Political Order and Political Decay (64 page)

China and the countries influenced by it were heirs to a Confucian moral and bureaucratic system that oriented rulers, through education and socialization, toward a broader concept of the common good. That, plus the Confucian emphasis on literacy and education, left a critical if unintended benefit for modern economic development. East Asia's rapid rise from the second half of the twentieth century on has been driven by strong technocratic states whose leadership, however authoritarian, remains oriented toward shared goals of economic and social development. It is very hard to prove in a social scientific manner a causal connection between these older historical and cultural traditions and the behavior of Itō Hirobumi, Yamagata Aritomo, Park Chung Hee, Lee Kwan Yew, and Deng Xiaoping, and the governments they led, but the connection is still there. While some were corrupt and most quite authoritarian, levels of malfeasance overall were kept in better check in Asia than in sub-Saharan Africa. Just as important, leaders in East Asia were much more competent in their economic management and understood better the importance of professional state administration. This is not to say there isn't a lot of corruption in the region. Compared to other parts of the world, however, bribe payers there got a lot more back for their money in terms of public goods and broad-based development.

China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea could seek to modernize their economies while taking for granted the existence of a strong and coherent state as well as a well-established national identity. The newly independent countries in sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, could not, and they needed to do everything at once—build modern states, establish national identities, create rule-of-law institutions, stage democratic elections, and promote economic development at the same time. While Europe and East Asia sequenced institutional development differently from one another, they had the luxury of doing this sequencing over long periods of time.

The strong states of East Asia developed bureaucratic institutions before they had a rule of law, while in Europe the sequence was reversed. The precociously strong East Asian state was for centuries able to head off the emergence of independent social actors that could challenge its power. While European liberal democracy grew out of a rough balance of power between state and society, the state-society balance in East Asia favored the state. This meant that, in contrast to most of the rest of the developing world where state weakness was the central issue, what is lacking in East Asia is the limitation of state power through law or political accountability.

In Part I, we saw that states that democratized before they had acquired modern state institutions were prone to large-scale clientelism. This has been much less of a problem in East Asia than in other parts of the world, because the region developed a smaller number of democracies than either Latin America or Africa, and the first ones to appear tended to be concentrated in industrialized countries already possessing strong states. Although I have not discussed the Philippines at any length, it would seem to be an exception that proves the rule: like the United States in the nineteenth century, that country democratized before it had a modern state and has therefore experienced substantial amounts of patronage and clientelism.

The state-society balance in East Asia is changing rapidly under the impact of two forces that didn't exist or were much less powerful in the premodern world. The first is industrialization, which mobilizes powerful new social actors like a middle class and working class that didn't exist in agrarian times. The second is the much more intense interaction among societies internationally, what we now label globalization. Goods and services, people, and ideas travel across international boundaries much more readily than they once did, which makes foreign actors far more important to the process of domestic development. So if East Asian states were traditionally strong, they today face both resistance from new groups in their own societies and the influx of ideas from other parts of the world. The same kind of social mobilization that changed European societies and laid the basis for democracy there is taking place in contemporary East Asia.

We need, then, to look more closely at the dynamic process by which democracy spreads. Democracy has become the dominant form of political organization around the world not just because it is a good idea, but also because it serves the interests of and is promoted by certain social groups. These groups in turn are the by-products of broader economic and social developments. Ideas matter in this process, but they interact with and shape the material interests of different classes in society.

 

PART THREE

Democracy

 

27

WHY DID DEMOCRACY SPREAD?

The Third Wave of democratization; theories of why democratic waves occur; how democracy is rooted in the interests of specific social groups; social mobilization as the link between economic change and democracy; political parties as key agents in the struggle over democracy

Japan, China, and other societies in East Asia were heirs to a long tradition of government and could presuppose the existence of a strong state as they began to industrialize in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prior to this point, they were highly unequal agrarian societies in which a small elite exercised a monopoly of power over a large mass of largely unorganized peasants. I suggested that the state-society balance began to change with the onset of rapid economic growth, and that the authoritarian system in contemporary China will face significant challenges as new social groups are mobilized and begin to demand a share of political power. Will this lead to the eventual appearance of formal democratic accountability in China? We have no way of predicting such an outcome. What we can do is to try to understand the process of democratization in other parts of the world and what implications it may hold for the future.

Between 1970 and 2010, the number of democracies around the world increased from about 35 to nearly 120, or some 60 percent of the world's countries, in what Samuel Huntington called the Third Wave of democratization. According to him, the first long wave began in the 1820s and continued through the end of the nineteenth century, while the second short wave happened in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The Third Wave began with the democratic transitions in Spain and Portugal in the early 1970s and continued through the end of military rule in Greece and Turkey, followed by a series of Latin American countries including Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile; then it moved to Asia with the democratization of the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan; and culminated in the collapse of communism and the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe and some of the successor states of the former Soviet Union. Democracy expert Larry Diamond has argued that there has been a recession of the Third Wave in the 2000s. While the outbreak of the Arab Spring in early 2011 suggested to some observers the start of a Fourth Wave, setbacks in Egypt, Libya, and Syria have made this a less compelling argument.
1

Why did these waves of democratization occur? Why did they occur in some regions and societies and not others? Why were some waves successful in establishing relatively stable democracies while others were rolled back? And why did democracy become a global phenomenon only during the twentieth century and not in the roughly four hundred prior centuries of human history?

One answer to the question of why democracy spread has been put forward in a number of different variants: democracy has taken hold as the result of the power of the underlying idea of democracy. This was stated forcefully by Alexis de Tocqueville in his introduction to
Democracy in America
. He noted that the idea of human equality that underlies modern democracy had been gaining ground for the preceding eight hundred years, and it had acquired an unstoppable momentum that aroused in him a “kind of religious dread.” He regarded its progress as a providential fact.
2
Other authors have agreed that ideas were critical and have traced them to specific historical and cultural roots, either in ancient Athens or in Christianity. Both Hegel and Nietzsche understood modern political democracy to be a secularized version of the Christian doctrine of the universal equality of human dignity. Hegel in particular saw developments in the material world such as the French Revolution and the emergence of the principle of equal recognition as the working out of the inner logic of human rationality. During the Third Wave itself, as well as during the more recent Arab Spring, ideas clearly propagated rapidly across international borders via radio, television, the Internet, and flows of activists bringing news of political upheavals elsewhere. The wave of democratic transitions occurring in sub-Saharan Africa during the early 1990s was clearly inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dramatic developments taking place in Eastern Europe shortly before.

In terms of the framework built around the six dimensions of development laid out in chapter 2, theories focusing on ideas or cultural values would posit a causal relationship looking something like
Figure 19
.

FIGURE 19.
Ideas and Democracy

But while ideas are indeed powerful and can explain much about political institutions, this kind of explanation begs as many questions as it settles. Why, for instance, do the ideas of human equality or democracy take off in some periods and not in others? The idea of democracy has been around at least since ancient Athens, and yet it did not become institutionalized anywhere until the end of the eighteenth century. Tocqueville does not explain why the idea of human equality became progressively more powerful, except to suggest that it was an act of God. Democracy did not arise in all parts of the world, nor has it gained traction equally across the globe. This has led to the assertion, made by parties as diverse as Samuel Huntington, the contemporary Chinese government, and a variety of Islamists, that liberal democracy does not represent a universal trend but is something culturally specific to Western civilization. If this is true, it still begs the question of why this particular idea arose in the West and not elsewhere.

An alternative school of thought understands democracy not as the expression of an idea or a set of cultural values but as the by-product of deep structural forces within societies. Social scientists have long noted that there is a correlation between high levels of economic development and stable democracy: most of the world's rich industrialized countries today are democracies, whereas most remaining authoritarian states are much less developed. One well-known study shows that while countries may transition from authoritarian to democratic government at any level of development, they are much more likely to remain democracies if they rise above a certain threshold of per capita income. This suggests prima facie that there may be something in the process of economic development that makes democracy more likely.
3

But what is the connection between economic development and democracy? Do people's values somehow magically flip over to favor democracy when they achieve a certain level of well-being? The statistical correlations linking development and democracy provide no insight as to specific causal mechanisms that connect the two. Within all of these correlations, moreover, there are many exceptions: for example, according to this view, impoverished India should not be a stable democracy yet wealthy Singapore should.

In chapter 2, I suggested an alternative causal path by which economic growth could affect democratic institutions, via social mobilization. The key concept here is the division of labor. Adam Smith asserted that the division of labor is limited by the size of the market, or, put differently, that as markets expanded through increased trade in a commercial and later an industrial economy, a new division of labor would arise and deepen. This division of labor entailed the creation of new social groups. Although Smith himself never made this argument explicitly, it follows logically that these new groups, excluded from participation in the political institutions of the old agrarian society, would demand a share of political power and therefore increase pressures for democracy. Economic growth, in other words, engendered social mobilization, which in turn led to increasing demands for political participation (along the lines of
Figure 20
).