Asia, it
initially passed over Indonesia, by far the largest country in the region, and
then essentially asked the Indonesian government for waivers that would
allow it to avoid all the red tape (and potential graft) clogging Indonesian
business today.19
Indonesia’s story is repeated in many young democracies. In Rus sia and
other post- Soviet states, people watched, after 1989, as the old nomenkla-
tura, the former communist offi cials, benefi ted from an orgy of self- dealing
of state assets. Yet, at the same time, the chaotic freeing of the economy of-
ten allowed these former bureaucrats, who now “owned” many former state
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108 Graft, Graft, and More Graft
assets, to extort bribes from the general public to get access to certain for-
eign goods, licenses to launch a business, or entrée into companies created
from old state fi rms. In a study of several post- Communist states by the New
Democracies Barometer at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, over 70
percent of respondents said that corruption had increased in comparison
with that under their former communist regimes, and that this had signifi –
cantly impacted their views of the quality of democracy.20
Indeed, several multicountry studies of corruption suggest that graft
increases in the early years of demo cratization. In one analysis of democ-
racy and rent seeking, economists Hamid Mohtadi and Terry Roe of the
University of Minnesota found that in nearly every one of the sixty- one
countries they studied, rent seeking and corruption rose in the early stages
of demo cratization.21 Other studies, focusing on specifi c regions or coun-
tries, have found similar results. Po liti cal scientists Chris Baker and Pasuk
Phonpaichit concluded that corruption rose as Thailand demo cratized; other
economists discovered that corruption has increased in most demo cratizing
Latin American nations as centralized networks give way to more decen-
tralized politics.22
Even when graft might not actually be getting worse, the openness of new
democracies often leads to the perception among the general public that it is.
In large part, this is simply because a freer media, and more in de pen dent
anticorruption agencies, investigate the government and publish reports on
graft. In the long run, again, this is a positive development: Exposés of graft
eventually could encourage politicians and civil servants to think twice about
their actions. But in the short run, the freer media and anticorruption agen-
cies’ reports tend to increase public perceptions of government corruption.
Under authoritarian governments, rumors of graft within po liti cal circles
may spread, but they are easier to keep out of the local press. In China, for
example, Prime Minster Wen Jiabao has successfully maintained an image
of a caring, earthy, and incorruptible grandfather type. Because of this im-
age, Wen is always the fi rst top Chinese offi cial on the scene at any major
tragedy, like the deadly 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province, where he
comforted the grieving and vowed an honest government investigation of
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Graft, Graft, and More Graft 109
any malfeasance that might have made the disaster worse. Wen has main-
tained this image despite the fact that po liti cal insiders— and foreign
journalists— know that his wife, Zhang Peili, wears staggeringly expensive
jewelry, which makes one wonder how she can afford such items given his
modest offi cial salary.23 But because the tightly controlled Chinese press
never reports on the business interests of Wen’s wife, and China’s state an-
ticorruption agencies do not touch such se nior offi cials, most average Chi-
nese have no idea about her wealth. When, in 2007, the Taiwanese media
reported that Zhang owned jade jewelry worth hundreds of thousands
of dollars, Chinese censors quickly blocked the stories from the Chinese
Internet. “The Propaganda Ministry issued blanket orders to the news me-
dia not to cover Zhang’s jewelry activities, according to a se nior Chinese
editor who asked not to be identifi ed. Filtering software was updated to
block all queries about “Wen’s wife” and “jewelry,” reported the Los Ange-
les Times.24
Similarly, during the time of the dictator Suharto, whose family stole
as much as $35 billion in government wealth, according to several estimates,
to publish an exposé of the Suharto empire would have meant guaranteed
arrest for any local reporter who attempted to do so. By contrast, the free,
and scandal- driven, press in Indonesia now produces endless exposés of cor-
ruption in high po liti cal circles. In addition, demo cratic Indonesia has devel-
oped a Supreme Audit Agency and other anticorruption watchdogs, which
generally produce in de pen dent, fair investigations of graft allegations. Yud-
hoyono, though certainly far less corrupt than Suharto by any standard, has
been battered by a long string of media reports about corruption linked to
his administration, including the Nazaruddin allegations and allegations
that the president ordered the bailout of a leading bank, Bank Century,
that made major campaign contributions to his vice president. These alle-
gations were given more fuel by a report, released in late 2009, by the
Supreme Audit Agency, which suggested that the vice president, who had
formerly governed Indonesia’s central bank, had used his powers as central
banker to help rescue Bank Century. The allegations became so numerous
that Yudhoyono was forced to go on national tele vi sion to address his role in
them, and to promise a tougher fi ght against graft. During Suharto’s time,
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110 Graft, Graft, and More Graft
such allegations simply would have been completely quashed, and the pres-
ident would not even have had to respond to them in public.25
These perceptions of corruption heighten economic uncertainty, since
average people simply hear more about graft than they used to under an au-
thoritarian regime, and they also add to civic disengagement from a po liti-
cal elite perceived as cynical and uninterested in the public welfare. As
economist Rock notes, under Suharto the private sector was, in a way,
protected from excessive graft— Suharto granted a “franchise” to a certain
number of se nior regime cronies to extort money from companies, but he
prevented any other offi cials who did not have this “franchise” from doing
so. Now, “demo cratization witnessed the collapse of the franchise system,”
making private companies in Indonesia even more uncertain about whether
their investments would be protected, or whether they would have to pay a
continual, unending string of bribes.26
In earlier global demo cratic waves, freedom of the press may have had
a similar impact, exposing corruption to the public. But the reach and scope
of media outlets were much smaller in the second and third waves of de-
mocracy, and so even if the press did print more stories on corruption, its
ability to quickly infl uence large sections of the public was limited. With
the Internet and social media, the media’s reach is far greater and faster.
Even in a developing nation like Indonesia, widespread Internet penetra-
tion and use of social media provide even the poorest men and women with
access to the latest news coverage— including numerous stories about cor-
ruption. Indonesia, in fact, now has the largest number of Facebook users
of any country other than the United States.27
Rising corruption, or even perceptions of rising corruption, can add to
pop u lar alienation with democracy. A meta- analysis of over thirty emerging
democracies around the world conducted by several of my research associ-
ates at the Council on Foreign Relations and myself used survey data be-
tween 2002 and 2007, the most recent years with comprehensive survey
information, to examine the correlation between support for democracy and
corruption. We conducted our analysis by using Barometer surveys from
various regions to examine support for democracy, and also utilized data
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Graft, Graft, and More Graft 111
from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey, in which people in several regions
were questioned to assess whether they considered corruption a “very big
problem” in their country. We found that, in roughly one- quarter of the
countries, support for democracy decreased when perceptions of corruption
increased. Conversely, in several of the case studies, such as Bangladesh,
Argentina, and India, signifi cant decreases in perceptions of corruption
were correlated with increases in pop u lar support for democracy. These
results suggest that, if governments in emerging democracies can quickly
get graft under control, they can more easily consolidate demo cratic transi-
tions.28
In countries in this meta- analysis that showed a clear link, the relation-
ship between corruption and diminishing support for democracy was sub-
stantial— a fi nding supported by the work of other researchers such as
Yun- han Chu of National Taiwan University, who has found that corrup-
tion perceptions have eroded trust in government in many young Asian
democracies.29 In Pakistan, where even many middle class liberals privately
admit that graft has increased in recent years of civilian governments as
compared with past military regimes, the survey data shows that perceptions
of corruption have been bad for democracy. Between 2002 and 2007, the
number of Pakistanis who perceived that the country had a serious cor-
ruption problem grew by 6 percent; over the same period, support for de-
mocracy among the Pakistani population fell by nearly 9 percent. Similarly,
in Ukraine, where many middle class men and women grew frustrated
in the late 2000s with the government of Orange Revolution leader Viktor
Yushchenko because they saw graft rising despite the country’s greater po-
liti cal openness, the survey data also shows that this frustration has led to
disillusionment with democracy. Between 2002 and 2007, the percentage of
Ukrainians who believed that the country had a serious problem with cor-
ruption grew by 9 percent; over that same period, support among the popu-
lation for democracy fell by a sizable 11 percent.30
Other studies show similar results. Examining perceptions of corruption
in Africa between 2002 and 2005, several researchers found that “corruption
is a major, perhaps the major, obstacle to building pop u lar trust in state insti-
tutions and electoral pro cesses in Africa.” Corruption was the strongest factor
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112 Graft, Graft, and More Graft
hurting Africans’ trust in demo cratic institutions— institutions whose func-
tioning was critical to these young democracies.31
In other cases, corruption fosters public dissatisfaction with elected of-
fi cials. This dissatisfaction can then lead to citizens looking to other, un-
elected actors to resolve po liti cal problems. This might not be such a problem:
one comprehensive survey, taken in the mid- 2000s, and covering all of South
Asia, found that less than 50 percent of Indians trusted po liti cal parties,
but that Indians had instead placed high degrees of trust in their country’s
judiciary and nonpartisan Election Commission, two important institu-
tions in a democracy. Even so, the rallies against corruption by Indian
hunger strikers in the summer of 2011, who openly disdained the po liti cal
system and elected politicians, drew large middle class crowds, suggesting
that even those low levels of trust in Indian politicians had fallen precipi-
tously.32
But at least in India, the public has placed trust in some demo cratic in-
stitutions. In places like Pakistan, Thailand, or Egypt, where the public today
has low levels of trust in po liti cal parties, middle class citizens instead often
have put their trust in the army, which, though it has played a central role in
those nations’ histories, can hardly be called guarantors of democracy.
As we have seen in the case of the Jakarta polls, this growth in corruption
also extends to election campaigns in young democracies, which, at fi rst,
become more corrupt and, potentially, divisive. As economist Paul Collier
shows in his analysis of demo cratic systems in Africa, initial demo cratic
elections in developing countries often create what he calls a “Darwinian
struggle for po liti cal survival in which the winner is the one who adopts the
most cost- effective means of attracting votes.”33 Lacking the strong institu-
tions capable of rewarding good governance and punishing cheating— such
as anticorruption watchdogs, a strong election monitoring commission,
and impartial courts— the most cost- effective means of winning votes in a
young and poor democracy, Collier found, is not delivering good gover-
nance but bribery, voter intimidation, and ballot fraud. And without an
established tradition of tolerance for opposition parties, these fi rst free elec-
tions turn into zero- sum battles, in which no party can afford to lose, and
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Graft, Graft, and More Graft 113
so all parties are willing to use the most dramatic— and even violent—
tactics to triumph. And in each subsequent demo cratic election, as the stakes
of winning or losing become clearer— each party understands that, unless
it wins, it will be cut out of all patronage— the amount of vote buying and
intimidation tends to increase. In Nigeria, for instance, vote buying appar-
ently has increased in each demo cratic presidential election, with the me-
dian price paid for a vote rising with each election as well.
So, during the fi rst truly competitive elections in Kenya, for example,
in the early 2000s, it made sense, from a perspective of survival, for all the
parties contesting the poll to use bribery, voter and candidate intimidation,
and even outright killings to try to dominate polling districts during the
election campaign. All of the parties knew, after all, that if they lost an elec-
tion, their party, and all their po liti cal, business, and ethnic allies, would be
frozen out of power.34
Even in wealthier emerging democracies such as those in East Asia,
where one might think there would be more room for politicians to share
spoils— and thus less incentive to view elections simply as survival of the
fi ttest— democracy has actually led to spikes in election violence and vote
buying. A 2011 analysis of several emerging democracies in Asia, produced
by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), found that while
elections can allow for public participation, in many emerging democracies
they are exacerbating violence and graft. Elections “can trigger violence. . . .
Elections are not in themselves suffi cient mechanisms for managing po liti-
cal change when the players have not bought into the rules of the game”— in
other words, contesting polls cleanly and peacefully, it noted. Electoral
democracy, it concluded, “has come at a high price [in emerging Asian de-
mocracies.] Each year hundreds of people lose their lives in connection with
competitive election.”35 In Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, the Philippines,
and Pakistan, among other emerging Asian democracies, elections have, as
in Africa, turned into winner- take- all contests in which any losing party
gets completely shut out, UNDP concluded. As a result, just as in Kenya or
Nigeria, Asian po liti cal parties are willing to go to any extent to win elec-
tions, since they know a loss means their power will be eviscerated. For ex-
ample, one estimate suggests that vote buying in Thailand has become so
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114 Graft, Graft, and More Graft
entrenched, despite laws that punish it with prison terms, that this activity
puts some $1 billion into the economy during election time.36
In Indonesia, money politics now has become the norm during cam-
paign seasons— in Jakarta and nearly everywhere else in the archipelago.
During Suharto’s time, there were really no parties other than Golkar, the
dictator’s po liti cal vehicle. Golkar representatives might hand out small
amounts of Indonesian rupiah during the elections, which were held every
fi ve years and which resulted in Suharto and his party getting Saddam
Hussein– like vote tallies. But those disbursements of money were necessar-
ily limited by the fact that Suharto had no real opposition, and the dictator’s
party, together with the army, always could use the threat of force to get
people to vote for them as well.
Today, Indonesian po liti cal parties are far more competitive: in parlia-
mentary elections, at least fi ve sizable national parties now contest each elec-
tion. None really can rely on force to intimidate voters into supporting them,
so handing out money during campaigns, or on Election Day, has become
far more important. One prominent Indonesian academic, Effenda Ghazali,
looked at voter attitudes in several parts of the country, and found that the
amount people were paid for their votes had more than doubled between
the early 2000s and the late 2000s.37
Even a quick tour of campaign stops by Indonesian po liti cal parties
reveals hyperinfl ation in the price of votes. At rallies in one Jakarta suburb,
where migrants from around the country have built small, two- room houses
of concrete and wood, candidates from one leading Indonesian party can-
vass for support. While a candidate speaks on the suburb’s makeshift stage,
his aides hand out small baskets of rice, cooking oil, and peanuts to people
in the audience, and then the candidate leads the crowd in chants and fl ag-
waving in the party’s colors. Few in the crowd seem to even bother listening
to the speech; many are waiting for an appearance onstage of a pop u lar
local pop singer known for dancing while shaking her rump toward the
crowd.
But the men and women in the audience, mostly working class people
who came to the capital to work in construction or other manual labor, start
to pay more attention as the candidate’s aides wander through the audience
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Graft, Graft, and More Graft 115
with other presents. Inside new baskets being handed out are small hand-
fuls of rupiah, along with cards instructing people how to fi nd the party’s
symbol and colors on ballots. Men and women who a minute ago had been
relaxing on the ground, chewing sticks of spicy chicken, jump to their feet
and press forward— many grab one, two, three baskets with the cash inside
in a scene that is reminiscent of an American radio station promotion. But
several of the people who grabbed baskets turn to the party’s aides in disap-
pointment after looking inside. “This is half what we got from the other
parties,” says one.38
The ongoing vote buying, the perceptions of growing corruption among
elected politicians, the little bribes demanded over and over, have begun
to wear down many Indonesians. When asked, many Indonesian business-
people refl exively express pride in their young democracy, and in how their
country has grown since the chaos and economic crises of the late 1990s.
But when pushed a bit harder, they allow their frustration to surface quickly—
street vendors, taxi drivers, and even wealthy tycoons will promptly complain
about all the bribes they must pay to keep their businesses running. So per-
haps it should not have been surprising when the former dictator’s son,
known as “Tommy” Suharto, decided in mid- 2011 that he would enter
politics— even though his father had overseen numerous brutal campaigns
of repression and he himself had served a long jail sentence for allegedly mas-
terminding the murder of a Supreme Court judge. Tommy launched a new
po liti cal party and became chairman of its board, and laid plans for Indone-
sia’s national elections in 2014. “The people don’t believe in the [Yudhoyono]
government,” one of Tommy’s top po liti cal aides told reporters. “Thirteen
years of ‘reform’ hasn’t made people’s lives better.”39
Tommy seemed to have understood the zeitgeist. In a study by the In-
donesian research or ga ni za tion Survey Circle, released in late 2011, only 12
percent of respondents believed that the current group of politicians in
the demo cratic era were doing a better job than leaders during the era of
Suharto.40 An overwhelming number of respondents cited graft as one of the
biggest complaints about the demo cratic era; commentaries on the survey
noted that a sizable percentage of Indonesia’s elected members of parlia-
ment were targeted by corruption investigations within a year after taking
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116 Graft, Graft, and More Graft
their seats. “This underscores the fact that for a majority of Indonesians,
democracy has not delivered a better life,” noted the Jakarta Globe, com-
menting on the results of the survey.41 In another poll released in May 2011,
residents of Indonesia, the supposed demo cratic success story of the 2000s,
said, by a margin of two to one, that conditions in the country were better
during Suharto’s time than under the government of demo cratically elected
Yudhoyono.42
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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: The China Model

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Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Democracy in Retreat
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T
he attendees of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos
are not exactly used to being told what to do. The Swiss resort
draws the global elite: the highest- powered investment bankers,
the top government offi cials and leaders, the biggest philanthropists, and
the most famous celebrities, who gather each year to attempt to solve the
world’s most pressing problems and still have time for eve ning cocktails.
But in January 2009, the Davos crowd had to listen to a blistering lec-
ture from a most unlikely source. Some thought that the fi rst se nior Chinese
leader to attend the World Economic Forum, premier Wen Jiabao, might
take a low- key approach to his speech to the Forum.1 But at Davos, that
genial grandpa was not in evidence. Months after Lehman Brothers col-
lapsed, triggering the global economic crisis, Wen told the Davos attendees
that the West was squarely to blame for the meltdown roiling the entire
world. An “excessive expansion of fi nancial institutions in blind pursuit of
profi t,” a failure of government supervision of the fi nancial sector, and an
“unsustainable model of development, characterized by prolonged low sav-
ings and high consumption” caused the crisis, said an angry Wen.2
Five years earlier, such a broadside from a Chinese leader would have
been unthinkable. Though in the 1990s and early 2000s China had used its
soft power to reassure its Asian neighbors and to expand its infl uence in
regions like Africa and Latin America, until the end of 2008 nearly every
top Chinese offi cial still lived by Deng Xiaoping’s old advice to build Chi-
na’s strength while maintaining a low profi le in international affairs.3 As
Deng told one visiting African leader in 1985, “Please don’t copy our model.
If there is any experience on our part, it is to formulate policies in light of
The China Model
7
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118 The China Model
one’s own national conditions.” 4 In the mid- 2000s, American journalist
Joshua Cooper Ramo already had coined the term “Beijing Consensus” to
describe China’s brand of authoritarian capitalism, and in private some
Chinese academics had begun discussing whether Beijing might have les-
sons to teach other countries in Asia, Africa, or Latin America.5 Still, no
Chinese offi cials, academics, or other opinion leaders were willing to say, on
the record, that they believed China had a model of po liti cal and economic
development that other developing nations could follow.6 Many top leaders
publicly stuck to the line that China was a developing nation that still had
much to learn from the world.7
But in 2008 and 2009 the global economic crisis decimated the econo-
mies of nearly every leading democracy, while China surfed through the
downturn virtually unscathed, though Beijing did implement its own large
stimulus package, worth roughly $600 billion.8 China’s economy grew by
nearly 9 percent in 2009, while Japan’s shrunk by over 5 percent, and the
American economy contracted by 2.6 percent.9 By August 2010, China (not
including Hong Kong) held over $860 billion in U.S. trea suries; when Chi-
nese leaders returned to Davos the year after Wen’s scolding of the West,
they came not to chat but to hunt for distressed Western assets they could
buy up on the cheap.10 In the downturn’s wake, the crisis made many West-
ern leaders tentative, questioning whether not only their own economies
but also their po liti cal systems actually contained deep, possibly unfi xable
fl aws. The economic crisis, said former U.S. Deputy Trea sury Secretary
Roger Altman, has left “the American model . . . under a cloud.”11 “This
relatively unscathed position gives China the opportunity to solidify its
strategic advantages as the United States and Eu rope struggle to recover,”
Altman writes.
These fl aws appeared especially notable when compared with what
seemed like the streamlined, rapid decision making of the Chinese leader-
ship, which did not have to deal with such “obstacles” as a legislature,
judiciary, or free media that actually could question or block its actions.
“One- party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a
reasonably enlightened group of people, as in China today, it can also have
great advantages,” writes the infl uential New York Times foreign affairs
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The China Model 119
columnist Thomas Friedman. “One party can just impose the po liti cally
diffi cult but critically important policies needed to move a society for-
ward.”12 Even John Williamson, the economist who originally coined the
term “Washington Consensus,” admitted, in an essay in 2012, that the Bei-
jing Consensus appeared to be gaining ground rapidly, at the expense of
the Washington Consensus.
As Western leaders, policy makers, and journalists questioned whether
their own systems had failed, Chinese leaders began to promote their au-
thoritarian capitalist model of development more explicitly. After all, in
the wake of the crisis many Western governments, including France and the
United States, bailed out their fi nancial sectors and many of their leading
companies. These bailouts made it harder for Western leaders to criticize
Beijing’s economic interventions, and led some Chinese offi cials to question
whether Western democracies now were copying the China model. In Bei-
jing, a raft of new books came out promoting the China model of devel-
opment and blasting the failures of Western liberal capitalism. “It is very
possible that the Beijing Consensus can replace the Washington Consensus,”
Cui Zhiyuan, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, told the Interna-
tional Herald Tribune in early 2010.13 Suddenly, too, the same Chinese lead-
ers who in the early and mid- 2000s still had played the role of the meek
learner became, in speeches and public appearances and writings, very much
the triumphalist teacher. In an article in the China Daily one think- tank ex-
pert from China’s Commerce Ministry writes, “The US’ top fi nancial offi –
cials need to shift their people’s attention from the country’s struggling
economy to cover up their incompetence and blame China for everything
that is going wrong in their country.”14
In previous reverse waves, eras when global demo cratic gains stalled
and went backward, there was no alternate example of development re-
motely as successful as China today; the Soviet Union claimed to be an al-
ternate example, but it never produced anywhere near the sustained growth
rates and successful, globally competitive companies of China today. In the
early 1960s, another time of a reverse wave following the post- WWII demo-
cratization in Eu rope and parts of Asia, the only real challenger to liberal,
capitalist democracy was the communist bloc. At the time, many developing
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120 The China Model
nations did attempt to follow the Soviet economic model, partly because it
offered an alternative to the West, which was attractive to former colonies,
partly because the Soviet model came with signifi cant Soviet aid, and partly
because many leaders of newly in de pen dent nations, such as Tanzania’s Ju-
lius Nyerere, had studied in socialist systems, or in universities in the West
that had favorable views of socialism and believed a Soviet- style system
could work.
But even among many true believers, who remained convinced that the
Soviet Union and Mao’s China offered viable alternatives of development,
the massive disaster of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1958– 61, which led to
a famine that killed tens of millions, and the stagnation of the Eastern bloc
economies, revealed by émigrés, showed that, given time, the communist
system probably would collapse. After the fi rst generation of postcolonial
leaders, many newly in de pen dent states that had once embraced socialist
models began to slowly dismantle them. By the 1980s, when many newly
in de pen dent states were struggling with serious economic crises, and neo-
liberal reforms promoted by the West began to take hold, communist- style
economics were nearly dead.
Today, China— and to a lesser extent other successful authoritarian
capitalists— offer a viable alternative to the leading democracies. In many
ways, their systems, which we will see in more detail, pose the most serious
challenge to demo cratic capitalism since the rise of communism and fas-
cism in the 1920s and early 1930s. And in the wake of the global economic
crisis, and the dissatisfaction with democracy in many developing nations,
leaders in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are studying the Chinese model
far more closely— a model that, eventually, will help undermine democracy
in these leaders’ countries.
In recent years, the “China model” has become shorthand for economic
liberalization without po liti cal liberalization. But China’s model of devel-
opment is actually more complex. It builds on earlier, state- centered Asian
models of development such as in South Korea and Taiwan, while taking
uniquely Chinese steps designed to ensure that the Communist Party re-
mains central to economic and po liti cal policy making.15 Like previous Asian
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The China Model 121
modernizers, China in its reform era has devoted signifi cant resources to
primary education, resulting in youth literacy rates of nearly 98 percent; in
many other developing nations, the youth literacy rate is less than 70 per-
cent.16 Like other high- growth Asian economies, and the most reformist of
the Persian Gulf modernizers, China also has created highly favorable envi-
ronments for foreign investment, particularly in the special economic zones
along the country’s coast; in many years over the past two de cades China
has been the world’s top recipient of foreign direct investment.17 Yet in the
China model, the Beijing government maintains a high degree of control
over the economy, but it is hardly returning to socialism. Instead, Beijing
has developed a hybrid form of capitalism in which it has opened its econ-
omy to some extent, but it also ensures that the government controls strategic
industries, picks corporate winners, determines investments by state funds,
and pushes the banking sector to support national champion fi rms. Indeed,
though in the 1980s and 1990s China privatized many state fi rms, the cen-
tral government today still controls roughly 120 companies. Among these
are the biggest and most powerful corporations in China: of the forty- two
biggest companies in China, only three are privately owned. In the thirty-
nine economic sectors considered most important by the government, state
fi rms control roughly 85 percent of all assets, according to a study by China
economist Carl Walter. In China the party appoints se nior directors of many
of the largest companies, who are expected to become party members, if
they are not already. Working through these networks, the Beijing leader-
ship sets state priorities, gives signals to companies, and determines corpo-
rate agendas, but does so without the direct hand of the state appearing in
public. And even when the state does not directly control the most impor-
tant companies, Beijing increasingly has used nontariff barriers to encourage
what it calls “indigenous innovation” in industries it considers strategic, like
energy, computing, and others— barriers that favor certain local fi rms for
procurement and research and development.
What’s more, in this type of authoritarian capitalism, government in-
tervention in business is utilized in a way not possible in a free market de-
mocracy: to strengthen the power of the ruling regime and China’s position
internationally. When Beijing wants to increase investments in strategically
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122 The China Model
important nations, such as Thailand or South Africa, it can put pressure on
China’s major banks, all of which are linked to the state, to boost lending to
Chinese companies operating in those nations. For example, Chinese tele-
communications giant Huawei, which is attempting to compete with multi-
nationals like Siemens, received some $30 billion in credit from state- controlled
China Development Bank, on terms its foreign competitors would have sali-
vated over. By contrast, though the Obama administration wanted to dras-
tically upgrade the United States’ relationship with Indonesia, an important
strategic partner, it could not convince many American companies to invest
there, and, unlike the Chinese leadership, it could not force them to do so.18
In short, the China model sees commerce as a means to promote na-
tional interests, and not just to empower (and potentially to make wealthy)
individuals. And for over three de cades, China’s model of development has
delivered staggering successes. Since the beginning of China’s reform and
opening in the late 1970s, the country has gone from a poor, mostly agrar-
ian nation to, in 2010, the second- largest economy in the world.19 Some
coastal Chinese cities, like Shenzhen and Shanghai, now boast gross do-
mestic products per capita equivalent to those of cities in Southern Eu rope
or Southeast Asia.20 In the pro cess, this growth has lifted hundreds of mil-
lions of Chinese out of poverty.21 With the economies of leading industrial-
ized democracies still suffering, today China, and to a lesser extent India,
are providing virtually the only growth in the whole global economy.22
Since 2008, not only top Chinese leaders but also people across the coun-
try clearly have become more confi dent about Beijing’s place in the world.
Some of this confi dence is only natural, part of China reclaiming its posi-
tion as a major world power, a role it occupied for centuries until it fell be-
hind the West’s modernization in the nineteenth century. But some of the
confi dence comes from China’s more recent rise during the global economic
crisis, which put Beijing in an international leadership role far before its
leaders expected. And, some of the confi dence comes from Chinese leaders,
diplomats, and scholars traveling more widely, and realizing that their demo-
cratic neighbors— Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and many others
that used to lecture China about human rights and freedoms— actually are
falling behind China’s breakneck growth. “Chinese leaders used to come
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The China Model 123
here and want to learn from us,” one se nior Thai offi cial said. “Now it’s like
they don’t have anything left to learn. . . . They have no interest in listening
to us.”23
China’s newfound confi dence has manifested itself in many forms.
When the Nobel committee awarded the 2010 Peace Prize to Chinese dis-
sident Liu Xiaobo, jailed in China for or ga niz ing an online petition calling
for the rule of law, Beijing condemned Norway and other Eu ro pe an na-
tions, and applied intense pressure on Eu ro pe an offi cials, and on many from
Asian nations as well, not to attend the award ceremony.24 Ultimately, several
of the nations China pressured the hardest, like the Philippines, declined to
send representatives to the Nobel ceremony.
A few months earlier, Beijing had applied similar pressure on Eu ro-
pe an nations, this time to join with it in an unpre ce dented public call to
replace the dollar as the global reserve currency. Previously, Beijing had
been relatively willing to abide by the dollar as the major global currency,
but China, owning a massive amount of U.S. Trea suries, had become more
and more worried about America’s unsustainable debt and reckless fi scal
policies. China followed up on its call by helping Chinese fi rms, and foreign
companies, to begin using the renminbi more readily in international trans-
actions, as well as in funds based in Hong Kong.25 When, in the fall of 2011,
Eu ro pe an nations looked for saviors to solve their growing economic crisis,
China stepped in. Chinese offi cials signaled their willingness to contribute
as much as €100 billion to the Eu ro pe an Financial Stability Fund, or possi-
bly to a new bailout mechanism set up by the International Monetary Fund.
In Greece, China launched plans to invest billions in infrastructure, in-
cluding its ports, while also repeatedly offering to buy up Greek debt.26 But
China did so only while at the same time demanding that Eu rope nations
drop any claims against China for unfair trade policies. Eventually, when
these conditions could not be met, China withdrew the idea of trying to
bolster Eu rope’s ailing banks.
Beijing has become more forceful in dealing with Washington, too, an
assertiveness that can add to its appeal with developing countries who’ve
often looked for another major power, and particularly a power hailing from
Asia, to balance their relations with the United States. When the Obama
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124 The China Model
White House informed Chinese offi cials in the summer of 2009 that it, like
every other recent American administration, planned to host the Dalai Lama
for a private meeting, Beijing aggressively lobbied the White House not to
meet the Tibetan leader. The White House acquiesced, and for the fi rst time
since the administration of George H. W. Bush the Dalai Lama came to
America without meeting the president, a huge victory for China.27 A few
weeks later, Chinese offi cials used a global conference on climate change to
furiously admonish their American counterparts for their position on global
warming, one of the fi rst times the Chinese had taken such a public ap-
proach to the issue. “There has been a change in China’s attitude,” Kenneth
G. Lieberthal, a former se nior National Security Council offi cial focusing
on China, told the Washington Post. “The Chinese fi nd with startling speed
that people have come to view them as a major global player. And that has
fed a sense of confi dence.”28 Or as one current se nior American offi cial who
deals with China said, “They are powerful, and now they’re fi nally acting
like it.”29
In 2010 and 2011, China also surprised its neighbors by stepping up its
demands for large swaths of the South China Sea, other contested waters,
and regions along its disputed land borders.30 In the summer and fall of
2010, China reacted so furiously to Japan’s decision to impound a Chinese
fi shing boat in disputed waters that it cut off shipments to Tokyo of rare
earth materials critical to the manufacture of modern electronics like cel-
lular phones and fi ber optics.31 Beijing also warned its neighbor Vietnam
not to work with Western oil companies like ExxonMobil on joint explora-
tions of potential oil and gas in the South China Sea, detained Philippine
and Viet nam ese boats, and claimed nearly the entire sea— Beijing’s claims
extended nearly to the shores of the Philippines, hundreds of miles from
China’s territory.32 When Southeast Asian nations, attending a regional
summit in the summer of 2010, protested Beijing’s stance on the South
China Sea and asked Washington to mediate their disputes with Beijing,
Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi lost his composure. He suddenly got
up and exited the meeting, leaving the room in an uncomfortable silence.
One hour later, he stormed back in and launched into a thirty- minute mono-
logue, practically screaming at the other participants. At one point Yang
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The China Model 125
mocked his hosts, the Viet nam ese; at another he declared, “China is a big
country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.” In
other words, he was implying that China could outmuscle these smaller
nations.33
This increasingly assertive Chinese diplomacy has alienated some coun-
tries, particularly in Asia. Yet along with more forceful diplomacy, Beijing
has started to proactively promote its model of development, and in some
ways its newfound confi dence, expressed in its more forceful relations with
the United States and other powers, only adds to its global appeal, since
other, smaller countries want to join forces with a clearly rising power. But
even as China has become more confi dent, its leadership still recognizes
that it cannot challenge American military power, at least not anytime soon.
As China analyst Stephen Halper writes, “In reality, Chinese leaders want
neither the strain on fi nances nor the negative and potentially costly atmo-
spherics that would accompany a genuine arms race with the United States.”34
Despite boosting its defense bud get by over 10 percent annually, China re-
mains a long way from developing a global blue water navy, or expedition-
ary forces capable of fi ghting far from China’s borders.35 Most years, the
Pentagon’s bud get surpasses the defense bud gets of all other major mili-
tary powers combined, and because of this disparity in spending Beijing
increasingly has focused on “asymmetric warfare”— ways for weaker mili-
tary powers to damage stronger ones, such as cyber attacks and ballistic
missiles.36 “We need to think more on how to preserve national integrity.
We have no intention of challenging the US [militarily,]” admitted Major
General Luo Yan, a se nior member of the People’s Liberation Army.37
Recognizing that China remains de cades from challenging the Penta-
gon, Beijing’s leaders realize they can compete in other ways, such as by pro-
moting their development model, and as other countries learn and adopt
aspects of the China model, they will become more likely to align with
China, to share China’s values, and to connect with China’s leaders. Over
the past two years, prominent Chinese academics have released a raft of
new books on the China model and its applicability to other countries, and
several Chinese media outlets called the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, for
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126 The China Model
which China reportedly spent some $60 billion, a platform to advertise its
development successes to other countries.38 On another occasion, according
to China scholar Randall Peerenboom, China and the World Bank jointly
hosted a forum called the Shanghai Global Learning Pro cess, where some
1,200 participants from 117 nations attended sessions designed partly to
explain how they could learn from China’s development experience.39 The
economic crisis, Chinese economist Cheng Enfu told reporters, “displays
the advantages of the Chinese model. . . . Some mainstream [Chinese] econ-
omists are saying that India should learn from China; Latin American
countries are trying to learn from China. When foreign countries send del-
egations to China, they show interest in the Chinese way of developing.” 40
By the early 2000s, China already had developed training programs for
foreign offi cials, usually from developing nations in Africa, Southeast Asia,
and Central Asia. These offi cials came to China for courses in economic
management, policing, and judicial practice, among other areas. At the time,
Chinese offi cials would not necessarily suggest that China had an economic
model to impart. But by the late 2000s, many of these courses explicitly fo-
cused on elements of the China model, from the way Beijing uses its power
to allocate loans and grants to certain companies, to China’s strategies for
co- opting entrepreneurs into the Communist Party, to China’s use of spe-
cial economic zones to attract foreign investment over the past thirty years.41
Attendees at these sessions described how, unlike in the past, their Chinese
counterparts explicitly contrasted the Chinese system and its ability to
rapidly handle crises and successfully pursue long- term goals— though they
did not explicitly say that China is an authoritarian country, of course—
with the gridlock of Western governments. One Viet nam ese offi cial who
repeatedly has traveled to China for such programs noted how the style
of the programs has changed over time. Now, he said, Chinese offi cials, far
more confi dent than even ten years ago, would introduce the example of
one or another Chinese city that had successfully attracted sizable invest-
ments, talking through how the city government coordinates all permits
and other needs, and moves favored projects swiftly through any approval
pro cess. Some of the offi cials would compare this with investments in India
or even wealthy democracies, noting how hard it was to get approvals for
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The China Model 127
even the smallest investments in many parts of these countries. Other Cen-
tral Asian attendees at Chinese training sessions noted how they increas-
ingly learned about the Chinese judicial system, in which the party has
almost complete control, and then returned to their home countries,
where their governments used similar types of control mea sures over their
judiciaries.
Beijing also has built close political- party- to- political- party ties with
several other developing nations. Increasingly, it has utilized these ties to
promote its model of po liti cal and economic development. For at least two
de cades, Viet nam ese offi cials have traveled to China and then consequently
have based many of their development policies on China’s strategies.42 More
recently, Chinese offi cials have worked on development planning with lead-
ing politicians in neighboring Mongolia, which demo cratized after 1989 but
where the public has become increasingly disenchanted with corruption and
weak growth. Chinese offi cials also have cooperated with United Rus sia,
the main pro- Kremlin party, whose leaders want to study how China has
opened its economy without giving up po liti cal control. In 2009, United
Rus sia held a special meeting with top Chinese leaders to learn Beijing’s
strategy of development and po liti cal power.43 China also has held training
sessions for many leaders from the Cambodian People’s Party, the party of
Prime Minister Hun Sen.44 Combined with the massive Chinese aid and
investment fl owing into Cambodia, where Beijing is now the largest donor
and biggest investor, these introductions to the China model have had a
signifi cant impact on Cambodia’s shaky democracy.45 “You already don’t
have a lot of strong demo cratic values here,” said one longtime se nior Cam-
bodian offi cial. “You have [government] people seeing how well China has
done, going to China all the time, what they come back [to Cambodia] with
is how much faster and easier China has had it without having to deal with
an opposition.” 46
These efforts to promote a China model of undemo cratic development
build on a decade- long effort by Beijing to amass soft power in the develop-
ing world— soft power that would then add to the appeal of China’s ideas
and China itself. Among other efforts, this strategy has included expand-
ing the international reach of Chinese media, such as by launching new
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128 The China Model
China- funded supplements in newspapers in many different countries, and
by vastly expanding the reach and professionalism of the Chinese newswire
Xinhua, which recently bought a fl ashy new American bureau in the heart
of Times Square in New York.47 Today, according to its own fi gures, Chi-
na’s state- backed international tele vi sion channel reaches over sixty- fi ve mil-
lion viewers outside the country.48 This strategy also includes broadening
the appeal of Chinese culture by opening Confucius Institutes— programs
on Chinese language and culture, at universities from Uzbekistan to Tanza-
nia.49 It has involved a rapid and substantial expansion of China’s foreign
aid programs, so that Beijing is now the largest donor to many neighboring
nations like Cambodia, Burma, and Laos. A study by the Wagner School of
New York University found that Chinese aid to Africa grew from $838 mil-
lion in 2003 to nearly $18 billion in 2007, the most recent year for which
data was available.50 Another analysis of China’s overseas lending, compiled
by the Financial Times in 2010, found that China lent more money to devel-
oping nations in 2009 and 2010 than the World Bank had, a stark display of
Beijing’s growing foreign assistance.51 And the soft power initiative has also
included outreach to foreign students, providing scholarships, work- study
programs, and other incentives to young men and women from developing
countries. The number of foreign students studying in China grew from
roughly 52,000 in 2000 to 240,000 in 2009.52
Over the past de cade, too, China has set up networks of formal and
informal summits with other developing nations. With meetings held
either in China or in the developing world, these summits are designed to
bring together offi cials and opinion leaders.53 At fi rst, the summits offered
China the opportunity to emphasize its role as a potential strategic partner
and source of investment and trade. But over the past fi ve years some sum-
mits, like those with Southeast Asian and African leaders, also subtly ad-
vertised China’s model of development, according to numerous participants.
Several Thai politicians who attended the Boao Forum for Asia, a kind of
China- centered version of the World Economic Forum in Davos, noted that,
in recent years, some of the discussions at the meeting had shifted from a
kind of general talk of globalization and its impact in Asia to more specifi c
conversations about some of the failings of Western economic models ex-
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The China Model 129
posed by the global economic crisis, and whether China’s type of develop-
ment might be less prone to such risks. “Many of the African leaders coming
here [to Beijing] for the Chinese- African summit are attracted not only by
opportunities for aid and trade, but also by the China model of develop-
ment,” argues Zhang Weiwei, a prominent Chinese scholar and former
aide to Deng Xiaoping, after leaders from nearly every African nation
traveled to Beijing in 2006 for a summit. These African leaders realize, he
writes, that for them the Chinese model of development will work better
than a Western model dependent on a liberal demo cratic government.54
The soft power initiative also has involved a coordinated effort to up-
grade the quality of China’s diplomatic corps, replacing an older generation
of media- shy, stiff bureaucrats with a younger group of Chinese men and
women, many of whom are fl uent in En glish and comfortable bantering
with local journalists. On one occasion Chinese reporters working in Thai-
land watched as the then U.S. ambassador Ralph Boyce appeared on a prom-
inent Thai talk show. Boyce was known in the diplomatic community for
his knowledge of Thailand and command of Thai; on the show he spoke
fl uently and elegantly. Not to be outdone, alongside him the Chinese ambas-
sador to Thailand also appeared, speaking fl uent Thai and appearing right
at home in the freewheeling tele vi sion talk show format. In one cable re-
leased by Wikileaks, even American diplomats stationed in Thailand ad-
mitted that Thai offi cials had become increasingly admiring of China and
its model of development, and less interested in the American model.
Until the past two or three years, the China model appealed mostly to the
world’s most repressive autocrats, eager to learn how China has modernized
its authoritarianism: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Bashar al- Assad of
Syria, and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. In Iran, se nior regime offi cials re-
portedly have engaged in intense debate about how to import China’s strategy
of nondemo cratic development to the Islamic Republic.55 In Syria, a similar
kind of debate reportedly has taken place among se nior offi cials surround-
ing Assad, while in Ethiopia, where strongman Meles Zenawi has ruled for
nearly two de cades, the foreign minister and other top offi cials have pub-
licly encouraged the country to follow China’s model of development.56
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130 The China Model
In the past, these repressive regimes attracted most of the media cover-
age of the China model. But in recent years it is not just autocrats who have
been learning from Beijing. China’s soft power offensive has given it in-
creasing leverage over democracies in the developing world, and has made
Beijing’s model of development more attractive to leaders even in freer na-
tions, places where there has already been some degree of demo cratic transi-
tion. Increasingly, leaders and even average citizens of young democracies
like Indonesia, Thailand, Senegal, Venezuela, Nicaragua, or Bolivia—
countries where pop u lar support for democracy has weakened— have taken
an interest in China’s model, and as China’s model becomes more infl uen-
tial, it can weaken democracy in these countries, since it brings with it
growing state control over both economics and politics.
Because China’s advocacy of its model of development is still relatively
new, it will take years to see the full effect of its challenge to Western liberal
orthodoxy. Still, one can see some initial effects in developing democracies.
In Venezuela and Nicaragua, Beijing has ingratiated itself with the leader-
ship, offering $20 billion in loans to Caracas in the spring of 2010, a time of
economic downturn in Venezuela; China’s loans have helped Hugo Chavez
perpetuate his government, even in the face of signifi cant opposition, and
even as he has used increasingly antidemo cratic methods to crack down.57
As China has gained a larger presence in nations like Venezuela, Chavez
increasingly has sent top diplomats and bureaucrats to Beijing to specifi –
cally examine China’s strategies of development, and how they might be
applied in Central or South America.58
Similar shifts have taken place in Southeast Asia, where China’s soft
power and its economic strength have broadened its appeal, even as its
military aggressiveness simultaneously has sometimes hurt it. In acknowl-
edging China as becoming the predominant infl uence in Cambodia, as well
as the loss of leverage of Western donors over the government of Hun Sen,
several Cambodian offi cials said that the Cambodian prime minister increas-
ingly has based his po liti cal and economic strategies on China, from his use
of his po liti cal party to control big business to his use of the court system to
dominate the opposition. In par tic u lar, according to a number of Cambodian
activists and human rights specialists, advisers from China’s Communist
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The China Model 131
Party have given suggestions to Hun Sen’s party about how to utilize laws
for libel and defamation to scare the in de pen dent media, how to create a
network of se nior offi cials who can move in and out of major companies,
and how to train special police forces, including Hun Sen’s personal body-
guard, who will always be loyal to him, even in the face of street protests.
What’s more, China has pushed Hun Sen’s government to crack down on
various protesters and refugees who might be an embarrassment to Beijing.
When a group of Uighurs, who live in the western Chinese province that is
home to about ten million Muslim and ethnic Turkic Uighurs, fl ed to Cam-
bodia in the winter of 2009, Chinese offi cials applied signifi cant behind-
the- scenes pressure on Hun Sen’s government to expel the Uighurs, even
though they were classifi ed as refugees. In December 2009, the Cambodian
government deported the Uighurs back to China, where many of them
vanished. Beijing praised Cambodia as “a model of friendly cooperation”;
shortly after the deportation, China signed new aid deals with Cambodia
worth roughly $1 billion, the biggest single disbursement of aid to the coun-
try ever.
China allegedly has made similar efforts to push Laos, Vietnam, and
Thailand to deport Uighurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and other po liti cal
migrants fl eeing China, as it has used its growing power in Nepal to push
the Nepalese government to return Tibetans fl eeing China, even though
Nepal has for years provided shelter to many Tibetans. And in Central
Asia, where China increasingly conducts training seminars for local police,
judges, and other justice offi cials, offi cials there say that Beijing has pushed
them to use their judicial systems to arrest and deport Uighurs as well. In
fact, even Kyrgyzstan, which once was the freest nation in Central Asia,
and a home for regional prodemocracy activists, including Uighurs, has
tightened the noose, searching for and deporting Uighurs back to China,
where they are often arrested, jailed, and tortured.
Across Southeast Asia, in fact, China’s model has gained considerable ac-
claim. “There are, of course, no offi cial statements from [Southeast Asian]
countries about their decisions to follow the Beijing Consensus or not,”
writes prominent Indonesian scholar Ignatius Wibowo. “The attraction
to the Chinese model is unconscious.” Still, it is possible to quantify this
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132 The China Model
“unconscious” appeal. Having analyzed surveys of po liti cal values in
Southeast Asia going back a de cade, Wibowo concludes that people in many
Southeast Asian countries share a willingness to abandon some of their
demo cratic values for higher growth and the kind of increasingly state-
directed economic system that many of these countries in fact had in their
authoritarian days, and that China still has today. Southeast Asian nations
“have shifted their development strategy from one based on free markets and
democracy to one based on semi- free markets and an illiberal po liti cal sys-
tem,” Wibowo writes. “The ‘Beijing Consensus’ clearly has gained ground in
Southeast Asia.”59 Indeed, by examining the po liti cal trajectory of the ten
states that belong to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Wibowo
found that with only a few exceptions, each country’s po liti cal model, exam-
ined through a series of po liti cal indicators, has moved in the direction
of China and away from liberal democracy over the past de cade, largely
because these nations had watched China’s successes and contrasted them
with the West’s failures. Many Southeast Asian leaders and top offi cials were
implementing strategies of development modeled on China’s, including tak-
ing back state control of strategic industries, recentralizing po liti cal deci-
sion making, using the judicial system increasingly as a tool of state power,
and reestablishing one- party rule— all changes that undermine demo cratic
development. Supporting his claims, the most recent Economist Intelligence
Unit survey of global democracy, which analyzes nearly every nation in the
world, found that the global fi nancial and economic crisis “has increased
the attractiveness of the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism for some
emerging markets”— which has added to democracy’s setbacks.
In Thailand, for example, growing numbers of politicians, bureaucrats,
and even journalists favorably contrast China’s undemo cratic model of
government decision making with Thailand’s messy and sometimes violent
pseudodemocracy.60 In the past fi ve years, as Thailand’s urban- based mid-
dle class, and its favored po liti cal parties, have taken back dominance of
politics, they have increasingly adopted tools of control similar to China.
These have included creating an Internet monitoring and blocking system
like China’s and skewing the judiciary, through judicial appointments and
“instructions” to judges from the royal palace, so that judicial rulings weaken
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The China Model 133
potential opposition parties and ensure the dominance of the ruling party.61
Although not every element of Thailand’s po liti cal change was explicitly
modeled on China, of course, many Thai offi cials, in the period after the
coup of 2006, noted how the use of the judiciary, the control of the Internet,
and other po liti cal tools did have some inspiration from China. Thailand’s
judiciary became so infl uential, and so obviously skewed against any oppo-
sition movements, that some opposition politicians and writers began to
complain that the country was turning into a “judiocracy”— an autocracy
of judges.62
Even outside Southeast Asia, in other parts of Asia, China’s gravita-
tional pull and its soft power have had an infl uence on democracies. Over-
all, concludes po liti cal scientist Yun- han Chu, who studied Asian Barometer
surveys about East Asians’ commitment to democracy, “Authoritarianism
remains a fi erce competitor of democracy in East Asia,” in no small part
because of the infl uence of China’s ability to foster economic success with-
out real po liti cal change, providing an alternative model that is clearly visible
to other East Asians who travel to China, work with Chinese companies,
buy Chinese products, or host Chinese offi cials.63 As he notes, China will, in
the coming years, become the center of East Asian trade and economic inte-
gration, giving it even more power. “Newly demo cratized [Asian] countries
[will] increasingly become eco nom ical ly integrated with and dependent
on non- democratic countries,” Chu writes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given
China’s growing power and infl uence in its region, in a poll of global public
opinion, in which people in twenty countries were asked which world lead-
ers they had the most confi dence in, Chinese President Hu Jintao topped
the list.64
To be sure, China’s model of development, just like demo cratic capital-
ism, suffers from numerous fl aws. These potentially include an inability to
hold corrupt or foolish leaders to account, a lack of checks on state power,
and a reliance on benign and wise autocrats for the China model to work,
which is hardly a given— for every Deng Xiaoping, the po liti cally savvy and
foresighted architect of China’s economic reforms, one could fi nd ten Mobutu
Sese Sekos or Kim Jong Ils, dictators who used their power solely for venal
purposes. And as we will see later, those fl aws, though obscured by China’s
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134 The China Model
recent successes, may in the long run spark a global backlash against Bei-
jing, a backlash that would empower demo crats in many developing na-
tions. Rising in e qual ity within China, between the favored urban areas and
the less- well- off interior rural provinces, also threatens to unhinge China’s
economic miracle, through either growing waves of protests by rural dwell-
ers or massive pop u lar migrations that unleash instability. Already, China
has shifted from one of the most equal— if poor— nations in Asia in the
late 1970s to one of the most unequal societies today in East Asia. But for
now, China has seen relative success in its attempt to quietly impart its
model of development to other nations.
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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: The Autocrats Strike Back

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Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Democracy in Retreat
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O
ffering an alternative model of successful but undemo cratic
development to other nations, China and other authoritarian states
may implicitly be fostering today’s powerful antidemo cratic wave.
But China, Rus sia, and, to a lesser extent, Venezuela and Iran have at times
gone further. Worried by how the fourth wave of demo cratization, includ-
ing the color revolutions in places like Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, has crept
up to their borders, Beijing and Moscow have developed a range of explicit
strategies to undermine democracy among their neighbors.1 And in a num-
ber of neighboring states, including Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Cambodia,
these authoritarian powers have enjoyed some striking successes in under-
mining young democracies.
Between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, neither Moscow nor Beijing
made it a priority to forestall democracy in their neighborhoods. Weakened
by economic crises and, in the case of China, international pariah status fol-
lowing the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, both Rus sia and China spent much
of the 1990s trying to put their economies on solid footing again, reassure
investors, and foster po liti cal stability at home. Still, both countries clearly
chafed at the West’s willingness to wield power right up to their borders.
NATO expanded to include Poland and other former Warsaw Pact nations,
putting it on Rus sia’s doorstep, and also talked of including Ukraine. Mean-
while, the United States not only fostered rapprochement with old enemies
in Asia like Vietnam but also consistently declared its right to patrol the
South China Sea and other waters near China and to adjudicate disputes in
these seas.2 And though many Rus sian liberals wanted their country to join
the leading Western organizations like the International Monetary Fund and
The Autocrats Strike Back
8
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136 The Autocrats Strike Back
the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Washington refused on nu-
merous occasions, further alienating Moscow and weakening liberals in the
Kremlin.3
Quite a few Rus sians, including many opinion leaders, saw the NATO
expansion as one of many Western strategies to weaken and take advantage
of post- Soviet Rus sia. “Even pro- Western liberals worried that exclusion of
Rus sia from the emerging all- European security system based on NATO
would lead to its [Rus sia’s] marginalization,” wrote Rus sian analyst Dmitri
Trenin.4 “We do not think NATO expansion is necessary, and believe the
policy is a relapse into the Cold War,” warned Rus sian Foreign Minister Ser-
gei Lavrov.5 By the 2000s, Rus sians already angry at NATO expansion often
would argue that the color revolutions in Central Asia and the Caucasus,
which often involved some assistance from American and Eu ro pe an democ-
racy promotion groups, were the latest Western plots to weaken Rus sia.
Both China and Rus sia, once Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency,
also clearly feared that democracy in East or Central Asia would foster
regional instability and, potentially, dangerous anti- Russia and anti- China
sentiment. This was not a wholly irrational fear. In some Southeast Asian
nations, like Malaysia or Indonesia, and in some Central Asian and Cauca-
sian states, like Georgia, majorities had long seethed at wealthier or more
po liti cally advantaged Chinese and Rus sian minorities living in their midst.
Given the freedom of a newly demo cratic system, these majorities could use
their numerical dominance to repress ethnic Chinese or Rus sians. During a
previous era of freer politics in Indonesia, in the mid- 1960s, mobs massacred
thousands of Indonesian Chinese (ultimately, some 500,000 people were
killed, though they were not all Indonesian Chinese; China gave safe haven
to some fl eeing Indonesian Chinese) after accusing them of communist
leanings. The Suharto dictatorship, which came to power after the 1965– 66
massacres, suppressed much of this interethnic tension. But after Suharto
fell in 1998, in the chaos of Indonesia’s early demo cratic reforms, mobs again
attacked Indonesian Chinese communities in Jakarta and other cities, burn-
ing Chinese homes and businesses and allegedly raping and murdering
ethnic Chinese women.6
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The Autocrats Strike Back 137
Of course, in many demo cratizing nations freer politics did not result
in stigmatizing minorities. In Thailand, where, under military dictators in
the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Chinese were targeted and the teaching of Chi-
nese language was banned, the demo cratic era ushered in a new celebra-
tion of Chinese heritage.7 Politicians who once would have hid their ethnic
Chinese backgrounds now openly celebrated: visiting China in 2005, Thai
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra made a high- profi le visit to his fami-
ly’s ancestral home in southern China, which would have been unthinkable
for an earlier generation of Thai leaders.8
More often, Beijing and Moscow simply seemed more comfortable
dealing with autocratic leaders— similar to those of the Putin- era Rus sian
system or the top ranks of the Chinese Communist Party— who could oper-
ate like powerful executives. Until recently, most Chinese offi cials in Wash-
ington still had a diffi cult time understanding the American system of checks
and balances, or comprehending that the American president could not sim-
ply do what ever he liked. For example, until recently Beijing invested little
in training its offi cials to lobby the U.S. Congress or other legislatures in
demo cratic nations. By ignoring Congress, it allowed its rival Taiwan, a far
smaller player, to dominate the congressional infl uence game, and conse-
quently lost important battles on Capitol Hill, such as the attempt by Chi-
nese oil giant CNOOC to take over the American petroleum fi rm Unocal
in 2005.9 With weak lobbying efforts in Congress, Chinese offi cials were
unable to convince Capitol Hill that the CNOOC takeover would not pose
a national security risk to the United States, and Unocal wound up being
sold to the American fi rm ChevronTexaco.10
The two authoritarian powers also obviously worried that regional
demo cratization might spill over into China or Rus sia, ultimately creating a
national movement for reform like the protests that led up to the 1989
Tiananmen crackdown. Again, this was not an irrational fear. In 1989, waves
of change in Eastern Eu rope had moved from one country to the next,
with citizens in some states modeling their reform efforts on what they
had seen next door. And China and Rus sia already contained large popula-
tions of ethnic minorities who might be swayed by watching neighboring
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138 The Autocrats Strike Back
states demo cratize and offer greater freedoms and autonomy to ethnic
groups. Were these outlying areas to revolt against Beijing or Moscow, as
Chechnya did in the mid- 1990s, they could threaten the very integrity of the
state. The demo cratization of other ethnic Turkic nations like Turkey had a
profound impact on many Uighurs in Xinjiang, the vast western Chinese
province home to about ten million Muslim and ethnic Turkic Uighurs.
Long repressed by China, the Uighurs, who briefl y had a de facto state of
their own in the early twentieth century, often traveled to Central Asia and
Turkey to trade or to attend schools. Outside China these Uighurs saw
how some of their ethnic peers had built states with far greater freedom of
expression and religion and cultural identity than in China, where Muslim
worship in restive Xinjiang remained tightly controlled, with the government
dominating selections of imams, approving who could travel on pilgrimage,
and dictating religious curricula.11 “When I left East Turkestan [the Uighurs’
name for Xinjiang] then I realized that you didn’t have to have the govern-
ment control religion, there was no danger to having a state where we could
worship on our own, and it could still be a democracy,” one Uighur activist
said.12 The demo cratization of Mongolia, after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, had a similar galvanizing effect on Inner Mongolia, a province of
China home to many ethnic Mongolians. And Beijing and Moscow also
feared that demands for greater democracy among ethnic minorities could
spread into ethnic Rus sian or Han Chinese regions. In the 1980s, an era of
widespread discontent in China, major antigovernment riots in Tibet in
1987 and 1988 were followed closely by Han Chinese activists and certainly
added to the national climate of protest that culminated in the Tiananmen
uprising.13
By the mid- 2000s, several changes in Chinese and Rus sian politics, and in
the international environment, coalesced, giving Moscow and Beijing the
rationale (in their offi cials’ minds) and the means to fi ght democracy in their
backyards. For one, both giants regained their stability. The fi rst peaceful
and orderly po liti cal transitions in the history of the People’s Republic of
China, from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin, and then from Jiang to Hu
Jintao, made the Communist Party leadership more confi dent and stable—
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The Autocrats Strike Back 139
and also more able to focus on events outside China’s borders.14 A renewed
fl ow of investment into China after the stain of Tiananmen faded also
helped booster the party’s power and legitimacy.15 By the late 1990s and early
2000s, as the rest of Asia tumbled into fi nancial crisis, and the United States
and Western institutions like the International Monetary Fund reacted
slowly to the Asian crisis, China assumed a larger regional role, publicly
refusing to devalue its currency, which might have triggered a worse
crisis, and increasing its aid disbursements to some of the hardest- hit Asian
countries.16 Following the Asian fi nancial crisis, many other states in the re-
gion never forgot China’s symbolically important pledge to help other coun-
tries, even if, ultimately, that pledge was not critical to resolving the crisis.
In Rus sia, Putin’s consolidation of po liti cal power, though disastrous for
Rus sian democracy, did create a kind of stability and confi dence in the Krem-
lin, confi dence that also provided an impetus to reassert power throughout
the former Soviet Union. A spike in the price of oil meanwhile helped re-
store petroleum- rich Rus sia’s economic stability. By the latter half of the
2000s, Rus sia under Putin had used its oil wealth to amass nearly $500 bil-
lion in currency reserves, and increasingly utilized the state- controlled gas
giant Gazprom to menace neighboring nations that did not go along with
Moscow’s foreign policy objectives.17
But even as Chinese and Rus sian leaders became more confi dent in the
early and mid- 2000s, the color revolutions worried the two authoritarian
giants, leading them to take more proactive action to stifl e democracy
on their borders. Beginning with the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003
(some would add the protests in Serbia in 2000), the term “color revolu-
tions” came to mean peaceful, pop u lar movements for demo cratic change,
primarily in the former Soviet Union and old Eastern bloc, though the con-
cept eventually expanded to include Lebanon and Burma and, in 2010, the
Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. The 2003 Georgia uprising, which toppled
president (and former Soviet foreign minister) Eduard Shevardnadze, led to
elections won by pro- Western leader Mikheil Saakashvili. Several Geor-
gian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that received funding from
American philanthropist George Soros, a prominent advocate of demo cratic
change in the former Eastern bloc, played a role in the Rose Revolution, as
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140 The Autocrats Strike Back
Soros- funded NGOs helped train reformist politicians and or ga nized other
meetings for civil society activists. Though these NGOs’ role in the Rose
Revolution was overstated by many Rus sian commentators, their mere
presence, combined with the dramatic reversal in po liti cal fortunes in
Georgia, both infuriated and scared Moscow. The state- dominated Rus sian
press demonized Saakashvili, and Putin displayed an obvious contempt for
the Georgian leader (he later reportedly told French president Nicolas
Sarkozy that he had wanted to “hang Saakashvili by the balls”).18
The Rose Revolution was followed a year later by an Orange one in
Ukraine that pushed out President Leonid Kuchma, a leader who governed
autocratically and who had presided over a degeneration of freedoms in
Ukraine. As in Georgia, the Western- leaning opposition leader and favorite
of the protesters triumphed in the election following the revolution— in
Ukraine the winner was Viktor Yushchenko— leading many Rus sians to
suspect the revolt was an American undertaking.19 (Other than rhetorically
praising the Orange demonstrators and funding the National Endowment
for Democracy, which had some grantees in Ukraine, Congress and the
White House had played no role in Ukraine.) Yushchenko’s views of
Moscow certainly weren’t helped by an incident during his election cam-
paign in which someone apparently poisoned him with dioxin, nearly kill-
ing him and permanently disfi guring his face— his youthful, robust visage
became a landscape of pockmarks and cysts that resembled a Slavic Manuel
Noriega.20 Toxicologists told the BBC that the sophisticated dioxin poison
used on Yushchenko could have been produced in only a handful of labora-
tories in the world, nearly all of which are located in Rus sia or the United
States.21
By 2005, when a Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan followed the Orange
one and drove out Kyrgyz autocrat Askar Akayev, who had maintained
close ties with the Kremlin, both Moscow and Beijing clearly were rattled.
“The Rus sian leadership viewed the outbreak of the color revolutions across
the former Soviet republics from 2003 to 2005 with deep apprehension,”
concluded Jeanne Wilson, a Rus sian specialist at Harvard. “In the Rus sian
view the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine
and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan indicated the efforts of Western
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The Autocrats Strike Back 141
actors, foremost the United States, to initiate regime change in the post- Soviet
states, an ambitious undertaking that potentially extended to Rus sia itself.”22
And according to Hong Kong– based publications, after the Kyrgyz
revolution Chinese president Hu Jintao commissioned an internal party
report, titled “Fighting the People’s War Without Gunsmoke,” that outlined
how the color revolutions had toppled other regimes and proposed ways the
Chinese Communist Party could prevent such a possibility from occurring in
China.23 The Chinese leadership, too, saw the hand of the United States and
its intelligence agencies rather than local po liti cal factors as the main reason
for the color revolutions. “The ability of the color revolutions to succeed can-
not be separated from the behind the scenes manipulation by the United
States,” argued one commentator in the People’s Daily, the party’s best- known
mouthpiece.24 Refl ecting this viewpoint, the Chinese leadership reportedly
sent intelligence agents to Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan to analyze why
the revolts occurred, and to look for the hand of the United States.25 Beijing
later reportedly commissioned several state- linked think tanks to produce
analyses on the color revolutions. At a symposium on the color revolutions,
Chinese think- tank experts and intelligence offi cials presented recommen-
dations for how China could forestall its own similar pop u lar revolt.26
The revolts in the Middle East in late 2010 and early 2011 also clearly
rattled both Beijing and Moscow. Almost immediately after the initial dem-
onstrations in Tunisia and Egypt, the Chinese authorities intensifi ed their
Web fi ltering, so that Internet users in China who tried to search for the word
“Egypt” got few or no results.27 According to Chinese offi cials and press ac-
counts, the se nior leadership in Beijing also held emergency meetings to con-
sider how the Middle East protests might impact China. When an unknown
group in China posted an online call for a “Jasmine Revolution,” echoing the
Middle East protests, Beijing cracked down hard. It stepped up arrests of
human rights activists and imposed new restrictions on foreign journalists,
limits on their reporting that had not been used in China in years. Some for-
eign journalists who tried to evade the restrictions and venture out to cover
potential protests in Beijing were beaten by the Chinese security forces.28
Chinese reporters said that the climate had become the most repressive for
local journalists in at least two de cades, while even foreign scholars who
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142 The Autocrats Strike Back
previously had never had trouble with the authorities found themselves
suddenly blocked when they attempted to do work in China.
The Chinese security forces employed such tough mea sures even
though, in most recent surveys, the majority of urban middle class Chinese,
who have prospered enormously since China’s reform period began in the
late 1970s, did not seem to want to change their government. In a 2009 poll
conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, China was the
only country in which a majority of citizens supported their government’s
response to the global economic crisis— 63 percent of respondents said their
government’s efforts to address the economic crisis were “about right.”29 Of
all the countries surveyed in the poll. Another comprehensive analysis of
Chinese citizens by the U.S.- based East- West Center found that “as China’s
economic reform and growth have progressed, public interest in promoting
liberal democracy seems to have diminished,”30 since the public believes
reform might threaten economic and social gains.
China’s state- controlled press cast the Middle East protests in the most
negative light possible. It accused protesters in Arab- Muslim countries of
creating chaos that would detract from growth and potentially hurt living
standards, partly by sparking a wave of rural, poorer people— currently kept
out of richer cities by many formal and informal barriers— who would fl ood
into urban areas, competing for jobs with the urban middle classes. “The
vast majority of the people [in the Middle East] are strongly dissatisfi ed
[with the protests], so the per for mance by the minority becomes a self-
delusional ruckus,” the Beijing Daily said in one typical editorial.31
Compared with the 1990s, by the late 2000s Rus sia and China also had
the means to act on their desire to limit democracy’s spread along their bor-
ders. China’s soft power offensive had spread beyond Southeast Asia into
Central Asia and even the Caucasus, and, by training thousands of offi cials
annually from countries like Kyrgyzstan and Cambodia, Beijing now was
in a position to exert sizable infl uence over foreign governments’ decision
making. From virtually nothing, China also had become a major aid donor
in Central Asia. Many Central Asian states, like Kyrgyzstan, also had be-
come dependent on Chinese investment to develop their infrastructure, or
simply to keep their economy afl oat.32 Chinese construction fi rms laid the
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The Autocrats Strike Back 143
new roads in Kyrgyzstan and built the new pipelines. A new Chinese Peace
Corps– like program to boost people- to- people contacts with neighboring
nations, called the China Association of Youth Volunteers, added to China’s
soft power reach.33
Rus sia, too, had assumed a far greater infl uence over Central Asia and
other former Soviet states than it enjoyed in the immediate aftermath of the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Through Gazprom, the Kremlin controlled gas
deliveries for its neighbors, and in many Caucasian and Central Asian states,
where se nior leaders had begun their po liti cal careers in the Soviet Union,
Moscow’s rhetorical and cultural infl uence still mattered as well. The con-
tinuing high price of oil, which fattened the Kremlin’s trea sury, also made
Moscow’s antidemo cratic regional initiatives a rounding error in the national
bud get. In fact, as Charlie Szrom and Thomas Brugato of the American En-
terprise Institute found, from 2000 to 2007 there was an empirical correlation
between the price of oil and the Kremlin’s foreign policy aggressiveness,
with Moscow becoming more forceful when the price of oil rose.34
Worried by the color revolutions, Moscow and Beijing fi rst shored up their
own control. While in the 1980s and early 1990s Beijing had allowed vibrant
debate at the highest levels of government about transition to more open
and demo cratic politics, after Hu Jintao became president in 2003, this de-
bate largely died, and the Communist Party consolidated its control of lead-
ing companies, top offi cials and policy makers, journalists, and other opinion
leaders. The se nior leadership under Hu, in fact, contained few leaders any-
where near as liberal as Zhao Ziyang, the premier who served under Deng
Xiaoping in the 1980s and who was purged after the 1989 Tiananmen crack-
down.35 China cracked down on foreign NGOs to make sure they couldn’t
serve as instigators of unrest. Chinese security forces raided the offi ces of
several local NGOs backed by American democracy promotion organiza-
tions, and after 2005 Beijing imposed much tougher restrictions on local
NGOs, resulting in the closure of thousands of them.36 According to a re-
port by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, the government started
spending a sum of 514 billion yuan (over $60 billion) annually on what it
calls “stability maintenance,” the largest allocation of the national bud get
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144 The Autocrats Strike Back
after military expenditures.37 And, following the July 2009 protests by ethnic
Uighurs in Urumqi, the largest city in Xinjiang, Beijing turned the vast west-
ern province, larger than Western Eu rope, into a communications black hole,
shutting off Internet and international mobile phone access to the province
for nearly ten months.38 Beijing imposed similar restrictions after a new wave
of protests by ethnic Mongolians in Inner Mongolia province in early 2011.
While China essentially has no elections, after the color revolutions the
Kremlin made it even harder for Rus sia’s tiny and besieged po liti cal opposi-
tion to win any votes, building up the vicious pro- Kremlin and pro- Putin
Nashi youth movement and calling on members to prevent a color revolu-
tion in Rus sia led by Western- backed instigators— the Rus sian opposition
parties.39 These youth activists targeted the few remaining opposition lead-
ers, who were harassed and frequently attacked. Meanwhile, after leveling
much of the Chechen capital, Grozny, during several wars, the Kremlin un-
der Putin essentially installed a Moscow loyalist, Ramzan Kadyrov, as pres-
ident of the Chechen republic. In Chechnya, Kadyrov did create a semblance
of stability and growth, but did so largely by brutally repressing any anti-
Kremlin or pro- autonomy sentiment.40
But these actions were hardly surprising or, really, new— as authoritar-
ian regimes, Moscow and Beijing long had come up with ever- more- inventive
ways to maintain their hold on power at home. But after 2005, what was
different was that the two authoritarian powers tried to extend their anti-
democracy battle abroad. First, they tried to delegitimize the color revo-
lutions, by arguing that the color revolutions were not genuine pop u lar
movements but actually Western attempts at regime change that violated
the sovereignty of in de pen dent countries. This argument, though not really
supported by facts on the ground in Georgia, Ukraine, or Kyrgyzstan, did
resonate with many people around the world, since the Bush administra-
tion had of course touted democracy promotion as a reason for the invasion
of Iraq. In the wake of the Iraq war, the defense of national sovereignty,
long a foundation of Beijing’s foreign policy, since it did not want foreign
nations involving themselves with Tibet or Taiwan, made the Chinese
leadership an anti- Bush champion to many other nations. In so linking Iraq
and democracy promotion, the White House had tarred the name of
American democracy promotion, but it also had given Rus sia and China
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The Autocrats Strike Back 145
ammunition for their defense of sovereignty and provided the opportunity
for the two countries to question the color revolutions.
In May 2005, Rus sian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov previewed this
strategy of linking support for autocrats to a defense of sovereignty, arguing
in an interview that the color revolutions were “unconstitutional” overthrows
of legitimate leaders, and actually would result in greater po liti cal oppression
and instability in the international system.41 Another se nior Kremlin offi cial,
Vladislav Surkov, later would tell the German magazine Der Spiegel that the
color revolutions were simply coups by another name.42 The Rus sian Duma
soon picked up this claim, holding sessions to discuss the illegitimacy of the
Orange Revolution and then using its representatives at the Council of
Eu rope to raise the issue.43 The state- dominated Rus sian press, too, piled on,
calling the Orange protest the “orange virus” or “orange plague,” according
to Russia- watcher Thomas Ambrosio.44 The Rus sian leaders, of course, did
not differentiate between a revolution to topple an authoritarian leader who
had not been elected legitimately, and one to overthrow a fairly elected leader,
as would happen in Thailand, for instance, in 2006. To the Kremlin, a gov-
ernment in power was automatically legitimate, and so any overthrow was
necessarily wrong. Still, Ivanov’s claims carried weight internationally. “The
great issue that divides the U.N. is no longer Communism versus capitalism,
as it once was; it is sovereignty,” wrote James Traub, one of the most astute
observers of the United Nations. By standing up for “sovereignty,” even in
farcical cases like autocrats trying to prevent color revolutions, Rus sia and
China gained supporters at the UN, including many developing countries—
and not only authoritarian ones— with histories of intervention by foreign
powers.45 To be sure, the UN in the late 2000s did adopt the principle of
Responsibility to Protect, or R2P, in which the international community
could intervene in a country, violating its sovereignty, in the case of war
crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.46 But many developing
nations only halfheartedly backed the concept of Responsibility to Protect,
and both they and the authoritarian powers watered down the concept be-
tween its introduction and fi nal adoption.
Indonesia offers an example of a nation that, despite its demo cratization,
supported many of China and Rus sia’s ideas on sovereignty. Indonesia had
been a Cold War battleground, with tensions between rightists, Muslim
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146 The Autocrats Strike Back
organizations, and communists resulting in a bloodletting in 1965 and 1966
that resulted in between a half- million and one million deaths, according to
reliable estimates.47 Even today, a demo cratic government in Jakarta still over-
sees massive human rights abuses in outlying provinces like Papua, where
the security forces are accused of torture, disappearances, and killings.48
So, Indonesian leaders even today see much to support in China and Rus sia’s
concept of sovereignty. During a state visit to China in 2005 by Indonesian
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, he and China’s leaders together
affi rmed their aversion to “meddling” by foreign actors in their internal
affairs— whether that meant human rights organizations criticizing abuses
by the Indonesian security forces, or foreign governments calling for some
real reforms in Tibet or Xinjiang.49
Together, Rus sia and China also used the Shanghai Cooperation Or ga-
ni za tion (SCO), a regional group linking the two powers with several Central
Asian nations, to make the argument that color revolutions, and demo cratic
change in general, were violations of national sovereignty. At an SCO sum-
mit in 2005, the or ga ni za tion announced that “the right of every people to
its own path of development must be fully guaranteed,” a coded critique of
the color revolutions.50 It would then condemn the color revolutions as akin to
“terrorism,” attempting to link the autocrats’ fi ght against the color demon-
strators to the United States’ global war on terror. By issuing these statements
in an internationally recognized or ga ni za tion, the authoritarian powers
obtained greater global credibility for this position as defenders of absolute
sovereignty. The SCO, wrote Ambrosio, was attempting to be not another
intergovernmental talk shop but “the embodiment of a new set of values and
norms governing the future development of Central Asia. . . . Those seeking
to promote democracy [in Eurasia] will meet another, less expected layer of
re sis tance. Not only will the autocratic regimes themselves oppose demo-
cratization, but the opposition [to democracy] will fi nd resonance at the
intergovernmental level as well.”51
The or ga ni za tion also clearly portrayed electoral democracy as a kind
of Western— foreign—idea, one that was not necessarily suited for Cen-
tral Asia. Thus, when color revolutions broke out in Central Asia, SCO
offi cials could claim that the protests were somehow unsuited to Central
Asia’s traditions.
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The Autocrats Strike Back 147
In other cases, China has worked to shore up autocrats facing pop u lar
pressure, or has even helped authoritarian rulers track down and arrest
their own dissidents and critics. In one notable example, after large- scale
demonstrations in Uzbekistan in 2005, the authoritarian Uzbek regime
cracked down on protesters, killing at least several hundred in the city of
Andijon when government forces fi red indiscriminately into crowds. In
response, Uzbek activists called for foreign governments to pressure their
government to own up to the massacre and to reform. Many governments
complied, including not only the United States but also other Asian nations.
China took the opposite approach: Not long after the massacre, Beijing
praised the crackdown as necessary and then welcomed Uzbek leader
Islam Karimov in Beijing with a state visit and a gun salute, showing that
China would stand fi rmly behind him. More dangerously, China then
worked with other nations in the region to deny asylum to any refugees
fl eeing Uzbekistan.
Meanwhile, Rus sia and other Central Asian autocracies like Kazakh-
stan used their positions in the Or ga ni za tion for Security and Cooperation
in Eu rope (OSCE) to change the focus of that group from human rights
and demo cratization to other issues like counterterrorism and security co-
operation, according to numerous participants in OSCE forums.52 Such a
shift would be critical, since in the past the OSCE had been one of the lead-
ing organizations monitoring elections— and potentially criticizing whether
they were free and fair. At several OSCE meetings, Rus sia threatened that
it would cut its funding for the or ga ni za tion if election monitoring re-
mained a primary focus of the group.53 Similarly, the Kremlin allegedly used
its delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Eu rope, an
or ga ni za tion of parliamentarians, to tamp down criticism of pro- Russian
Ukrainian leaders and to critique pro– Orange Revolution Ukrainian politi-
cians.54 And Rus sia, along with several other former Soviet states, created
their own election monitoring system to observe polls in the old Soviet
Union. But unlike most internationally accepted election monitoring sys-
tems, the one created by Rus sia relied on a small circle of trusted Kremlin
allies, rather than on groups of monitors selected at random from a range of
NGOs like the Carter Center. As Ambrosio found, in nearly every election
in the former Soviet Union, these Kremlin- allied monitors approved votes
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148 The Autocrats Strike Back
as free and fair, often in sharp contrast to the reporting of those same polls
by Western Eu ro pe an monitoring organizations.55 When Eu ro pe an moni-
toring groups criticized these polls, the Kremlin, and other autocrats in the
former Soviet Union, could hold up their own monitors as evidence of free
polling and then accuse the Eu ro pe ans of applying inaccurate standards.
“The differing conclusions allowed Rus sia to discredit the external observ-
ers’ fi ndings by fostering a seemingly unwinnable ‘he said- she said’ debate,”
Ambrosio found.56
The two authoritarian powers also took more specifi c actions to under-
mine regional democracy. If Beijing and the Kremlin could undermine
demo crats, and show that their governments were less effective, more cor-
rupt, and worse for development than the authoritarian regimes that previ-
ously had run countries like Ukraine, they might be able to convince the
public in those countries to accept a return to autocratic rule— a return that
would forestall any regional demo cratic wave that might touch the two
powers.
In Ukraine, the Kremlin’s party, United Rus sia, signed an agreement
to cooperate with the party of pro- Russian Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanu-
kovych, who was hardly sympathetic to the Orange revolt.57 This deal in-
cluded plans by the Kremlin to help Yanukovych’s party in the next election.
Moscow later provided Kremlin- backed po liti cal con sul tants to advise
Yanukovych’s presidential campaign, and proved willing to sanction Ukrai-
nian elections marred by serious vote rigging, elections in which pro- Russia
candidates triumphed.58 In the winter of 2005– 06, the Kremlin went fur-
ther. Facing a government run by the Orange favorite Yushchenko, Moscow
cut off Ukraine’s discounts on natural gas. Western Eu ro pe an nations forced
the Kremlin to back off its gas threat, but the new price it negotiated with
Ukraine still was twice the old one. Later, the Kremlin would further
threaten the Orange government by questioning Ukraine’s borders and
highlighting the rights of Rus sian speakers in the Ukraine, widely believed
to be a means of further inserting the Kremlin into Ukrainian politics. The
Kremlin’s assistance, combined with the poor governing per for mance of
the post– Orange Revolution government in Kiev, did allow Yanukovych
to regain his power, and in 2010 he won the presidency. As Yanukovych
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The Autocrats Strike Back 149
consolidated his power, arresting many of the top offi cials from the Orange
government including the former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, in-
vestigating domestic and foreign NGOs working in Ukraine, and appar-
ently pressuring the media to portray him only positively, Moscow backed
him staunchly. While Moscow had tried to hike gas prices for Ukraine un-
der his pre de ces sor, with Yanukovych the Kremlin negotiated a new deal to
sell gas to Ukraine at subsidized low rates again, a deal that could help boost
Ukraine’s economy, and thus suggest that a more authoritarian leader could
deliver stronger growth than the fractious demo crats who came into offi ce
following the Orange Revolution.59
Similarly, in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and other former Soviet nations like
Moldova, the Kremlin intervened directly in attempts to reverse color revo-
lutions or to prevent new ones from occurring. In so doing, Rus sia actually
violated these nations’ sovereignty far more than any actions by American
democracy promotion organizations or funders like Soros. The Kremlin’s
youth group, Nashi, known for its aggressive tactics against democracy ac-
tivists, launched branches in other Central Asian nations, and another pro-
Kremlin youth or ga ni za tion signed an agreement to help youth groups in
Kiev.60 In Moldova, the poorest country in Eu rope but an increasingly open
democracy, the Kremlin has used its Ukrainian allies to pressure the Moldo-
van government, intermittently barred Moldovan exports from entering Rus-
sia, and taken other steps to promote parties skeptical about demo cratization.
In Kyrgyzstan, Rus sian advisers helped a series of leaders emulate the Krem-
lin’s model of po liti cal control. In part because of this Rus sian infl uence, the
respected International Crisis Group found, “Parliamentary democracy in
Kyrgyzstan has been hobbled. . . . A good example of how the Vladimir
Putin model of governance is being copied in Central Asia.” By 2010, the
top politicians in four Kyrgyz parties were traveling regularly to Moscow,
where they could compete for the Kremlin’s fi nancial support and rhetori-
cal backing.61
In Georgia, which under Saakashvili became a favorite of the Bush
administration, the Kremlin denounced the color revolution as a violation
of sovereignty and a rollback of democracy.62 Then, weeks after Moscow
cut off Ukraine’s subsidized gas in the winter of 2005– 06, an explosion
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150 The Autocrats Strike Back
disrupted natural gas pipelines from Rus sia to Georgia, plunging Georgia
into a state of fear during an exceptionally cold winter.63 Still, having failed
to force a change in the government of Georgia, including the imposition
of economic sanctions in 2006, Putin ratcheted up tensions, abetted by
Saakashvili, who himself seemed to delight in angering the Kremlin. In Au-
gust 2008, Rus sian forces took advantage of skirmishes between Georgian
troops and separatist insurgents to attack Georgia, advancing to within a
few miles of the Georgian capital. The Rus sian assault, which included the
blocking of Georgia’s harbor and the deployment of tanks out of propor-
tion to the initial skirmishing, had far more to do with teaching Georgia a
lesson— and possibly showing other demo cratizing neighbors how Moscow
would treat them— than with the ostensible dispute over Georgian- Russian
border regions. Although Rus sia portrayed its actions as a move to protect
ethnic Rus sians in the South Ossetia region of Georgia, years earlier Rus sian
intelligence ser vices and military forces had clearly tried to foster separatist
sentiment among ethnic Rus sians in South Ossetia, distributing Rus sian
passports to South Ossetians and taking many other steps to prod the re-
gion to break away, according to several reports by Eu ro pe an human rights
groups.
Perhaps even more dangerous than the direct intervention in neighbor-
ing nations, both China and Rus sia began to redefi ne the very meaning of
democracy so that, in true Orwellian fashion, the word started to lose its
meaning, which was exactly what the authoritarian powers wanted. “Rarely
has democracy been so acclaimed yet so breached,” noted Human Rights
Watch in its 2008 survey of global freedoms. “Today, democracy has be-
come the sine qua non of legitimacy . . . yet the credentials of the claimants
have not kept pace with democracy’s growing popularity. . . . Determined
not to let mere facts stand in the way [autocratic] rulers have mastered the
art of demo cratic rhetoric that bears little relationship to the principle of
governing.”64
Under Putin, the Kremlin, working with many Rus sian academics,
developed the idea of “sovereign democracy,” a concept that would provide
the Kremlin with the ideological underpinnings for Putin’s autocracy. As
one of Putin’s closest advisers defi ned it, sovereign democracy meant a
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The Autocrats Strike Back 151
“democracy” run by a highly centralized state and in which civil society is
used by the state to monitor government offi cials, yet society is not in de pen-
dent of the government.65 Sovereign democracy also meant, according to
Kremlin strategists, that each nation was free to choose its own form of
“democracy,” even if that meant holding essentially fake elections designed to
buttress an autocrat— a leader’s “sovereignty” inoculated him against for-
eign criticism of the fairness of his or her “democracy.” To maintain the
facade of democracy, in 2006 the Kremlin even created a fake opposition
party, called A Just Rus sia, designed to simulate the appearance of competi-
tion with the Kremlin- backed United Rus sia, which dominates Rus sian
politics.66
The Kremlin even created its own international NGOs that were sup-
posedly focused on democracy promotion and seemed, from the outside, to
be mirror images of Western groups like America’s National Endowment
for Democracy. But these Rus sian “NGOs” actually offered expertise and
funding to foreign leaders to help them forestall new color revolutions.67 In
Kyrgyzstan, Rus sia allegedly helped launch several NGOs, such as the Co-
ali tion of People’s Demo crats, which mostly spent its time condemning the
United States as well as opposition Kyrgyz politicians.68 In Ukraine, an
or ga ni za tion called the Rus sian Press Club and run by an adviser to Putin
posed as an NGO and helped facilitate Rus sia’s involvement in Ukrainian
elections.69 Moscow also copied a trick used for years by China, which has
fought back against American criticism of its rights record by issuing its own
annual survey of human rights in the United States, which often refers to
historical abuses like slavery.70 In 2008, Rus sia launched an “NGO” called
the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation; its job was to monitor the
human rights climate in Western nations like the United States and France.
It produced a steady stream of articles and press briefi ngs promoting Rus sia’s
style of “democracy” and taking apart America’s democracy promotion
efforts.
The Chinese leadership also wants to alter the meaning of democracy. In
his report to the 17th Party Congress, held in October 2007, President Hu
Jintao used the words “democracy” or “demo cratic” roughly sixty times, ac-
cording to one analysis.71 In its annual report on human rights, too, “Progress
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152 The Autocrats Strike Back
in China’s Human Rights,” Beijing featured a defi nition of human rights that
emphasized economic rights and material gains for average people in China,
twisting the traditional defi nition of human rights, which historically has fo-
cused more on social and po liti cal freedoms.72 This altering of the defi nition
of rights to focus primarily on economic gains was echoed by many elected
autocrats, men and women like Cambodia’s Hun Sen or Venezuela’s Hugo
Chavez. As the international monitoring or ga ni za tion Freedom House noted,
Chavez has consistently touted Venezuela’s (praiseworthy) economic gains on
his watch, such as reductions in poverty, as indicators of the progress on rights
the country has made— and as a means of avoiding discussion on po liti cal
rights, which have gone backward during his time in offi ce.73 At the United
Nations Human Rights Council, China has similarly made arguments that
twist the traditional defi nition of human rights, while trying to change the
way the Council operates so that only governments, and not human rights
groups or other civil society organizations, could make reports on human
rights to the Council.74
Many elected autocrats, like Cambodia’s Hun Sen or Malaysia’s Najib
Tun Razak, have explicitly modeled their defenses of human rights on
China’s, claiming that, like China, they have brought signifi cant economic
progress and economic liberalism to their citizens, and that these gains
overshadow any concerns about po liti cal repression.
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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: Failure of the Emerging Powers

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

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Democracy in Retreat
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R
epresenting the world’s largest democracy, which has sewn
together a nation of a billion people, as well as countless ethnic
groups, castes, and languages, Indian offi cials long have boasted of
their nation’s deep and founding commitment to democracy. And as China
and India increasingly have become global competitors— and China’s gleam-
ing infrastructure, rapid decision making, and high growth rates have
outshone India’s— Delhi has emphasized its rhetorical commitment to
democracy only more.
But to Myo, a Burmese activist, demo cratic India doesn’t look much dif-
ferent from authoritarian China.1 Worse, maybe. “At least with China, you
expect that they are going to support dictators, so it’s not that surprising,”
Myo said. “But with India, it’s not what I expected, so it was a slap to [Bur-
mese activists.]”
After working as a democracy activist in Burma, underground, for many
years, Myo fl ed the country in the mid- 2000s to work in exile. Before he left,
he sat in a dingy noodle shop in Rangoon, where customers slurped steam-
ing bowls of Burmese mohingar noodles seasoned with bits of lime and cab-
bage and slices of egg. Myo picked a table wedged deep into one dark corner
of the restaurant, where it would be hard for anyone to overhear conversa-
tion. He said he had been working for a publishing company in Rangoon,
but he covertly had to smuggle po liti cal messages into the writings he pub-
lished in magazines that focused on safe topics like soccer or Burmese rap.2
“It’s kind of a game everyone here plays, but after a while it gets so tiring,” he
said, as he stirred bits of oil into his soup broth. “I’d like to once not have to
try to fi gure out how to fool the censors over a simple article.”
Failure of the Emerging Powers
9
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154 Failure of the Emerging Powers
At fi rst, after leaving Burma Myo traveled to India, where he’d hoped
that the world’s largest democracy would prove hospitable to activists push-
ing for human rights and democracy in a repressive state on India’s borders.
“I’d heard that, before, India had been very welcoming to Burmese activ-
ists, particularly after 1988 [a period of antigovernment rioting in Burma],
so I expected it would still be,” he said. But Myo was wrong. In the 1990s,
some Indian offi cials had tried to assist Burmese democracy activists, and
India’s then- defense minister George Fernandes, a prominent human rights
advocate, even allowed some Burmese exiles to take shelter in his personal
family compound.3 But by the 2000s, Delhi had reversed its Burma policy
180 degrees. Rather than criticizing the Burmese junta, it now engaged the
generals under a new policy it called “Look East,” hosting Se nior General
Than Shwe on a state visit, during which, with no obvious irony, he visited
the monument of the revered Mahatma Gandhi.4 India ignored interna-
tional resolutions condemning the Burmese regime’s massive human rights
abuses, and it launched a policy to boost Indian investment in Burma, par-
ticularly in the valuable petroleum industry. Delhi began providing arms to
Burma, and in the fall of 2007, while tens of thousands of Burmese monks
were protesting against the government in the streets of Rangoon, Burma’s
biggest city, India’s petroleum minister traveled to Naypyidaw, the new capi-
tal of Burma that had been built by the military, to sign new agreements on
oil and gas.5 He made no mention of the massive protests going on in Ran-
goon, which ultimately would be put down with brutal force.
After Than Shwe’s visit to Gandhi’s monument, a Burma specialist for
Amnesty International commented that “it was entirely unpalatable . . . that
India could allow one of the world’s most fl agrant violators of human rights
to stain the legacy of a man who led masses to peacefully overthrow a re-
pressive colonial overlord . . . or to symbolically forsake its support for [Bur-
mese opposition leader] Aung San Suu Kyi, herself a sort of Burmese version
of Gandhi.”6 Amnesty could have launched a similar salvo at nearly every
major emerging democracy around the world. It could have blasted South
Africa, which Nelson Mandela vowed would make the promotion of de-
mocracy and human rights a pillar of its foreign policy, but which has for
years tolerated Robert Mugabe’s brutal regime next door in Zimbabwe.7 It
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Failure of the Emerging Powers 155
could have lambasted Brazil, which even as it has grown more powerful has
cozied up to Ira ni an dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well as to local
elected autocrats like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.8
By the late 2000s and early 2010s, many Western offi cials still hoped that
the big emerging democracies, the Brazils, Indonesias, and South Africas,
would eventually become regional and global champions of human rights
and demo cratization. To some Western observers, this made natural sense,
since these countries themselves had fought hard for their own democra-
cies, and surely saw the importance of strengthening demo cratic systems in
the countries around them. And yet, as India showed with Burma, such
hopes often proved naive. Unlike, say, the Netherlands or Canada, countries
like India and Indonesia suffered de cades of foreign interventions during the
Cold War that left their leaders skeptical of any policies that might violate
other countries’ sovereignty. And more often than not, these major emerg-
ing democracies shared as many strategic interests with their undemo cratic
neighbors, whom they actually had to live next to, as with the faraway West.
The end of the Cold War may have sped up the emergence of new democra-
cies in the world, but it was not until the late 1990s and early 2000s that the
United States, and other Western nations, began aggressively trying to enlist
emerging powers like India in global democracy promotion. Working with
the leaders of several new democracies, including India, the Clinton admin-
istration helped establish the Community of Democracies, a global meeting
of nations that fi rst convened in Poland in 2000.9 The group was supposed to
help promote an expansion and deepening of demo cratic norms throughout
the world, and it eventually expanded, in 2004, to create a democracies’ cau-
cus at the United Nations.10 Still, despite a request from Washington, India
declined to serve as the leader of the UN democracy caucus.11
The community of democracies established some shared demo cratic
norms and, at the UN, created a fund to help support civil society groups
that monitor elections and take other steps to promote freedom.12 At roughly
the same time, America’s National Endowment for Democracy, working
with civil society groups in many other nations, launched the World Move-
ment for Democracy, which brought together democracy activists from
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156 Failure of the Emerging Powers
around the globe to support prodemocracy organizations within autocratic
nations, as well as groups operating in existing democracies. And some
regional democracy organizations sprung up as well, from the Inter-
Parliamentary Caucus of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to the
Offi ce for the Promotion of Democracy of the Or ga ni za tion of American
States. At one gathering of the World Movement for Democracy, held in Ja-
karta in the spring of 2010, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
struck all the right rhetorical notes. “I am convinced,” Yudhoyono declared,
“that ultimately the 21st century instinct is the demo cratic instinct. . . . No
po liti cal system can ignore this.”13 Indonesia also hosted the annual Bali
Democracy Forum, at which representatives of many different emerging
democracies come together to share their experiences and learn from each
other’s stories.14
In 2008, Arizona Senator John McCain would propose a League of De-
mocracies that would strengthen cooperation among demo cratic nations.15
This concept previously had been outlined in several essays by foreign policy
specialists James Lindsay and Ivo Daalder, who argued that a “Concert of
Democracies” could work together on a range of security and economic chal-
lenges that require multilateral cooperation, as well as on promoting democ-
racy and human rights.16 Such a concert, they noted, need not be a formal
structure, with a permanent infrastructure, but could be more of an infor-
mal grouping of democracies.
Enlisting emerging powers like Brazil, India, or Indonesia in an inter-
national partnership of democracies made obvious sense; the concept of a
Concert of Democracies, in theory, could promote more effective multilat-
eral cooperation. Not only would the emerging powers’ cooperation in such
an initiative reduce any fears that democracy promotion was a stealth Amer-
ican plan for regime change around the world, but the emerging powers
often wielded far more infl uence in their own regions than the United States
or other Western democracies did. The United States slapped sanctions on
Burma in 1997 that, since that time, have signifi cantly reduced America’s
role in the country, but India, Thailand, and Indonesia, three democracies
near Burma, implemented no sanctions, and enjoy sizable trade and security
relationships with the Burmese junta.17 South Africa provides Zimbabwe
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Failure of the Emerging Powers 157
with electricity, food aid, and other lifelines, and so Pretoria carries by far
the most weight in Harare, no matter how much Robert Mugabe rails at
imagined diabolic American and British intervention in his country.18 And
while the United States wields enormous infl uence in the imagination of
many Latin American leaders, due to Washington’s history of interventions
in the Western Hemi sphere, it is Brazil’s increasingly powerful economy,
and left- leaning leaders, that now have greater infl uence over many South
and Central American leaders, particularly those from socialist backgrounds
like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega.
At times, the enthusiasm responsible for concepts like a League of De-
mocracies has seemed warranted. Besides the growth of these new inter-
national organizations of democracies, some emerging powers had taken a
stand, at times, in their own neighborhoods. In the late 1990s, under the
government of Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai, Bangkok took a tougher ap-
proach to the Burmese junta than it had under any previous administration.
Distancing itself from other Southeast Asian countries’ engagement with
Burma, Chuan’s government began criticizing the junta’s human rights
abuses and offering mea sured support for Suu Kyi and her National League
for Democracy.19 Chuan himself told American offi cials, “As prime minister
he never visited Burma. . . . He didn’t want to demonstrate any form of sup-
port or sense of legitimacy to the [Burmese] regime.”
But these examples are relatively rare. Besides its see- no- evil Burma
policy, India took a hands- off approach to its neighbor Sri Lanka, which
under the government of President Mahinda Rajpaksa crushed the Tamil
Tiger rebel movement in the spring of 2009, and in the pro cess tried to de-
stroy Sri Lanka’s press, civil society, and opposition parties, as well as indis-
criminately shelled Tamil civilians in the north of the country.20 At the UN,
Delhi blocked a resolution tabled in the Human Rights Council that would
have condemned Rajpaksa’s actions.21 Instead India praised the Sri Lankan
government for its handling of the aftermath of the war against the Tigers,
during which the Sri Lankan government allegedly executed Tigers who
surrendered and garrisoned tens of thousands of Tamil civilians in prison-
like camps.22 And after Chuan’s party lost in the 2001 national elections to
Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand once again launched close ties with the
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158 Failure of the Emerging Powers
Burmese military regime and all but ignored human rights abuses by its
neighbor. Thaksin claimed his government “worked to bring Myanmar
[Burma] in from the cold,” and helped push the junta to draft a proposal for a
transition to democracy— a proposal widely criticized by international hu-
man rights groups as actually paving the way to a sham election in Burma
that installed the military’s favored party in power.23 Under Thaksin, Thai-
land also drastically increased its trade with and investment in Burma: Be-
tween 2003 and 2008, Burma’s exports to Thailand more than doubled,
including sizable exports of natural gas.24
After a coup deposed Thaksin in 2006, a military- backed government
in Bangkok continued the policy of engagement, with Thai companies in
2010 making a $13.3- billion investment in a new Burmese deep- sea port,
the largest- ever Thai investment in its neighbor.25 Indeed, in 2010 and 2011,
Burma received some $20 billion in new foreign investment, the highest
year- on- year fi gure in its history; the vast majority of that investment came
from neighboring nations, including democracies like India, Thailand, and
South Korea.26 Thailand, which during the Vietnam War era sheltered tens
of thousands of Indochinese refugees, in 2009 also forced some three thou-
sand Hmong, an ethnic minority group, back to Laos, even though many
of the Hmong, who once fought against the communists in Vientiane,
might face persecution back at home.27 And in fact, after being pushed
back to Laos many of the Hmong were corralled into areas that appeared
to be prison camps, and foreign reporters who attempted to visit these areas
were banned. Some of the Hmong refugees simply vanished.28
Like Thailand and India, South Africa, Turkey, and Brazil sometimes
mouth the rhetoric of rights and democracy promotion. After the end of
apartheid, many human rights activists had high hopes for South Africa’s
ruling African National Congress (ANC), which after all had benefi ted
from a global pressure movement when its members were fi ghting against
white rule. Under Mandela, the ANC passed one of the most progressive
constitutions in the world, and South African leaders helped broker an end
to confl icts across the continent. ANC leaders at times condemned atrocities
in Zimbabwe, as well as abuses in other countries like Burma and Sri
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Failure of the Emerging Powers 159
Lanka.29 Yet in recent years Pretoria has used its infl uence at the UN, and
at African organizations, not only to protect the regime in Zimbabwe but
also to veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning rights abuses in
Burma.30 Asked during a visit to Harare about Zimbabwe’s co ali tion gov-
ernment, in which Mugabe used security forces to intimidate and kill mem-
bers of the opposition Movement for Demo cratic Change, South African
President Jacob Zuma blithely told reporters that “it is indeed very encour-
aging to note the signifi cant progress that has been made under the auspices
of the inclusive government” in Zimbabwe.31 Perhaps unable to conceal his
delight, Mugabe, speaking after Zuma, declared, “The inclusive government
is alive and well.”32 Mugabe’s allies would continue beating supporters of
other po liti cal parties, using trumped- up criminal charges to intimidate op-
position politicians, and persecuting independent- minded judges, reporters,
and civil society activists, according to a comprehensive investigation by
Human Rights Watch.33
In 2011, Zuma seemed to take a slightly tougher line toward Zimbabwe,
declaring at a regional conference in March 2011 that state violence against
opposition politicians must stop; one of Zuma’s top advisers, Lindiwe Zulu,
declared that “people [in Zimbabwe] want to see democracy.” Still, Zuma
took few concrete actions to pressure Zimbabwe to hold free and fair elec-
tions, even as Zimbabwean researchers released reports showing that voter
rolls in the country were stuffed with at least two million ineligible voters,
all likely to “support” Mugabe’s party.
Pretoria also opposed the multinational effort to end the brutal regime
of Libya’s Muammar Qadaffi , ignored international efforts to bring Suda-
nese leader Omar al- Bashir to justice for crimes against humanity at the
International Criminal Court, and generally remained mute about reports
of massive rights violations in other young African democracies, from Kenya
to Nigeria.34 Even after Qadaffi ’s regime had already fallen, and the dictator
and his family were on the run, Zuma’s government refused to recognize the
new, transitional government of Libya and played a lead role in getting the
African Union to delay recognition. The South African leadership refused
even to allow the Dalai Lama to make a visit to the country in 2009 for a
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160 Failure of the Emerging Powers
conference of Nobel laureates, presumably for fear of angering China— a
decision that drew the rebuke of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South Afri-
ca’s own Nobel Peace laureate.35
While Brazilian President Lula did speak out against some egregious
human rights abuses, and offered asylum to an Ira ni an woman sentenced
to be stoned to death for adultery, his government mostly ignored democ-
racy promotion and human rights in other nations. Lula called on Venezu-
elan leader Hugo Chavez to tone down his fi ery anti- American rhetoric,
according to one U.S. embassy cable released by Wikileaks, but he did not
push the Venezuelan to address some of his autocratic tendencies.36 Ques-
tioned by a Newsweek reporter about why Venezuela was allowed to partici-
pate in a South American trade bloc that is supposed to be open only to full
democracies that respect human rights, Lula responded, “Give me one ex-
ample of how Venezuela is not demo cratic.” When the reporter listed Chavez’s
crackdown on in de pen dent media, trade unions, and po liti cal rivals, Lula
casually said, “That’s not the [Venezuelan] government’s version.”37 On an-
other occasion, Lula called Chavez “the best president of Venezuela in the
last 100 years.”38 And even though Lula himself got his start in trade unions
and opposition politics during what was a relatively repressive atmosphere
in Brazil at that time, he also pointedly refused to join regional condemna-
tion of human rights abuses in Cuba. When a prominent Cuban po liti cal
prisoner named Orlando Zapata Tamayo went on a hunger strike (he ulti-
mately died in the midst of his strike, approximately two and a half months
later), Lula seemed to ridicule Tamayo’s struggle, likening the activist to a
criminal who was trying to gain publicity to get out of jail. Meeting with
Cuban leader Raul Castro, Lula pointedly declined to even mention the
hunger strike or other abuses.39 Along with Turkey, Lula also took a simi-
larly accommodating view toward Ira ni an leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
even after Ahmadinejad’s government crushed the Green protest movement
that erupted in mid- 2009, jailing hundreds of opposition supporters and al-
legedly torturing and even killing some of the most prominent opposition
leaders.40 Together, Lula and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo-
gan traveled to Tehran, where they appeared in an embrace together with
Ahmadinejad after allegedly brokering a solution to the Ira ni an nuclear
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Failure of the Emerging Powers 161
program— one that most experts on Iran believed simply bought Tehran
more time to develop a nuclear weapons program.41 Lula’s successor, Dilma
Rouseff, who also had been persecuted by past military governments in
Brazil, stepped back from some of Lula’s most obvious embraces of abusers,
such as his courting of Iran. But she continued the country’s close ties to
Chavez, rarely criticizing the Venezuelan leader.
There are exceptions to the emerging powers’ abdication. Poland, the
largest and most powerful of the newer entrants to the Eu ro pe an Union,
and a country that had its own demo cratic revolution, has used its infl uence
to support reformers in other Central and Eastern Eu ro pe an nations, such
as Belarus. As the Belorus sian government cracked down on opposition
movements in the winter of 2010– 11, Poland’s leaders decried the repression
and called for the Eu ro pe an Union to enact strict punishments against Be-
larus, including travel bans on its leaders and bank account freezes. Poland
also bankrolled opposition radio and tele vi sion stations broadcasting un-
censored news into Belarus.42
But Poland is an exception; Brazil and South Africa are the norm.
Often, these weak policies drew international condemnation, like Amnesty’s
chastising of India for is approach to the Burmese junta. Even President
Obama, who wanted to consolidate his pre de ces sor’s historic outreach to
India, chided Delhi mildly during a trip to India in the fall of 2010. “If I can
be frank, in international fora, India has often shied away from some of
these issues [like Burma],” Obama said, to the annoyance of his hosts.43 (The
Obama administration would later launch its own engagement with the
Burmese government, but would take a cautious approach, retaining sanc-
tions on new investment in the country and keeping American aid fl ows
into Burma to a trickle.) But the most stinging critiques came from the citi-
zens of affected countries themselves, men and women like Myo who had
hoped for more from the new demo cratic powers. “I am saddened with
India. I would like to have thought that India would be standing behind us.
That it would have followed in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and
Jawaharlal Nehru,” Suu Kyi told the Indian Express newspaper.44 Or as
another Burmese exile said, after years of living like a fugitive in Thailand
and watching the Thai government coddle the Burmese generals: “Thai
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162 Failure of the Emerging Powers
people will protest for democracy here [in Thailand] but in Burma they’d
just as soon watch us die.”45
The emerging powers’ abdication of interest in international human
rights or democracy did more than just hurt the efforts of activists like Suu
Kyi or Myo. By taking a limited— or nonexistent— role in international
democracy promotion efforts, countries like South Africa or Brazil or Tur-
key made it easier for autocratic leaders to paint democracy promotion as a
Western, and alien, activity, or even to portray it as an illegal intervention
similar to Western meddling in the Cold War in such places as Iran, Gua-
temala, and Chile, where Western intelligence organizations backed coups
against left- leaning leaders. Eva Golinger, a prominent Venezuelan- American
attorney who often advocates the worldview of Chavez’s government, charged
that democracy promotion was the latest American excuse for forceful re-
gime change, a view echoed by leaders of many other autocratic regimes.46
Again, as Western powers bombed Libya in the winter and spring of 2011, to
assist rebel forces battling Muammar Qadaffi ’s regime, many emerging
demo cratic powers harshly criticized the intervention, creating space for
some of Qadaffi ’s closest friends, like Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, to
condemn the intervention as neo- imperialism.47 Turkey, for example, strongly
opposed the Libya intervention, with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan call-
ing it “unthinkable” and “absurd.” South Africa did the same, calling for an
investigation into the war crimes committed in the toppling of Qadaffi , and
mostly ignoring that Qadaffi himself had not only committed massive
abuses over his forty- year rule but also played a role in stoking sub- Saharan
African confl icts from Chad to Liberia.
Indeed, by studying the voting patterns of the major emerging democ-
racies at the United Nations, the Democracy Co ali tion Project and Ted
Piccone of the Brookings Institution clearly show that most of these new
giants adhere to strict principles of nonintervention and sovereignty.48
India’s voting record at the United Nations— the General Assembly, the
Rights Council, and the Security Council— shows that while it occasionally
supports democracy, it “maintains that democracy must not be imposed on
other countries” and so still favors nonintervention, the study revealed. In-
donesia’s voting record reveals that it opposes nearly every human rights
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Failure of the Emerging Powers 163
and democracy initiative at the United Nations, even though within the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations, where Indonesia is the leading
member, Jakarta has forcefully pushed for the creation of a human rights
body. Brazil’s voting patterns, though more unpredictable, also tend to
favor nonintervention, unless “supporting democracy or human rights will
help [Brazil] to further its own goals of consolidating regional leadership,”
Piccone’s study notes. Turkey, which benefi ted signifi cantly in the 1990s
and early 2000s from democracy assistance from Eu rope and the United
States, also generally has avoided pushing for rights in its UN votes, al-
though in the past year it has become more critical of Arab autocracies, such
as Syria, that have brutalized their own citizens. (In October 2011, Turkish
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu criticized the UN for not forcefully
condemning Syria’s crackdown on its citizens, saying, “What is taking place
in Syria is not a domestic issue of Syria. It has become a tragedy for the hu-
manity.”)49 And South Africa is perhaps the most disappointing in the study
of UN voting rec ords. Repeatedly at the United Nations, South Africa’s
postapartheid leadership has allied itself with autocratic regimes in votes,
generally ignoring democracy movements in these authoritarian countries.50
Like India and Indonesia, South Africa normally just abstained from any
resolutions scrutinizing human rights abuses in other nations, even in such
extreme examples as North Korea and Sudan, whose governments alleg-
edly had committed massive crimes against humanity including, potentially,
genocide. South Africa also refused to join a call for a special UN Human
Rights Council session on Burma, whose abuses ranked on par with those of
North Korea and Sudan.51 Among emerging demo cratic powers studied by
Piccone, only South Korea consistently voted for resolutions condemning au-
thoritarian regimes like Burma and Sudan, or for resolutions creating man-
dates to monitor human rights abuses in these authoritarian states.52
Though they attracted criticism, the policies of these emerging demo cratic
powers made some sense— in their own domestic contexts. The concept of
nations’ absolute sovereignty, promoted by authoritarian nations like China,
also resonated intensely with the new emerging demo cratic powers. Many of
them, like India and Indonesia, had been leading members of the nonaligned,
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164 Failure of the Emerging Powers
anti- imperialism movement during the Cold War, and felt extremely un-
comfortable joining any international co ali tion that sought to undermine
other nations’ sovereignty, even if potentially for a good reason.53 “The inter-
nal anticolonial strain in the newly in de pen dent India morphed into sus-
tained anti- imperialist posturing within the po liti cal discourse on world
affairs [during the Cold War],” notes India specialist C Raja Mohan.54 India
allied itself with the Soviet Union, while the United States tilted toward
Pakistan. Though the end of the Soviet empire, and the bankruptcy of In-
dia’s state- dominated economic model in the early 1990s, would undermine
some Indian leaders’ faith in nonalignment and socialism, among Indian
elites and, particularly, older members of the Indian left this antipathy
toward any international efforts led by Western powers, and this defense of
absolute sovereignty, remained strong. What’s more, India— like China,
Indonesia, and many other newer powers, demo cratic or not— still wor-
ries about maintaining its own territorial integrity, particularly in relation
to Kashmir, and so it wondered whether any international effort, even on
democracy or human rights, might eventually rebound against Delhi.
India’s attitudes were hardly unique. Other emerging powers, includ-
ing Indonesia and Turkey, want to avoid criticism of their own human rights
abuses, in restive regions like Papua, a province in eastern Indonesia where
security forces have harshly repressed dissent, or in Kurdish regions of Tur-
key. And during the Cold War, African National Congress leaders like
Zuma and his pre de ces sor, Thabo Mbeki, watched as the United States
vetoed congressional legislation that would have punished apartheid, and as
Western nations pursued a relationship with South African scientists even
as some government- linked apartheid era scientists pursued programs to
poison ANC leaders.55 Not surprisingly, many ANC leaders developed an
intense animus toward the West; some close associates of Mbeki believed
that his fear of outside powers, including scientists, trying to destroy the
ANC was one factor behind his strange, highly counterproductive beliefs
about AIDS, including questioning whether HIV causes AIDS and allow-
ing his government to recommend natural remedies, including garlic and
lemons, to treat HIV.56 Other emerging powers today also were victimized
by Western interventions during the Cold War: the Eisenhower adminis-
tration backed an ill- fated rebellion by outlying Indonesian islands against
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Failure of the Emerging Powers 165
the Sukarno government in the late 1950s. So, in countries like Indonesia,
where a younger, post– Cold War generation of po liti cal leaders has not yet
taken power, most of the po liti cal class still instinctively views aggressive
democracy promotion— and virtually any Western initiatives that threaten
countries’ sovereignty— with suspicion, even if some Indonesian liberals
supported efforts like the Bali Democracy Forum.
Combined with this lingering suspicion of the West, leaders in many
emerging powers realize that, on issues other than democracy and human
rights, their interests do not always coincide with those of established
democracies— and that, even on democracy promotion and rights advo-
cacy, the institutions and structures were created by Western powers, dur-
ing the Cold War, with little input from countries like Brazil or India.
If democracies are going to challenge autocracies’ sovereignty, nations like
South Africa, Brazil, and India want to have the authority to help decide
when such challenges to sovereignty are appropriate and when they are not.
And as long as they are not granted that authority, whether through the
United Nations or other international institutions, Pretoria or Brasilia will
take stands at the United Nations supporting the sovereignty of even atro-
cious regimes like Burma or Iran. At summits of the so- called BRIC nations
(Brazil, Rus sia, India, and China), these emerging powers have challenged
many established international institutions, including the makeup of the UN
Security Council and the use of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.57
Though two of these BRIC members are autocracies, the demo cratic mem-
bers supported challenges to international institutions just as strongly.
Indeed, as a developing nation that does not want to be penalized for
polluting the environment as severely as a developed country, India has
allied with China to push developed nations, like the United States, to play
a larger role in reducing emissions, and to argue that Delhi and Beijing
cannot afford prohibitive emissions caps, which would undermine their
growth. India also has allied itself with China and Saudi Arabia, among
other autocracies, in trying to reduce the power of the International Mone-
tary Fund in managing global fi nancial crises.58
In many cases, too, these new demo cratic powers, less secure in their
regional environments than, say, Britain or Norway, are more willing to live
with stable but autocratic neighbors than to risk destabilizing their regions.
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166 Failure of the Emerging Powers
The British and Norwegian governments need not fear, today, that problems
in Sweden or Ireland could destabilize the United Kingdom or Norway. But
India and South Africa do not enjoy such luxury. The chaotic border be-
tween India and Burma allows a myriad of armed insurgent groups, includ-
ing several fi ghting for their own homelands in India’s fractious northeast,
to smuggle weapons, people, and narcotics; the porous frontier between
South Africa and Zimbabwe includes large networks of people smuggling.59
And, the instability that already exists makes leaders in these emerging
democracies very wary of encouraging any more change, even if that change
might ultimately benefi t a vast majority of people.
Democracy advocates inside Burma or Zimbabwe would argue that
these autocratic regimes, by their nature, foster instability— massive refugee
outfl ows that suck up neighbors’ resources, waves of pop u lar unrest that
occasionally spill over borders, illicit economic activity like drug smuggling.
After all, at least a million Burmese refugees already have fl ed to Thailand
(the real number is probably much higher), and some two million Zimba-
bweans have crossed the border into South Africa.60 Yet despite the dangers
Burma or Zimbabwe exports, sizable fear exists among leaders in Bangkok
or Delhi or Pretoria that, in a po liti cal transition, the chaos and instability
exported would be far worse. “The situation [on the Thai- Burmese border]
isn’t good now, but it’s been mostly the same for de cades,” one Thai offi cial
said. “So no one wants to mess with it.”61
Of course, in some cases, certain constituencies within the emerging
powers prosper from their relationships with autocracies, and so have no
reason to support democracy promotion and human rights advocacy. The
Thai military and police, for example, long have utilized their presence
along the Burmese border, and their connections in Burma, to exploit natu-
ral resources and drugs that trade across the border. (In the 1950s, Thai
Police General Phao Sriyonand allegedly became one of the largest opium
traffi ckers in Asia.)62 Brazilian construction companies have established a
large presence in Venezuela, a presence that necessarily requires some court-
ing of Chavez’s government.63 Such interests exist in Western democracies,
too: American oil fi rms do business in Equatorial Guinea, where they lav-
ishly support that petro- state’s thuggish regime, and French oil companies
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Failure of the Emerging Powers 167
prosper from their ties to Gabon, where they enjoy a cozy relationship with
Gabon’s nepotistic regime.64 But in these longer- established democracies,
businesses’ relationships with authoritarian regimes often are balanced by
the advocacy of well- established human rights groups, democracy promo-
tion organizations, muckraking journalists, and other civil society associa-
tions. American oil fi rms may invest in Equatorial Guinea, but Mother
Jones will write a biting story chronicling their dealings, and human rights
groups will make sure this article gets into the hands of congressional in-
vestigators probing Equatorial Guinea; French oil companies may do busi-
ness in Gabon, but oil transparency organizations based in Paris and London
will make sure that sunlight is thrown on their corporate practices. But in
younger or weaker democracies like Thailand or South Africa or even Brazil,
civil society and the press are not necessarily so strong, and so powerful
groups that favor doing business with authoritarian neighbors can prevail
more easily. In Thailand, offering any criticism in the media of the army’s
policies, even over a subject like doing business in Burma, could prove haz-
ardous to a reporter’s health.
All these concerns— that change fosters instability, that Indian or
Brazilian or South African business groups will be hurt by their govern-
ments advocating democracy, that democracy promotion will link leaders
too closely with the United States— are exacerbated by having to compete
with authoritarian powers for the resources and the friendship of nations
like Burma, Venezuela, or Iran. In the early 1990s, the period when some
Indian offi cials like George Fernandes more strongly backed the Burmese
prodemocracy movement, Delhi could in some ways afford to antagonize
the Burmese government. At that time, the Burmese junta was still strug-
gling to attract investment following years of xenophobic socialism, and
India’s potential rival, China, had not yet established a sizable economic
presence in Burma. But by the early 2000s, when India sharply altered its
Burma policy, engaging the generals, it did so in large part because it feared
it was losing to China in a battle for Burma’s resources— its oil, gas, deep-
sea ports, and other attractions. In the 2000s and early 2010s, Chinese com-
panies built a new petroleum pipeline for annually transporting roughly
240,000 barrels of oil to China per day, as well as some twelve billion cubic
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168 Failure of the Emerging Powers
meters of gas. Smaller Chinese fi rms came to dominate business across
northern Burma, where they imported electronics, industrial goods, and
virtually every other fi nished product and exported gems, logs, and other
natural resources to China.65 Chinese fi rms built a port in Burma that
could help Chinese intelligence gather information on Indian activities and,
feared some Indian strategists, could be part of a larger plan to encircle
India with Chinese ports.66
Concerned it was losing out strategically, eco nom ical ly, and diplomati-
cally, India changed course with Burma. The Burmese regime made sure
that its giant demo cratic neighbor received some benefi t from its policy
shift, though India certainly never gained the type of economic infl uence in
Burma that China has. India obtained the right to build several hydro-
power dams in Burma, and was given a chance to modernize a different
Burmese port.67 “This is a major strategic victory for us,” Indian power and
commerce minister Jairam Ramesh told Indian reporters.68
This fear of losing out to China on business and strategic deals if
an emerging democracy focused too much on promoting democracy was
hardly restricted to Burma. Indian concerns about China’s growing infl u-
ence in Sri Lanka, where Beijing also was building new ports, added to
Delhi’s decision to remain quiet, in 2008 and 2009, as Colombo committed
massive human rights abuses in the waning days of the battle against the
Tamil Tigers.69 A desire to push back against the rising infl uence of China
in Central Asian states like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, where many people
are of Turkic heritage and have cultural ties to Turkey, surely was a factor
in Ankara’s diplomatic overtures to the region, which also make little men-
tion of democracy or human rights abuses, even though Turkey routinely
positions itself as a kind of model Muslim democracy. And China’s rapid
and sizable investments across sub- Saharan Africa, where it has gone from
having little presence two de cades ago to being the continent’s largest trad-
ing partner and greatest source of fi nance and aid, has made other emerg-
ing powers in Africa, including South Africa and India, reconsider whether
they might lose commercial deals if they prioritize human rights and de-
mocracy in places like Angola and Congo, two countries where China has
made billions in investments.70
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Failure of the Emerging Powers 169
In Delhi, Pretoria, Brasilia, and other capitals of emerging powers,
some opinion leaders argue that, in the long run, democracy would be these
states’ competitive advantage, and that they would devalue that advantage
by seeking to out- China China, which they could never do anyway. “We
came to be seen as no different from China in pursuing a policy of uncon-
ditional support to the [Burmese] junta,” wrote Indian strategic analyst B
Raman, a former se nior offi cial in the Indian intelligence agency— a senti-
ment confi rmed to me by many Burmese activists, who wonder why India
would try to match China’s policy toward Burma when it could naturally
appeal to Burma’s reformers, who one day, most likely, will run the Bur-
mese government.71 After all, China’s support for the Burmese govern-
ment, along with an infl ux of Chinese businesspeople into central Burma,
led to a spike in anti- China sentiment, symbolized by a near- riot in the
Burmese city of Mandalay in the spring of 2011, after an argument between
Burmese and Chinese gem traders.72 Activists instead urge their leaders to
look back to their nations’ demo cratic heritage, or to their history of opposi-
tion to their own military dictatorships. And they suggest that, in the long
run, when citizens of nations like Zimbabwe or Iran or Burma have freed
themselves of their current autocratic rulers, those demo crats now in power
would remember— and reward— nations that stood by them when they
were fi ghting in opposition. But how could they be so sure? After all, when
they, the leaders of the ANC, or the Brazilian trade union opposition, had
fi nally reached the presidential palace, they quickly seemed to forget demo-
crats in other countries.
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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: Failure of the West

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Democracy in Retreat
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A
s we have seen, democracy in the early part of the twenty- fi rst
century faces a serious range of threats, from empowered authori-
tarians to conservative middle classes to emerging giants uninter-
ested in democracy promotion. Yet the idea that democracy eventually,
ultimately, will be the end state of every nation on earth remains a powerful
concept. This idea of the inevitability of progress has existed for centuries,
since the Enlightenment, but in the past twenty years it was enunciated so
clearly by Fukuyama— an inevitability still publicly embraced by nearly
every major Western leader, despite the global democracy recession of the
past de cade, and despite the West’s own unwillingness to actually come to
the aid of embattled demo crats around the world. Obama himself, in a
2010 speech to the United Nations General Assembly captured this con-
cept of the inevitability of demo cratization, even if he was not prepared to
stake his presidency on promoting this idea in the Middle East. “History is
on the side of liberty,” Obama told the gathering of world leaders. “Democ-
racy, more than any other form of government, delivers for our citizens.”1
As we will see in the next chapter, in the long run democracy probably
is the best po liti cal system— not only because it allows people essential free-
doms but also because it provides the transparency and rule of law that in
the long run foster prosperity. Still, it is a mistake to assume that just be-
cause democracy has survived previous reverse waves in the 1930s and late
1960s— and in other times when undemo cratic governments gained global
power and nascent democracies in places like Germany and Latin America
and Greece fell prey to coups and other government takeovers— it is
predestined to survive in the developing world today. As po liti cal scientist
Failure of the West
10
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Failure of the West 171
Azar Gat notes in his study of the history of democracy, the Allies did not
win the Second World War because (excepting the Soviet Union) they were
demo cratic and held some moral high ground. They won because they
were the world’s industrial powers, facing off against two medium- sized
powers, Germany and Japan, which had nowhere near the industrial might
or the population of the Allies.2 Similarly, the Soviet Union collapsed in the
late 1980s not primarily because of its lack of po liti cal freedom, though its
collapse did trigger demo cratic change in other Eastern Eu ro pe an states,
but because its noncapitalist economic model, always fl awed, had reached
its limits and fi nally had begun to die.
What’s more, today democracy faces greater challenges than in the
previous two major reverse waves mentioned above. Though the Cold War
is now long over and some of the strategic factors that led the United States
and other Western powers to support autocratic rulers around the world
have vanished, other developments have empowered autocracy, including
the growing power of China, the global economic crisis, the decline of the
West, and the poor leadership of emerging democracies. These challenges
have no easy solutions, particularly when the United States’ democracy pro-
motion efforts have proven so shortsighted and infl exible.
We have touched upon some of the reasons why this current reverse wave of
antidemo cratization may be more serious than the reverse waves in the
1930s, 1960s, and early 1970s. But it is important to look at these threats to
democracy today together, and at how Western nations are failing in their
democracy promotion efforts. For one, the third and fourth waves are
vulnerable partly because democracy proliferated to a larger, more diverse
group of countries— in parts of the developing world like the Middle East
and Africa that had not played a part in the previous waves. In some ways,
of course, this spread strengthens democracy— when only a tiny handful
of countries, primarily in Eu rope and North America, fi t the defi nition of
democracies enunciated in the fi rst chapter, the possibility always existed
that, due to war or po liti cal change, democracy could be wiped off the
planet entirely. This is not going to happen today, since democracy, at least
in some form, has spread so widely around the globe. But, as we have seen,
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172 Failure of the West
in the third and fourth waves, democracy came far faster to many nations
than in the previous waves, to countries that had only recently gained in de-
pen dence, or still lacked the foundations for solid growth, or remained
quite poor, or had such a weak rule of law that demo cratization made graft
worse. Because their demo cratic foundations are so weak, these third and
fourth wave nations are far more vulnerable to reversals than are many of
the countries in the fi rst and second waves of democracy’s spread, many
of which had more time to consolidate change and create stable demo cratic
institutions before facing the reverse waves of the 1930s and 1960s.
Because of the weakness of the newest democracies, the duration pre-
ceding the reversal of some of their gains has shortened, compared with
previous reverse waves. And since the reverse waves come so much more
quickly today, they pose a serious threat to these young democracies. While
third wave nations like Thailand took more than a de cade before recalci-
trant, conservative elements of the middle class, combined with an aggres-
sive military, were able to undermine even the most nascent reforms, in
countries that have seen the Arab uprisings, such as Egypt, this reversal took
less than a year to occur. In other third wave nations like the countries of
Eastern Eu rope, working class anger at the lack of improvements in eco-
nomic well- being during the demo cratic, post– Berlin Wall period, eventu-
ally led, over a de cade or more, to growing dissatisfaction with democracy
and, in some countries like Rus sia and Ukraine, a revival of authoritarian
leaders who promised higher growth and stability in exchange for weak-
ened demo cratic freedoms. In fourth wave countries like Malawi and Indo-
nesia, this dissatisfaction with the lack of equitable growth, and the rise and
spread of corruption, led to pop u lar sympathy for authoritarian rule in less
than a de cade from the time of demo cratization. Only a year after the ini-
tial uprisings in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, weak growth, crime, chaos, and
growing corruption already led to authoritarian nostalgia among the mid-
dle and upper classes.
Although the role of outside actors in demo cratization can be overstated,
they can play a substantial part; American democracy promotion does
matter, especially in states where the United States historically has wielded
outsized infl uence, such as Thailand or Liberia. “The strong, positive in-
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Failure of the West 173
corporation of democracy as a mutually reinforcing goal alongside US eco-
nomic and security interests in some places . . . has helped fi rm up the idea
in these countries or regions that democracy is the normal, expected out-
come,” writes Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for Interna-
tional Peace. In addition, he notes, during the 1990s, American assistance
for reform- minded civil society groups helped promote democracy in many
nations, and American diplomatic involvement at times helped stop threat-
ened coups in places like Ec ua dor and Paraguay.3 Indeed, a study of Amer-
ican democracy aid in the 1990s by researchers from Vanderbilt University
found that U.S. democracy assistance generally helped speed the pace of suc-
cessful demo cratization in developing nations.4 Meanwhile, the Eu ro pe an
Union’s increasingly aggressive democracy promotion, as well as the allure
of joining the EU itself, created powerful incentives for nations in Eastern
Eu rope in the 1990s to maintain reformist policies and alter their laws to
conform to the progressive norms of the EU. After the end of the Cold
War, the EU also provided substantial economic assistance to former East-
ern bloc countries like Poland, offered expertise in creating new po liti cal
institutions, and monitored their progress toward democracy, as part of the
preparation for future EU accession.5
Yet Western nations have too often made critical mistakes in their
democracy promotion: they have focused too much attention on whether
countries hold regular national elections, on the emergence of one charis-
matic and reform- minded “big man” leader like Susilo Bambang Yudhoy-
ono in Indonesia or Ellen Johnson- Sirleaf in Liberia, and on the ability of
new democracies to follow a pro cess of demo cratization that has become a
one- size- fi ts- all routine. This one- size- fi ts- all demo cratization strategy rarely
takes into account local cultural and economic conditions. What’s more,
Western powers, including the United States, too often do not look at either
the quality of the elections, the strength of other institutions besides elec-
tions, the complex characteristics of their favored “big man,” or— perhaps
most important— the level of public support in that nation for demo-
cratization.
Often, the focus on regular elections con ve niently makes it easier to
argue that a developing country is a success and move on; the West has
been relatively comfortable with weak democracies. As democracy theorist
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174 Failure of the West
Larry Diamond notes, “Despite . . . po liti cal scientists warning of ‘the
fallacy of electoralism,’ the United States and many of its demo cratic allies
have remained far too comfortable with this superfi cial form of democ-
racy.”6 Counting a developing nation as a success thus allows Western na-
tions to justify an alliance with that country, or providing aid to it, or investing
there. This despite the fact that, in many developing nations, transitioning
from authoritarianism local citizens recognize that regular elections, even
if held freely and fairly, might not be the highest priority at the outset of
their demo cratic era. Two months after the collapse of Hosni Mubarak, a
poll of Egyptians, taken by the Pew Research Center, found that only about
half of Egyptians thought “honest, multiparty elections” were most impor-
tant in the country’s transition. Nearly 80 percent, by comparison, believed
that “a fair judiciary” was most important, and over 80 percent believed that
“improved economic conditions” were most important.7
It was in Cambodia in the late 1990s and early 2000s that I fi rst noticed this
easy ac cep tance of elections as the end- all of demo cratic change. Nonprofi t
workers at that time gathered most eve nings at one of the bars in Phnom
Penh along the slow- moving, chocolaty Mekong River to drink Tiger beer
over ice and snack on bowls of sliced chicken fl avored with piquant sliced
ginger and tiny, powerful chilis. In the run- up to the election in 1999, Cam-
bodian human rights groups and opposition parties had been reporting
numerous instances of intimidation, from beatings of opposition campaign-
ers to money being handed out to village chiefs to convince people to vote
for the ruling party. This type of intimidation had become common in
Cambodia during the 1990s, where the legacy of the Khmer Rouge geno-
cide had left a shattered and traumatized population, a high incidence of
violence, and a surplus of weapons. The crime pages of the local news-
papers read like horror scripts, with stories of villages beating to death petty
thieves, or people handling disputes by taking an axe to the other person.8
All of the aid workers, many of whom had lived in Cambodia since the
beginning of the massive UN assistance program in the early 1990s, which
ultimately cost over $3 billion and was charged to Western donors, had
heard about the intimidation; some had traveled to villages and had seen
the effects in person. The enormous reconstruction effort was partly due to
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Failure of the West 175
Western nations’ guilt over having done nothing during the Khmer Rouge
era, and partly because of a desire to court Cambodia as a new strategic ally.
Many of the aid workers remembered that, back in 1993, Prime Minister
Hun Sen of the ruling party had actually lost the national election and then
used the threat of force to convince the real winner to allow him to form a
co ali tion government. Only two years earlier, in 1997, a group of Americans
working for the International Republican Institute (IRI) had attended a
rally of the opposition Sam Rainsy Party, along with around two hundred
party supporters. In what seemed to be a well- planned attack, someone
tossed four grenades into the crowd, and the explosions killed at least six-
teen people and maimed at least a hundred, scattering limbs and other
body parts in the street.9 The leader of the IRI mission in Cambodia was
seriously wounded in the attack.
But when anyone brought up the problems with the elections, and the
general chaos, intimidation, and thuggery that was coming to characterize
all of Cambodian politics, no one wanted to respond. Turning the conversa-
tion to the unpleasant, even brutal nature of Cambodian politics would
force people to put down beers or stop talking about the latest affairs in
Phnom Penh’s incestuous foreigner society, or to admit that their massive
reconstruction effort was failing. As in Af ghan i stan later, the Cambodia
effort came to revolve around national elections, one big man, and a pro-
cess— a certain sequencing of elections, list of laws to be passed, and other
proscribed reforms— developed in post- Soviet states, but which bore little
resemblance to the people and problems of Cambodia, where local- level
government, and basic education about demo cratic pro cesses, were in far
greater need than in Eastern Eu rope. “Look at how far they [Cambodia]
have come since the Khmer Rouge era,” one aid worker said. “You have to
admit it’s impressive— even if there are problems with the election, they are
having an election, one generation after a genocide.” “Sure, there are some
problems,” said another aid worker who’d spent considerable time in vil-
lages where opposing the ruling party could be tantamount to a death sen-
tence. “But they’re still holding an election.”
Of course, compared with the past— in this case a past that constituted
one of the most genocidal regimes in history— elections where people cam-
paigning are only sometimes beaten up or harassed rather than murdered
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176 Failure of the West
en masse were a step forward, but how long could the country be mea sured
against that low standard? How would any free elections be preserved in
the long run if the country’s po liti cal culture became more and more vio-
lent and repressive? How could Western donors push a demo cratization
pro cess on Cambodia developed in post- Soviet Eastern Eu rope, where coun-
tries were far richer and more stable, and had more experience with demo-
cratic politics? How could any donors put their trust in Hun Sen, leaving
no other po liti cal options other than the big man?
When I put these questions to foreign aid experts in Cambodia, or even
to local human rights activists, no one wanted to answer. And ten years
after my experience, in the late 1990s, Cambodia had not made much more
progress. As veteran journalist Joel Brinkley shows in Cambodia’s Curse, an
exhaustive investigation of the country’s current troubles, the UN and other
Western donors in Cambodia are still falling into “the fallacy of electoralism”—
they have focused almost exclusively on holding elections as a sign of prog-
ress, all but ignoring the other, more important, foundations of a free society.
As long as the Cambodian government holds regular elections, even elections
with no pretense of fair competition, Western donors continued to support
the government with aid, and mostly ignore it otherwise: in 2010, donors
pledged over $1 billion to Cambodia, even while at the same time noting that
corruption had become endemic in the country. And in this vacuum of any
external infl uence, Cambodia’s big man, long- ruling prime minister, Hun
Sen, and his cronies have robbed the country blind, sold off much of its
valuable land to China, and used unfair laws and outright thuggery to crush
the opposition.
The opposition parties that existed in the 1990s, during the early part
of the UN period, have crumbled in the face of per sis tent pressure from
Hun Sen’s Cambodian’s People’s Party, which now dominates the legisla-
ture as a one- party giant like Mexico’s old Partido Revolucionario Institu-
cional. Other opposition politicians are simply bought off: Brinkley describes
a common stratagem in which opposition politicians who agree to throw in
with the ruling party are given control of parts of certain ministries, which
allow them to loot public coffers.
Meanwhile, powerful men and women act with total impunity— they
can grab land, steal from the public trea sury, or even kill peasants without
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Failure of the West 177
facing any repercussions. In one too- common type of incident that occurred
in August 2008, a nephew of the prime minister ran down another man on
a motorcycle with his Escalade SUV, tearing off the other man’s arm and
leg and leaving him bleeding to death in the middle of a crowded street in
the capital. As the motorcycle driver expired on the street, military police
comforted Hun Sen’s nephew and took the license plates off of his car,
making it diffi cult for anyone to report the crime.10
If Cambodia illustrated the failure of electoralism, perhaps nowhere has
the reliance upon one big man been more disastrous than in Af ghan i stan, a
country that theoretically has been the center of the Obama administration’s
foreign policy efforts, despite the fact that it fi ts few of the qualities of other
countries ready for demo cratization, like Thailand, Rus sia, or Venezuela—
stability, urbanization, a history of some demo cratic institutions. From early
after the victory over the Taliban, the United States pinned its hopes on
Hamid Karzai, a man believed to combine Pashtun legitimacy and Western
liberal ideals— he and his family had lived in the West for de cades.11 As
in Liberia, Nigeria, Indonesia, and many other developing nations, in Af-
ghan i stan American offi cials failed to invest time studying and connecting
with a broad range of opinion leaders, and identifying a wide range of
potential demo cratic allies after the fall of the Taliban. Consequently, the
White House wound up personifying hopes for reform in the being of one
supposedly transformative leader— Karzai.
Karzai’s power would be legitimized through national presidential and
parliamentary elections, which he and the West could point to as obvious
signs of Af ghan i stan’s progress. But the focus on him, and legitimizing him
through national elections, even if they were fraudulent, distracted attention—
and funding— from fostering deeper demo cratic institutions, such as in-
vesting in creating a stable judiciary like the one that was critical to the
development of democracy in Israel’s early years, a decentralized series of
local and village elections like those that have transformed Indonesia, or a
vibrant civil society of NGOs like those that emerged in Taiwan’s early
years of transition. The United States and NATO developed some small
programs in all of these areas, but they were downplayed compared with
the military offensive, the backing for Karzai, and the holding of regular
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178 Failure of the West
national elections, which could be held up to Afghans and Americans, and
to the media, as a sign of progress toward democracy.
In fact, Af ghan i stan, like Indonesia, could have been perfect for
decentralization— giving more power to local leaders through village and
township elections. The country had a tradition of local consultation and
governance, through the jirga pro cess, and was as ethnically diverse, if not
as geo graph i cally spread out, as a place like Indonesia. Indeed, in many vil-
lages across Af ghan i stan local leaders in the mid- 2000s had themselves
established such types of decentralized democracy, often with some help
from foreign aid organizations. Called local development councils, these
small groups managed local infrastructure projects that the central govern-
ment ignored, addressed local social welfare issues, and sometimes took the
place of the local courts in adjudicating disputes. The local development
councils proved enormously pop u lar, despite their meager funding from
the national government and a few foreign NGOs. As the Economist re-
ported, in some parts of the country they had become so pop u lar that,
when central government funds for the councils ran out for one year, villag-
ers worked together to petition foreign NGOs for aid.12 But Karzai appar-
ently saw even these local councils as a threat to his rule, and the kind of
progress made through these local- level efforts— new wells, more effective
annual audits of local government— rarely got much attention in the inter-
national media, and were hard to tout in a speech explaining Af ghan i stan
policy to the American public.
Perhaps these failures of democracy promotion might have mattered less,
but unlike the reverse waves of the 1960s and early 1970s, nascent democra-
cies today have new models of development that mix successful capitalism
with undemo cratic rule. As Gat points out, from the end of World War II
until very recently such alternative models did not exist; the only alternative
for smaller countries that chose capitalism over communism (itself not a
successful economic model) was to embrace demo cratization.13 But as we
have seen, that is no longer the case: smaller countries can copy the example
of China— and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar,
or other successful authoritarian capitalists— and thus delink prosperous
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Failure of the West 179
free market capitalism from demo cratization. At a time when the quality
of governance in Western democracies has plummeted, refl ected by the
constant partisan deadlock in Congress, the two de cades of paralysis in
Japan, and the Eu ro pe an Union’s inability to agree on effective mea sures to
resolve its fi nancial crises, these alternative options of governance seem ever
more alluring. After all, Western citizens themselves seem to be losing faith
in their own governing models, resulting in waves of pop u lar protest on
both the left and the right, from the Occupy movement to the Tea Party
movement to the somewhat anarchic violent antistate protests in Greece
and Italy. As Charles Kupchan notes in an essay on the governability crisis,
and the rise of the authoritarian model, Western nations will essentially
have to copy some of the Chinese strategies, such as “strategic economic plan-
ning on an unpre ce dented scale [in order to prevent po liti cal and economic
collapse]. . . . State capitalism has its distinct advantages, at least for now.”14
And certainly, Kupchan notes, as citizens of developing nations see the West’s
leaders fl oundering, and Western living standards eroding, and Western
publics protesting and rioting, they will wonder why they should listen to
anything Western democracy promotion advocates say. Or as one State De-
partment offi cial focusing on democracy promotion said, “How can with a
straight face we be telling countries in Africa and the Middle East that they
need to develop better systems for governing when we can’t even pass a
bud get [in Congress]?”15
In the long run, the lack of transparency and openness may hinder the
rise of these authoritarian capitalists. China, for one, already faces a cor-
ruption epidemic so large that one China scholar estimates puts the cost to
government at $86 billion annually, and the lack of sunlight in Dubai’s fi nan-
cial and real estate markets helped precipitate a massive crash in the emirate
in the late 2000s.16 Still, in the short run most of the authoritarian capitalists,
and particularly China, have amassed relatively successful economic rec ords,
and so smaller countries no longer have to choose between demo cratic capi-
talism and authoritarian noncapitalism. No longer having to take into
account conservative middle classes— which, as we have seen, now have
serious doubts about democracy— they can enjoy economic benefi ts without
allowing po liti cal freedom for all their compatriots, which is an increasingly
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180 Failure of the West
attractive bargain. Many members of the People’s Alliance for Democracy,
the conservative middle class Thai or ga ni za tion that, through street protests
and other demonstrations, has debilitated democracy and called for a return
of unelected leaders, spoke favorably of China’s model of development, a
model that would allow them to maintain their businesses and their wealth
without having to deal with the pop u lar power of the working classes.17
This sentiment praising China’s model is heard over and over from middle
class men and women in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia, and
many other countries.
In the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, such sentiments were heard, too,
in places like Egypt, where growth collapsed in 2011, partly because tourists,
so critical to the economy, were scared away, and partly because crime, graft,
and uncertainty undermined business and drove some of the brightest
talents out of the country. But having seen the successes of Gulf states like
Qatar, and of China, an increasingly powerful investor in Egypt, Egypt’s
business community increasingly wondered whether it might not have
prospered more under Mubarak, said Egypt expert David Schenker of the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The dictator, after all, had in
the 2000s committed to liberal economic reforms. Or, Schenker said, some
Egyptian business elites wondered whether they might do better under
some future Chinese- style autocratic government, even if that meant tolerat-
ing a far less open po liti cal system than in the year after Mubarak’s fall.18
Though the exigencies of the Cold War are a memory— the divide into
Soviet and American camps that led the United States to back dictators
from Zaire to Indonesia— other strategic changes have not necessarily proven
more hospitable to democracy. The war on terror in many ways mimics the
Cold War, with Washington offering new pledges of support to undemo-
cratic nations, like Malaysia or Morocco, countries whose leaders can more
readily hold prisoners indefi nitely and conduct brutal interrogations of
suspects.19 I recent years, in fact, as the Malaysian government has launched
a wide crackdown on hundreds of opposition activists trying to hold rallies
promoting clean and fair elections, with riot police beating demonstrators
including longtime opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, the United States and
other Western governments have barely paid notice. The Clinton adminis-
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Failure of the West 181
tration had explicitly criticized the Malaysian government’s Internal Secu-
rity Act, which allowed Kuala Lumpur to detain people indefi nitely. But the
Bush and Obama administrations muted that critique as Malaysia’s ability to
hold detainees became a valuable tool in combating terrorism.
Af ghan i stan again has been the apex of how exigency has trumped
democracy— even as the United States receives few benefi ts for making sup-
posedly “strategic” decisions. In Af ghan i stan’s 2009 presidential elections,
it became obvious months before the actual vote that Karzai and his allies
would rig the election, preventing Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign
minister and a man generally viewed as more stable and liberal than Karzai,
from having any chance of winning. Karzai had handpicked an election
commission totally biased toward him, and on voting day it became clear
that whole regions had voted for one candidate, normally Karzai. In many
cases, polling sites counted their votes without ever opening them in public
view.20 An in de pen dent election monitor concluded that 1.3 million votes
had clear evidence of fraud; of these, 900,000 were for Karzai.21 Before the
vote, the government had made little real effort to create an in de pen dent
election watchdog, a court system that could scrutinize election violations,
or even a national apparatus to get polling places open. There was no legis-
lation designed to handle the fact that many candidates had criminal,
even murderous, backgrounds; indeed, the entire electoral system lacked
credibility among most voters, according to an analysis of the pro cess by
Scott Worden of the Af ghan i stan Electoral Complaints Commission, a
UN- appointed body during the 2009 vote.22
But the White House, and American diplomats on the ground, por-
trayed the election as a triumph for democracy, since Karzai, for all his
fraud, fi nally allowed a runoff between him and Abdullah— which Karzai
won handily. Diplomats from other countries pushed the United States to
condemn the election; Canadian ambassador to Af ghan i stan William Cros-
bie apparently told the Americans in early 2010 they should be “prepared
for a confrontation with Karzai” in order to stop him from rigging the 2010
parliamentary elections as he had the 2009 presidential election.23 Ameri-
can offi cials mostly ignored this advice, and no top American leader con-
demned the cheating and fraud in the election.
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182 Failure of the West
Indeed, the United States remained convinced that Karzai alone could
deliver effective counterterrorism cooperation, help cement the offensive
against the Taliban, and keep some kind of order. As in many other devel-
oping nations, U.S. offi cials seemed to feel that, once they had bet so much
on a “great man,” they had to double and redouble that bet; there was pre-
cious little willingness to step back and examine whether any possible alter-
native would be better both for American strategic aims and for the future
of Af ghan i stan’s democracy.24 They did so even after Karzai handed over
control of much of southern Af ghan i stan to his brother, who was reported
to be one of the largest drug traffi ckers in the country (before he was killed
by insurgents), and after the Afghan president pardoned or simply ignored
other drug traffi ckers moving massive quantities of opium in and out of the
country, thereby undermining a major initiative of the NATO program to
reduce opium production and create alternative economic strategies.25 In
the vacuum of leadership, the Taliban grew bolder and bolder, putting more
and more of the weight of fi ghting the insurgency in the hands of the United
States and its NATO allies, and allowing the Taliban to gain de facto con-
trol of more and more territory.
Too often, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before
it, fell into another democracy promotion problem: failing to work with
developing nations’ leaders to manage their citizens’ expectations of what
democracy, and assistance, would actually do for them. Rarely did the White
House work with developing world leaders to approach democracy promo-
tion a different way, like a permanent po liti cal campaign. Approaching it
like a campaign would have meant, for one, trying to help manage pop u lar
expectations about what gains in the standard of living and effective gover-
nance democracy actually would bring to a developing country, at least in
the early years of demo cratization. It might have meant admitting that now
there are viable, serious alternatives to democracy in authoritarian states
like China, and that the West’s crises of governance have undermined some
of the appeal of liberal democracy to developing nations.
But American presidents and many leaders of developing nations in-
stead often promised to developing nations not only that democracy would
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Failure of the West 183
sweep the globe, bringing enormous po liti cal and economic benefi ts to aver-
age people, but that the United States would greatly assist that transforma-
tion. As Bush declared in his second inaugural address, “The policy of the
United States [is] to seek and support the growth of demo cratic movements
and institutions in every nation and culture. . . . The survival of liberty in our
land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best
hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world”26 In
2005 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised, during a trip to Egypt,
that the United States would abandon its policy of backing Arab autocrats,
saying, “We are supporting the demo cratic aspirations of all people. . . .
Our goal instead is to help others fi nd their own voice, to attain their own
freedom.”27 When democracy had spread to developing nations, Bush—
and, later, Obama— repeatedly suggested it would pacify civil confl icts,
unleash new waves of prosperity, and reduce in e qual ity.
Fostering these perceptions of democracy’s infallibility mattered. A Pew
Research poll taken only months after Egypt’s initial Tahrir Square uprising
showed that more than half of Egyptians believed that demo cratization
would make Egypt more prosperous— 56 percent of Egyptians expected the
economy to improve over the next year with Mubarak gone, even though
Mubarak actually had pursued relatively liberal economic policies during
the last de cade of his rule.28 Similarly, numerous studies of African states in
the early 2000s showed that large majorities of people believed democracy
would increase growth rates and reduce societal in e qual ity. Yet as we have
seen, in the early period of demo cratization growth often stagnates as newly
empowered parties push populist mea sures and compete for spoils, graft can
get worse, and civil confl ict can intensify.
Both the Obama and the Bush administrations knew democracy could
come, in the early stages, with such problems.29 Many American offi cials
working on democracy promotion had read the literature showing that, in
its early stages, democracy is not necessarily more linked to higher growth
than is authoritarian rule; some had worked in places like Kenya or the
Balkans where the initial period of demo cratization had made civil confl ict
worse; quite a few had read the literature, such as the books and articles
by Edward Mansfi eld and Jack Snyder, suggesting that countries initially
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184 Failure of the West
transitioning to democracy may actually be more likely than authoritarian
states to engage in confl icts because they fall prey to nationalism, ethnic
confl ict, and interclass strife, without the stable institutions to rein in belli-
cose leaders like Vladimir Putin or Slobodan Milosevic.30 But neither West-
ern offi cials nor leaders of developing nations tried to manage public
expectations for what democracy would bring.
And partly because hopes had been raised so high in many developing
nations, the reality of democracy’s early stages proved such a letdown— a
major reason, as we have seen in places from Malawi to the Philippines to
Rus sia, why public support for democracy dropped in many developing
nations in the 2000s and early 2010s. Even in the countries of Central and
Eastern Eu rope, which were far wealthier than nations like the Philippines,
the economic downturn of the late 2000s and early 2010s, combined with
populations’ overestimation of how joining the EU and building democ-
racy would help stabilize their economies, led to precipitous drops in public
support for democracy in many Central and Eastern Eu ro pe an nations.
Conversely, in countries where the fi rst group of postauthoritarian lead-
ers made a serious effort to manage expectations, the population often has
been willing to accept slower growth, slower attempts to reduce in e qual ity,
and a longer time frame for effective economic reforms. In South Africa,
for example, shortly after assuming the presidency in 1994 Nelson Mandela
made clear, in a series of speeches, that he would not begin a rapid program
of land redistribution, that white capital remained necessary to the econ-
omy, and that serious in e qual ity would remain for years due to the adjust-
ments of the postapartheid era. South Africa’s poor were not thrilled by
these speeches, and some did demand a more rapid land redistribution
program than the moderate one that was designed. But public support for
Mandela’s administration stayed strong and, more importantly (since one
could attribute that support to Mandela’s enormous reserve of public good-
will), support for democracy as the preferred po liti cal system remained
high throughout the terms of Mandela and his far less beloved successor,
Thabo Mbeki. When questioned in polls, poor South Africans expressed
anger about how democracy had not led to equitable growth, enriching
mostly a small, new black middle class, but they remained committed to
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Failure of the West 185
demo cratic governance— and often told pollsters that they understood the
slow nature of change in a new democracy, exactly the message Mandela
had emphasized. Even under the term of Mbeki’s successor, Jacob Zuma, as
grievances over the lack of redistribution built up and led to larger public
protests against the government and against Zuma himself, they never seri-
ously threatened South Africa’s democracy.
Along with some local leaders’ failure to cater to the poor, the Bush and
Obama administrations further alienated working classes critical to suc-
cessful demo cratization by failing to make their democracy promotion
efforts as inclusive as possible. This lack of inclusion went beyond simply
focusing on one big man. “It was made clear to USAID and other embassy
staff working on the ground in Jordan that, if there was civil society, democ-
racy promotion programs that the [the government] didn’t want, those would
be gotten rid of,” said Tom Melia, a specialist on democracy assistance at
Freedom House who later went to work for the State Department.31 Indeed,
a comprehensive Freedom House report, released in 2009, found that
American offi cials “have sought to distance themselves from civil society
and human rights leaders who were not favored by the host government,”
even though the very defi nition of civil society often places its leaders in
opposition to government.32 In many cases, the Obama White House now
refuses to provide funding to any local NGOs that were not registered with
host governments, even though many governments have used registration
laws as a means of weeding out civil society groups they disapproved of.33
And when American diplomats visited developing countries, they shied
away from meeting a broad swath of po liti cal parties, which they would not
have thought twice about if they had been in France or Germany or Can-
ada, where American diplomats and offi cials have regular contacts with par-
ties currently in opposition, such as Canada’s Liberals. Many of the parties
ignored by Western offi cials in developing nations— Thailand’s Thai Rak
Thai, for instance— tended to be those representing the working classes, and
led by men and women who did not speak En glish or have much knowledge
of the United States, compared with more traditional liberal, secular, and
elite parties. But as in Thailand, those more populist parties eventually would
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186 Failure of the West
triumph in the demo cratic system since they appealed to large majorities
of the population, leaving American diplomats, and American democracy
promotion efforts, largely unprepared for their assumption of power. When
Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell visited Thailand in 2009 and
2010, he occasionally tried to meet leaders not from the ruling Demo crat
Party but from other, more populist parties. Many Demo crat Party leaders
objected to Campbell’s breakfasts with the opposition, saying that American
offi cials had set no pre ce dent of meeting anyone but top government offi –
cials. They were right— Campbell’s breakfasts were unique, and few other
American offi cials followed his lead.34
This myopia also suggested to working classes in many countries that
the United States did not care to support demo cratization if elections did
not lead to outcomes Washington felt comfortable with. At its worst, this
myopic focus on only one or two elite- led parties in developing countries led
to at least tacit American support for extraconstitutional efforts by con-
servative middle classes to overthrow demo cratically elected, if unsavory,
leaders. As pressure built up in Thailand in 2006 among middle class Thais
unhappy with the government of Thaksin Shinawatra, American offi cials
said little publicly about the possibility of a coup. Many privately told Thai
peers that it would not be a disaster to see Thaksin replaced, since it might
result in the return of Abhisit’s Demo crat Party, the favorite of the military
and the crown.35 The American ambassador at the time, Ralph Boyce, clearly
saw a potential coup coming and warned offi cials in Washington and in
other Western embassies. But even after the coup occurred, in September
2006, the United States did little to sanction Thailand, continuing to hold
high- profi le joint military exercises with the Thai armed forces, which se-
nior Thai leaders interpreted as support for their actions. (The United States
did make some token downgrades of its ties with Thailand.) In one diplo-
matic cable released by Wikileaks, the U.S. ambassador in Thailand met
privately with the coup leader shortly after the putsch. Though the ambas-
sador had not been in favor of the coup, he knew that Washington was not
going to punish the Thai government severely, and he advised the coup
leader on how he could quickly show the United States and other Western
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Failure of the West 187
nations that Thailand was still on a demo cratic track, which would result
in completely restored diplomatic relations.36
Similarly, in Venezuela the Bush administration in 2002 refrained from
condemning a coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez; before the at-
tempt collapsed, press secretary Ari Fleischer seemed to be blaming the coup
on Chavez and quickly welcoming the coup leaders as legitimate. Chavez
has since been able to portray the United States’ Venezuela policy as decid-
edly undemo cratic, undermining any efforts by the United States to reach a
broad swath of Venezuelans beyond anti- Chavez middle classes and elites
with aid programs or other democracy assistance. Then, in 2011 the Obama
administration risked making the same mistake in another region, with
administration offi cials privately briefi ng reporters and suggesting that
the administration was not happy with the victory of Islamic parties in Mo-
rocco and Tunisia and other Arab states, before enough time had passed to
determine whether these parties were willing to govern within secular and
liberal demo cratic norms, and sometimes without distinguishing between
more hard- line and more moderate Islamic parties.
Even if the White House had developed a masterful democracy promotion
strategy, any policy requires funding to back it up. But too often rhetoric,
as in George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address, was not matched by re-
sources, or at least the wise use of resources. In most years the Bush admin-
istration did increase bud gets for democracy promotion, but it drastically
undermined the use of those funds by linking the war in Iraq to democ-
racy promotion, as well as by undercutting Bush’s rhetoric with undemo-
cratic practices such as rendition and torture. Bush’s policies essentially
equated democracy promotion with military intervention and regime
change, poisoning the idea of democracy promotion by suggesting that it
could be touted as a reason for the United States, unilaterally, to overthrow
governments that Washington opposed. Bush himself reportedly said in
April 2004, a time when American marines were fi ghting a bloody battle in
Fallujah, “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek
them out and kill them!”37
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188 Failure of the West
While the Bush administration had welcomed many dissidents to Wash-
ington, a strategy that at least helped pacify some middle class and elite opin-
ion leaders from developing countries, the Obama administration seemed
strangely aloof to dissidents, which only further alienated opinion leaders
from countries like Thailand, Malaysia, China, or Egypt. When several
prominent Ira ni an dissidents came to Washington in the summer of 2009
following the massive Green uprising in Tehran, they could not obtain meet-
ings with any se nior Obama administration offi cials.38 Similarly, many
Uighurs, Tibetans, Cubans, and other dissidents found it hard to get a meet-
ing with administration offi cials. Rabeeya Kadeer, the Uighur equivalent of
the Dalai Lama who had met with George W. Bush, found herself shunted
off to low- level State Department offi cials by Obama.39 Even when the
Dalai Lama visited Washington in 2009, the Obama administration did
not allow him to meet the president, the fi rst time the Tibetan leader had
come to Washington and not seen the president in nearly two de cades.40
Determined to take a new and less confrontational approach to democ-
racy promotion, the Obama administration shifted away from Bush’s belli-
cose tone, which was probably a wise idea. Added to the desire of drawing
a line between himself and George W. Bush, and the weakened position of
a debt- ridden, febrile American economy, Barack Obama himself seems to
have a natural inclination toward pragmatism and consensus. As historian
Walter Russell Mead notes in a lengthy essay on Obama’s foreign policy, the
president fell into the Jeffersonian tradition of American leaders who want
to “reduce America’s costs and risks overseas by limiting U.S. commitments
[and] believe that the United States can best spread democracy and support
peace by becoming an example of democracy at home.” 41
But the new president, too, failed to match rhetoric with the effective
use of resources. Between 2009 and 2011, the Obama administration re-
peatedly cut funding for core democracy promotion programs in some of
the biggest battlegrounds for demo cratization, despite the fact that several
of these programs had performed well in both internal and external audits
of fi nances and delivery of results. Although the White House in fi scal year
2011 and 2012 asked for funding to support some fi ve hundred new State
Department positions, these were primarily in consular departments. The
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Failure of the West 189
White House repeatedly cut democracy funding to Egypt, halving it to
$25 million annually in 2009, and then cut it again in 2010 and 2011, while
slashing the State Department’s broader Democracy Fund by 21 percent in
early 2011. The administration also cut the most important government-
affi liated democracy promotion or ga ni za tion, the National Endowment for
Democracy, reducing subsidies for it in 2011 by roughly 12 percent.42 “The
administration was looking across the board, and looking for places to cut,
and they were choosing to cut democracy assistance, and prioritizing other
areas, it wasn’t just democracy assistance getting cut along with everything,”
said Tom Melia of Freedom House, who later went to work for the State
Department.43 The White House also eliminated high- level positions on the
National Security Council that, under the Bush administration, had been
devoted to democracy promotion.44 At the State Department, the adminis-
tration appointed an Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights,
and Labor, Michael Posner, who in his previous work had been mostly fo-
cused on cleaning up America’s own abuses.45 This was not a bad thing—
the Bush administration indeed left major issues to resolve. But it meant
that the top offi cial in the State Department focused on democracy promo-
tion actually had had little experience with promoting democracy abroad
before he came to the job.
To be sure, in a tough fi scal climate, and dealing with a Congress con-
trolled by the opposition party beginning in 2010, the Obama administra-
tion was constrained, and the White House did not necessarily always cut
democracy funds in exchange for worse- performing or less useful programs.
But in many cases, it did. Overall, foreign aid funding decreased in the 2012
bud get, and congressional staffers made clear that there was little chance for
increases in the 2013 bud get. And the White House was not exactly getting a
lot of help from its friends and allies: consumed by its own fi scal crises, the
Eu ro pe an Union failed to agree in 2011 to create its own version of the Na-
tional Endowment for Democracy, a longtime goal of Eu ro pe an democracy
advocates.46 At the United Nations, the new secretary- general, Ban Ki- moon,
seemed uncomfortable with the rhetoric of democracy, and often took a
soft line. In dealing with some of the most recalcitrant nations, Ban usually
just backed down: Ban meekly left Burma in 2009 and 2010 after the regime
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190 Failure of the West
refused to allow him to meet opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.47 By
contrast, when Kofi Annan served as secretary- general, he was far more
willing to criticize autocratic leaders who denied the UN human rights
rapporteurs access to their countries.
But of all foreign aid, democracy promotion funding has been but a
rounding error in the federal bud get, and it might well not have been held
up in Congress because, of all foreign aid programs, democracy promotion
has tended to be the most pop u lar on the Hill and with constituents, and it
also had been thoroughly examined by internal and external auditors, far
more than most other foreign aid programs. Indeed, in interviews with se-
nior staffers for GOP senators and representatives working on appropria-
tions, most said that they would have gone along had the administration
pushed hard for stable or higher levels of democracy funding.48 “If the ad-
ministration had come to us, and made clear that wanted to restore [i.e.,
maintain] funding for democracy aid in the bud get, I don’t think that would
have been a problem on appropriations,” said one se nior congressional
staffer. “No one wants to look like they are cutting money for democracy
and for protesters and activists.” 49
Even when the Obama administration did maintain or even increase fund-
ing for democracy promotion programs, it failed to shift programming to-
ward local needs, and away from USAID and State Department formulas.
I compared USAID democracy assistance strategies in twelve developing
nations, including countries as diverse as East Timor, Mozambique, and
Bosnia. Almost without exception, the strategic planning documents, the
priorities for the programs, and the actual methods of implementation were
the same for each country. Successful democracy promotion must be fl exible,
adapting to local conditions and involving a wide range of local actors. But in
country after country, this was not happening with USAID and State.
This survey was hardly unique. In a similar study of American democ-
racy promotion efforts, Matthew Alan Hill of the University of London
found that USAID rarely employed case- specifi c strategies, in part because
it knew that if it used strategies that already had been vetted throughout the
entire bureaucracy and procurement pro cess, it was unlikely to be criticized
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Failure of the West 191
later. “Af ghan i stan had four years of drought, famine, and a greater level of
absolute poverty than Bosnia, but Bosnia had lost over half its population
during the confl ict. . . . Despite these differences there was an assumption
that democracy could be developed using the same strategy in each case,”
he found.50 “The sub- program areas [i.e., the specifi cs of assistance on the
ground] are nearly identical.” Or, as Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie
Endowment noted after participating in multiple USAID assessments,
American democracy promotion remained wedded to pro cess, leading to
“lamentable patterns of infl exibility, cumbersomeness, lack of innovation,
and mechanical application.”51
At times, Western leaders like Obama simply seemed to abdicate democ-
racy promotion, assuming that the spread of new technology would take on
the burden of fomenting po liti cal change. Indeed, many Western leaders
and writers argue that technology is a new factor and will strengthen the
third and fourth wave democracies, smoothing their paths to freedom. Cell
phones, the Web, Internet calling technologies like Skype, and social media
sites like Facebook will, in theory, allow activists to or ga nize large numbers
of people quickly and easily, and without subjecting their communications
to government surveillance. In some respects, Western leaders seem to want
to believe in the power of transformative technology because technology,
combined with globalization, would let them off the hook— if the Internet
is going to change societies, then all Washington has to do is support Inter-
net freedom in other nations, without the kind of hard choices of publicly
backing real activists in countries like Thailand or Malaysia, where the
American government has close ties with ruling governments.
What’s more, techno- optimists believe, the spread of the Internet and
mobile communications will make it nearly impossible for governments to
censor information from their publics, since savvy netizens could always
access free, unfettered information online or by calling outside the country.
The new technology also theoretically will make it easier for activists to
share their thoughts with the wider public, without having to use tradi-
tional platforms like tele vi sion and the print media. “The networked popu-
lation is gaining greater access to information, more opportunities to engage
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192 Failure of the West
in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action,”
wrote Clay Shirky of New York University, one of the most prominent
techno- optimist writers. In 2000 President Bill Clinton said, “In the new
century liberty will spread by . . . cable modem,” and other prominent West-
ern leaders followed up with similarly optimistic projections. Clinton’s succes-
sor, George W. Bush, promised, “If the Internet were to take hold in China,
freedom’s genie would be out of the bottle,” and, under President Obama,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched a new American initiative to
promote global Internet freedom. Announcing the initiative, Hillary Clin-
ton declared, “Now, in many respects, information has never been so free.
There are more ways to spread more ideas to more people than at any mo-
ment in history. And even in authoritarian countries, information networks
are helping people discover new facts and making governments more ac-
countable.”52 Some cyberactivists even got the Internet nominated for the
2010 Nobel Peace Prize, theoretically for its transformative impact on global
po liti cal life.53
The media, too, are hardly immune from techno- exuberance, touting
the growth of the Internet as a de facto sign of po liti cal opening and exu-
berantly highlighting the use of new technology in virtually every po liti cal
protest or civil society gathering. Even New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman, a longtime cynic regarding change in the Middle East, wrote,
“The Internet and globalization are acting like nutcrackers to open societ-
ies.”54 Friedman’s colleague, columnist Nicholas Kristof, wrote that in “the
quintessential 21st century confl ict . . . on one side are government thugs
fi ring bullets [and] on the other side are young protesters fi ring tweets.”55
The impact of technology is so great, both for activists and for authori-
tarian governments, that it should be neither celebrated as a revolutionary
tool destined to promote democracy nor feared as a powerful device of
autocracy. Instead, technology can cut both ways, a prospect few of the new
techno- utopians seem to realize. Some successes by activists or ga niz ing
through the Web, or through cell phones, have stoked this enthusiasm. Fili-
pino activists gathering in Manila in early 2001 to protest corruption or ga-
nized their marches through text messages, a template that later rallies in
Manila would follow.56 In the Orange and Rose revolutions in Ukraine and
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Failure of the West 193
Georgia, many activists used mobile phones and text messages to or ga nize
demonstrations, while in Moldova in 2009, protests or ga nized largely by
text messages, Facebook, and the microblogging site Twitter helped restore
a legitimate government after a clearly fraudulent election.
In the winter of 2010– 11, Tunisian and then Egyptian and Bahraini
activists used social media and mobile technology to or ga nize antigovern-
ment protests and disseminate articles that chronicled the corruption and
repression of the governments of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni
Mubarak. In January 2011, Ben Ali’s government collapsed, and he fl ed the
country, followed soon after by Mubarak.57 In the central areas of Tunis, ac-
tivists painted graffi ti that read, “Thank you Facebook.”58 One of the heroes
of the anti- Mubarak revolution was a local Google executive, Wael Ghonim,
who was detained for over a week by Mubarak’s security forces.59
Activists in other Arab- Muslim countries employed similar usage of
cell phones, text messages, and social media, and major technology com-
panies like Google launched divisions designed to develop tools that might
help demo cratic activists around the world.60 By the early 2010s, some activ-
ists in developing nations began to travel to other countries to share infor-
mation on the best ways to use new technology for or ga niz ing.61
The impact of the Internet, social media, and mobile communications
technology on demo cratic change is far too nuanced, and complex, to be
explored in depth here— there are entire books dedicated to this question.
But it is clear that while social media, the Internet, and mobile phones have
helped activists push for greater democracy in some developing nations,
they also at times have enabled governments to monitor and censure activ-
ists, and even to forestall demo cratization entirely.
Simply the spread of Internet access certainly has not ensured freer
politics or demo cratic consolidation. Technology often matters most in the
early stages of demo cratic change, when activists can use social media or
cell phones to or ga nize public protests and other high- profi le activities,
which rouse people out of their everyday routines, and require less long- term
commitment. But in societies that have already begun transitions to democ-
racy, and where what is required for demo cratic consolidation is sustained,
diligent reformist advocacy— such as monitoring government transparency,
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194 Failure of the West
launching NGOs and in de pen dent media outlets, and maintaining pres-
sure on government offi cials, judges, or other civil servants— these emerg-
ing technologies, which do not develop bonds as close as those in old- fashioned
or ga niz ing, appear less effective. The weak bonds built by technology’s new
tools such as social media often wilt under pressure from governments, and
are not strong enough to keep citizens coming back to the regular, more
mundane institutions of civil society critical for a democracy— town hall
meetings, ongoing public demonstrations, or elections for local offi ces. Writer
Malcolm Gladwell has dubbed this “slacktivism”— the idea that the Inter-
net leads to casual participation in groups, since the barriers to entry are
very low, compared with old- fashioned or ga niz ing, which requires people
to leave their homes, attend meetings in another place, and participate in
rallies where they would potentially face physical danger. “The platforms
of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following, or
being followed, by people you may never have met,” Gladwell writes. “Weak
ties seldom lead to high- risk activism.”62 In his native Belarus, writer Evgeny
Morozov, author of the prominent new techno- skeptic book The Net Delu-
sion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, saw the effect of such weak bonds.
Belorus sian activists, he found, focus on the Internet, which appears to
them capable of doing “politics remotely, anonymously, and on the cheap.”63
But, he fi nds, no social media or online or ga niz ing in Belarus has been able
to match the government’s control, or generate the type of grassroots move-
ment necessary to seriously challenge the government through consistent
and repetitive actions.
Authoritarian governments, and even elected autocrats like Hun Sen,
Putin, or Chavez, increasingly understand that, outside of charismatic street
protests, technology often creates weak bonds— bonds that they can exploit
or crush. In Thailand the growth of the Internet, while allowing some
degree of discussion of topics like labor rights, environmental concerns, cor-
ruption, the future of the powerful Thai monarchy, and military repression,
has not clearly helped boost opposition politics, except when the opposi-
tion has used technology to help or ga nize rallies in Bangkok. Thai opposi tion
activists admit that, in getting participation for regular activities like petition-
writing or weekly protests, old- fashioned methods like calling friends and
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Failure of the West 195
neighbors have proven more effective. The Thai Internet, which has pene-
trated most Thai house holds, also has given rise to hard- core, nationalist,
royalist, and progovernment activists who use the Web to attack— and
sometimes to cause the arrest of— opposition politicians who do try to dis-
cuss the future of the monarchy, even if they make only the most benign
comments about the royal family.64 And during the Arab uprisings of 2010
and 2011, many autocratic Arab regimes launched similar types of attacks
on opposition leaders. Bahrain’s government used Facebook to create a
smear campaign against Mohammed al- Maskati, a prominent human rights
activist, while Sudan’s government allegedly used Facebook to barrage
opposition movements, and anyone else, with reams of false information
about prodemocracy movements’ aims and gatherings.
Many authoritarians and elected autocrats also have developed highly
sophisticated methods of monitoring and fi ltering websites, often based on
China’s comprehensive “Great Firewall,” which make it harder for people
to use technology to or ga nize or gain access to free news. Unlike older forms
of communication, like face- to- face or ga niz ing in dissident Eastern Eu-
rope, the Internet’s bonds often prove weak enough that fi ltering and block-
ing successfully prevent activists from or ga niz ing. Thailand now blocks some
100,000 websites, according to an analysis by one Thai NGO; theoretically,
this blocking is to prevent online discourse harmful to the Thai monarchy,
but in reality it serves to censor a wide range of po liti cal opposition.65 Since
Thailand’s Internet laws banning content offensive to the monarchy are so
broad that they could be used against virtually any Internet user, they scare
all users, keeping many even from exploring sites that mention the royal
family but that otherwise are devoted to criticism of the Thai government.
Even some of the most prominent Thai academics and writers who’d con-
sidered themselves immune from po liti cal pressure now report that they
increasingly watch what they say and post online.66
Other nascent democracies, like Malaysia, have attempted or considered
similar blocks to prevent opposition parties or other civil society groups from
or ga niz ing online, or they apparently have used “denial of ser vice” attacks to
shut down opposition groups’ websites and forums.67 Singapore has drafted
broad Internet laws that could implicate many Web users, and has reinforced
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196 Failure of the West
paranoia by occasionally notifying the public that the government- linked
Internet provider has snooped through users’ Web accounts.68
Some authoritarian or elected autocrat governments also use state- backed
commentators to control online discourse and threaten po liti cal opponents.
After all, activists have no monopoly on the Web. In emerging democracies,
as in the West, most Internet users are not logging on to join a po liti cal cause
but to play games, read soccer scores, download music, or watch pornogra-
phy. And governments can use the Internet to promote their messages, to
fl ood the Net with progovernment writings, to swamp the blogs and other
accounts of activists, or simply to create enough mindless entertainment that
average people do not focus on online politics. The Internet is perfect for
these kinds of distractions. As writers like Cass Sunstein have noted, the
Internet is particularly well suited to disseminating false and unreliable infor-
mation, since it has no fact- checking and tends to create echo chambers, in
which people with similar beliefs search for information that confi rms
their ideas.69
Rus sia seems to have particularly perfected using the Internet to
distract and confuse the populace. The Kremlin has its own funded “Web
brigades” that attack liberals and praise Prime Minister Putin, and the
Kremlin also apparently is considering creating a “national search engine”
modeled on Google but that will fi lter out content that Moscow considers
dangerous to the state.70 The Kremlin also has launched many other strate-
gies to co- opt bloggers by creating state- controlled online forums for them.
As Morozov notes in The Net Delusion, the Rus sian state not only has co-
opted bloggers but also has played a role in producing a wide range of on-
line entertainment programming that is both highly enjoyable and clearly
nationalist and pro- Kremlin. This entertainment includes a beautiful blonde
blogger named Maria Sergeyeva, who both praises Vladimir Putin and blogs
about her personal life like Paris Hilton or some comparable American ce-
lebrity.71 “At some point, economies of scale begin to kick in,” writes Moro-
zov. “The presence of paid commentators [advocating for the government
online] may signifi cantly boost the number of genuine supporters of the re-
gime, and the new converts can now do some proselytizing of their own.”72
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Failure of the West 197
Worse, by creating their own personal Web pages or Facebook pages,
activists are building the kinds of dossiers about themselves that, in the old
days, government security ser vices had to work hard to piece together,
using timely legwork and bugging of dissidents’ homes, which could take
months or even years. Now this information is easily available online. It also
has become easier for the security ser vices to follow dissidents, since they can
track groups of them online rather than having to infi ltrate actual meetings
of dissidents in people’s homes or bars. Many Syrian and Ira ni an protesters,
for example, believe that Damascus and Tehran use protest leaders’ Facebook
pages and other online identifi ers to fi nd them and their friends during anti-
government demonstrations.73 Similarly, in Thailand, many activists believe
that the government has used monitoring of social media to follow and, in
some cases, detain people opposed to the military- backed government.74
The technology that became available in earlier waves of demo cratization
was not so easy for regimes to adapt for their own purposes. Part of the
challenge for activists and foreign powers trying to support democracy is to
develop ways that new technology can mimic the strong bonds and effective
penetration of older communication technologies. Fax machines, which
dissidents in Eastern Eu rope used before 1989, and shortwave radios were
basically an upgrade on old- fashioned printing presses that could circulate
samizdat literature or advertisements for rallies, but they did not allow gov-
ernments to collate massive amounts of information about democracy activ-
ists. And although the fax machine was more modern than state- controlled
radio and television— communication methods that people in authoritarian
states tended to fi nd boring and consequently often ignored— regimes found
that faxing was neither a more complete nor more sophisticated way to fl ood
their country with their own propaganda and entertainment. The oldest tool
of all, oral messages relayed from person to person, among small groups of
friends and neighbors, remains the most effective form of communication;
when a close friend or neighbor invites someone to participate in an activity,
the likelihood that he or she will do so is high, since the person will have to
see that friend or neighbor again, and since he or she can experience a real
sense of close community by joining friends in such group activities. Indeed,
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198 Failure of the West
recent experiments by po liti cal scientists Aaron Strauss and Allison Dale
have found that text messaging and e-mails—particularly when sent from
strangers and not from friends or relatives— are relatively in effec tive in
voter mobilization, in terms of increasing voter turnout. Numerous other
studies have found similar results, concluding that e-mail and other similar
tools are in effec tive in voter mobilization. But, if activists can transform
social media or cell phone networking to mimic the effects of more tradi-
tional or ga niz ing, authoritarian governments will have much more to fear.
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