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Back in the
1980s and 1990s, it seemed as if capitalism and democracy were in
some kind of mutually beneficial relationship. These days it
looks different. Rapid state-led growth is enriching China and
other Asian manufacturers, regardless of their political systems,
while their demand for energy and commodities is enriching
democratic and undemocratic primary producers alike.
Only
slowly, by sometimes painful trial and error, do elites learn
that it is in their own interests to exclude violence from
politics; to take turns at governing; and above all to submit to
the rule of law.
Representative
government with multiple parties will generally produce superior
governance to dictatorships and one-party states, where
rent-seeking behaviour is generally unchecked by free political
opposition. There is corruption in most countries, but it is
nearly always worse - and more economically distorting - in
non-democracies.
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Feature:
Slow but sure
Niall Ferguson
Financial Times
4
Feb
08
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/56514caa-cbb2-11dc-97ff
-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1
Has
the democratic wave broken? Is the tide of political freedom now
ebbing after the spectacular flow that began in 1989? Recent
events on nearly every continent certainly give real cause for
concern to those who dream of a world governed by the ballot box
rather than the bullet. But they may also provide an overdue
opportunity to think more realistically about the way the process
of democratisation works.
The picture is, as usual,
especially bleak in Africa, where two erstwhile democratic
role-models find themselves in serious difficulty. Only five
years ago, Mwai Kibaki's election as president was supposed to
mark a new dawn for Kenya after 24 long years of misrule by
Daniel arap Moi. But now allegations that Kibaki in effective
stole last month's presidential election from the opposition
leader Raila Odinga have unleashed bloody ethnic conflict between
Kikuyus and other tribes.
The problem in South Africa is
not violent (as yet) but it is equally troubling. There, the
African National Congress has chosen as its new leader, and
therefore the country's most likely next president, a man who
currently faces serious corruption charges involving payments of
more than R4m. Already, some of Jacob Zuma's more radical
supporters are warning that there will be ''blood spilt in the
courtroom'' if he is convicted. It is not without significance
that Zuma is a Zulu, while his arch-rival Thabo Mbeki is a
Xhosa.
In Asia, too, democracy is in retreat. Benazir
Bhutto's assassination in Pakistan on December 27, two weeks
before elections were due to be held there, has significantly
reduced the chances of a peaceful transition from military rule
back to democracy. In Thailand, the generals are still in power
16 months after staging a coup against Thaksin Shinawatra
(another democratically elected leader facing accusations of
corruption). Meanwhile, a much nastier military junta continues
to rule Burma with the mailed fist, having crushed last summer's
protests by political dissidents and Buddhist monks. It is
scarcely worth adding that the prospects for democracy in the
world's most populous country look little brighter. The Chinese
Communist party shows no sign of wanting to relinquish its
monopoly on power.
To be sure, communist rule is a thing
of the past in the territory of the former Soviet Union. But Time
magazine's Man of the Year, Vladimir Putin, is making a mockery
of the Russian constitution by, in effect, handing the presidency
to one of his own sidekicks, who intends to appoint Putin as
prime minister. Nor is Russia the only former Soviet Republic
slipping back into old autocratic habits. In Kyrgyzstan, last
month's elections were condemned by international observers.
Kazakhstan is little more than an Oriental despotism; the same
goes for Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Even Georgia's
''Rose Revolution'' seems to be withering fast.
Latin
America offers some consolations, though it still remains to be
seen if Venezuela's Hugo Chavez will really accept the unexpected
defeat he was handed in last month's referendum on constitutional
''reform''. As for the greater Middle East, the Bush
administration's bid to spread democracy at gunpoint has proved
far more costly in lives, money and time than almost anyone in
Washington envisaged five years ago. Despite the success of the
recent military ''surge'', Iraq continues to teeter on the verge
of civil war. Afghanistan is little better.
It was not
supposed to be like this. Nearly 20 years ago, on the eve of the
fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published a seminal
essay, ''The End of History'', in which he prophesied ''the end
point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization
of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government''.
In fairness to Fukuyama, he was writing
after more than a decade of sustained improvement in global
governance. In the mid-1970s, roughly half the world's states
could be classified as ''autocracies''. By 1989 the number had
very nearly halved. And the trend continued much as Fukuyama
foresaw - by 2002 it was down to fewer than 30. In its 1998
report, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral
Assistance was able to announce that, for the first time, a
majority of the world's population were living in democracies.
There really did seem to be a democratic wave, beginning in the
Iberian peninsula in the mid-1970s, spreading to Latin America
and parts of Asia in the 1980s and sweeping eastwards from
central Europe in 1989-91. All Fukuyama did was surf it.
The
trouble with waves is that sooner or later they break. Every
year, the think-tank Freedom House awards scores to the countries
of the world according to their degrees of political freedom.
According to the latest figures, no fewer than 57 countries have
suffered a democratic ebb in the past five years. Among the worst
performers were Armenia, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Fiji, Gabon,
Russia, Somalia, Thailand, Vanuatu and Venezuela. The list of
''success stories'' is almost as discouraging: Burundi, Haiti,
Iraq, Lebanon and Liberia have all improved their scores by more
than 10 points (out of a possible 40) since 2003. It would be a
hopeless optimist who put money on the durability of those
democratic transitions. A pessimist might wonder if we are about
to witness another of those declines of democracy such as
happened in the 1920s and 1930s, when the democratic wave that
ended the first world war was followed by a rip-tide of reaction
and repression.
Why does democracy flourish in some
countries, but shrivel and die in others? The simplest answers on
offer are economic. According to the political scientist Adam
Przeworski, there is a straightforward relationship between per
capita income and the likelihood that a democracy will endure. In
a country where the average income is below $1,000 a year,
democracy is unlikely to last a decade. Once average income
exceeds $6,000 a year, it is practically indestructible. This
certainly seems plausible at first sight. The countries with the
maximum Freedom House scores are, with the exception of Barbados,
the rich countries of north-western Europe. The countries with
the lowest scores include some of Africa's poorest.
Another
appealing economic rule is the Harvard economist Benjamin
Friedman's: that sustained growth (rather than the level of
income) is conducive to democratisation. At first sight, that
proposition appears to fit the long-run historical trend, with
the greatest challenge to democracy coming in the era of the
Depression.
However, recent economic developments have
weakened such arguments. The world economy as a whole has never
enjoyed a boom like that of 2001-07. Yet democracy has gained
little from all this prosperity. Moreover, the most rapidly
growing economies in the world since 2000 have not been the
democracies. Take the case of the so-called BRICs (Brazil,
Russia, India and China). While communist-ruled China's share of
world gross domestic product has increased by 2.5 percentage
points in the past seven years, democratic India's has risen by
just 0.6 per cent. Russia has outperformed Brazil by a comparable
margin. And this disparity between democracies and autocracies
seems set to widen. From now until 2050, according to Goldman
Sachs, China's share of global GDP will increase from 4 per cent
to 15 per cent, while that of the G7 countries - the world's
wealthiest democracies - will decline from 57 per cent to 20 per
cent. Other emerging markets expected to achieve rapid growth in
the next 40 years include Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan and
Vietnam, none of which seems an obvious candidate for successful
democratisation.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed as
if capitalism and democracy were in some kind of mutually
beneficial relationship. Not only was economic progress
apparently conducive to political progress; the causation could
go the other way, from democratisation to enhanced economic
performance. These days it looks different. Rapid state-led
growth is enriching China and other Asian manufacturers,
regardless of their political systems, while their demand for
energy and commodities is enriching democratic and undemocratic
primary producers alike.
A quite different explanation for
the success or failure of democracy has to do with culture rather
than economics. It was Samuel Huntington who argued in 1993 that,
following the cold war, western civilisation would find itself in
conflict primarily with Islamic and Confucian civilisation. By
implication, these two civilisations were much less likely to
produce peace-loving democracies than the Judeo-Christian
civilisation of the west. Of all the ripostes to ''The End of
History'', ''The Clash of Civilizations'' has been the most
compelling.
Prima facie evidence in support of
Huntington's proposition is not hard to find. In the Freedom
House rankings, for example, it is clear that western societies
are much more likely to be democratic than Muslim societies. Yet
such cultural explanations also have their defects. Taiwan and
Indonesia show that democracy can work for ''Confucians'' and
Muslims alike. If due allowance is made for economic and other
variables, the gap between the west and the rest is much less
significant. In any case, it was not so long ago that serious
scholars were arguing that Roman Catholics were incapable of the
capitalist work ethic, or that German-speakers could never make a
success of democracy - hypotheses falsified by postwar European
history.
History is indeed the key to understanding what
makes democracy work. Over New Year in Cape Town, I diverted
myself from the alarms and excursions of African politics by
re-reading the second of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels,
Phineas Finn. The setting is Westminster in 1866, the year before
the second great electoral Reform Act. The youthful hero enters
parliament as the member for a tiny Irish constituency, whose 307
voters generally do the bidding of the Earl of Tulla. He finds
the House of Commons a den of iniquity, where his fellow MPs vote
as the whips (rather than their own consciences) command, largely
in the hope of securing the salaries that come with ministerial
office, so that their grasping creditors can be satisfied and
their club bills paid. There is general satisfaction, even among
Liberals, when a popular demonstration in favour of the secret
ballot is broken up by the police.
The England of the
1860s was, in short, hardly a model democracy, quite apart from
its still-restricted franchise. Was there corruption? By today's
standards, certainly. Were the rich over-represented? Without a
doubt. Yet three things are striking about the system Trollope so
vividly describes. First, the political elite were agreed in
condemning any kind of political violence - even the threat of it
- out of hand. Secondly, those in government did not hesitate to
leave office, and all its perquisites, if they felt their
parliamentary position to be untenable. Thirdly, the overwhelming
majority of MPs on both sides accepted the sanctity of the
constitution and supremacy of the law.
These assumptions
did not spring into life overnight. They were the product of
around 200 years of political evolution, dating back to the
Glorious Revolution of 1688. Only gradually did the two-party
system arise. Only gradually did it become conventional for the
prime minister to command a majority in the House of Commons.
Only gradually did ideas about representation develop until
finally - long after Trollope's time - the right to vote became
associated with adulthood alone, rather than with
property-ownership, education or sex.
The reality about
democracy is that it cannot be conjured up out of thin air in the
absence of such assumptions. As a young Tanzanian once explained
to me: ''In Africa, if you give a man all the privileges of power
- the money, the power, the big house and car - and then say,
five years later, 'Now you must give all this up to your harshest
critic,' he is quite likely to find a reason not to do what you
ask.'' Yet this is not a peculiarity of Africa. It was once the
case everywhere. Only slowly, by sometimes painful trial and
error, do elites learn that it is in their own interests to
exclude violence from politics; to take turns at governing; and
above all to submit to the rule of law.
Winston Churchill
famously described democracy as ''the worst form of Government -
except all those other forms that have been tried from time to
time''. This remains the case, not least because representative
government with multiple parties will generally produce superior
governance to dictatorships and one-party states, where
rent-seeking behaviour is generally unchecked by free political
opposition. There is corruption in most countries, but it is
nearly always worse - and more economically distorting - in
non-democracies. That is why, if they remain one-party states,
China and Russia will sooner or later stumble and fall behind the
democratic tortoises, Brazil and India.
The key to
spreading democracy is clearly not just to overthrow undemocratic
regimes and hold elections. Nor is it simply a matter of waiting
for a country to achieving the right level of income or rate of
growth. The key, as Stanford political scientist Barry Weingast
has long argued, is to come up with rules that are
''self-enforcing'', so that the more they are applied, the more
respected they become, until at last they become
inviolable.
There is no reason why that should not be
possible in any of the world's civilisations. As the British
example makes clear, however, it can (and probably must) be a
very protracted process. And that is precisely why it would be
rash, after a few bad years, to prophesy the death of democracy -
as rash as it was to predict its triumph after a few good
ones.
Niall Ferguson is a contributing editor to
the Financial Times.
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