Political Order and Political Decay (70 page)

In nineteenth-century Europe, popular mobilization for democracy got hijacked by nationalism. This phenomenon first manifested itself during the French Revolution, when calls for the Rights of Man quickly evolved into the militant assertion of the rights of the French nation. It was evident in Germany in the 1870s, when many of the liberals of the 1840s and '50s became fervent supporters of Bismarck and his forceful unification of the German nation. And it appeared in August 1914, when rank-and-file members of working-class parties that had been charter members of the Second Socialist International lined up behind their national governments and plunged into war.

There is an obvious cultural factor that has gravely complicated the possibility of democracy in the Middle East—Islam. A large number of Muslim-majority societies have had to contend with militant and antidemocratic Islamist groups; there was no equivalent threat to the Third Wave democratic transitions in Eastern Europe or Latin America. A number of observers have suggested that Islam itself constitutes an insuperable obstacle to the emergence of democracy, since it has never accepted the principle of the separation of church and state, and harbors a long tradition of violent religious militancy. Islamist organizations like Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that have played by democratic rules are often accused of using democracy instrumentally to gain power; their real agenda remains creation of illiberal theocratic states. The rise of these groups has then provoked conservative authoritarian governments to crack down on them, leading to politics that is polarized between two nondemocratic alternatives.

Whether political Islam will remain a permanent obstacle preventing the emergence of liberal democracy in Muslim majority countries is not so obvious, any more than an assertion that nationalism makes democracy impossible in Europe. Political Islam has waxed and waned over the decades, and in the twentieth century it often took a backseat to other movements based on secular nationalism or liberal authoritarianism. All large, complex cultural systems can be and have been interpreted in a variety of ways over time. Although there is an egalitarian doctrine at the heart of Christianity (as there is in Islam), Christian churches aligned themselves with authoritarian rulers and justified illiberal orders over the centuries. Part of the story of the Third Wave of democratizations in Europe and Latin America has to do with the reinterpretation of Catholic doctrine after Vatican II in the 1960s to make it compatible with modern democracy.
4

So too with radical Islam. It seems likely that its current expansion is due more to the social conditions of contemporary Middle Eastern societies than to the intrinsic nature of the religion. Indeed, the spread of political Islam can be seen as a form of identity politics very comparable to its nationalist variant in Europe. This was an argument first made by Ernest Gellner, whose theory of the origins of nationalism was noted back in chapter 12. Gellner, it will be recalled, argued that nationalism is a response to the identity dislocation that occurs as societies modernize and transition from Gesellschaft—the small village—to Gemeinschaft—the large city. It occurs primarily in modernizing countries, where the narrow old forms of identity based on kinship and locality disappear and are replaced by more universalist doctrines linking individuals to broader cultural movements. He argued that the rise of modern Islamism responded to very similar imperatives in the Middle East, where religion plays the role that nation played in Europe. To the confused former peasant now living in Cairo or Karachi, or to a second-generation Muslim immigrant in Europe, a figure like Osama bin Laden can provide a convincing answer to the question “Who am I?” The rise of political Islam in the last part of the twentieth century does not therefore reflect the return of an eternally unchanging Islam, as both the proponents of radical Islam and their critics maintain, but rather is a response precisely to the half-modernized state in which much of the Middle East finds itself.

So just as the nineteenth-century European impulse toward democracy got diverted into nationalism, so the Middle Eastern popular mobilization risks being hijacked by religion.
5

The Third Wave transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America are thus misleading precedents for the Arab Spring. It is really Europe's long and tortured journey from autocracy through nationalism to democracy that provides the better model. This line of analysis does not offer comfort to those hoping for the emergence of liberal democracy anytime soon in the Arab world. We can only hope that such a transition, if it eventually occurs, will not take anywhere as long as it did in Europe. Europe in the nineteenth century had no prior experience of democracy and therefore no clear institutional models to follow. The same is not the case in the contemporary Middle East. Regimes that balance strong states with legal and democratic constraints on power have become a normative standard around the world. Getting there, however, depends on the creation of a complex set of interlocking institutions, which in turn are facilitated by changes in the nature of underlying economic and social conditions. The social basis for stable democracy did not exist in the Europe of 1848, and it may not yet exist in many parts of the Middle East today.

 

30

THE MIDDLE CLASS AND DEMOCRACY'S FUTURE

How the working class became the middle class in the developed world and upset Marx's predictions; technology, globalization, and the future of middle-class societies; some reflections on the role of violence in bringing about modern democracy

According to Karl Marx, modern capitalism was headed for an ultimate crisis of what he called “overproduction.” Capitalist use of technology would extract surpluses from the labor of the proletariat, leading to greater concentrations of wealth and the progressive immiseration of workers. The bourgeoisie who ran this system could not, despite their wealth, consume everything that it produced, while the proletariat whose labor made it possible were too poor to buy its products. Ever-increasing levels of inequality would lead to a shortfall in demand, and the system would come crashing down upon itself. The only way out of this crisis, according to Marx, was a revolution that would give political power to the proletariat and redistribute the fruits of the capitalist system.
1

Marx's scenario seemed quite plausible through the middle decades of the nineteenth century in all industrializing countries. Working conditions in new factory towns were appalling, and huge new agglomerations of impoverished workers appeared out of nowhere. Rules concerning working hours, safety, child labor, and the like were either nonexistent or poorly enforced. European conditions were, in other words, very similar to those found in the early twenty-first century in parts of China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and other developing countries.

But a number of unexpected developments occurred on the way to the proletarian revolution. First was the fact that labor incomes began to rise. Early gains were the result of extensive economic growth as new workers were mobilized out of the agrarian population, but that process reached natural limits and the price of labor relative to capital began to increase. This dynamic is happening today in China, as the cost of labor has risen rapidly in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Second, many countries, beginning with the United States, began to put into place universal public education systems as well as increasing investments in higher education. This was not simply a matter of public generosity: new industries required engineers, accountants, lawyers, clerical staff, and hourly workers with basic literacy and numeracy skills. Higher labor costs could easily be justified if they were matched by enhanced productivity, which was in turn the result of better technology and increasing human capital.

Third, the spread of the franchise described in the previous chapter led to expansion of the political power of the working classes. This happened through the struggles to legalize and expand trade unions, and in the rise of political parties associated with them like the British Labour Party and the German Social Democratic Party. The nature of conservative parties began to change as well: instead of representing wealthy landowners, they shifted their base of support to the new middle-class elites. The working classes' newfound political power was then used to implement social legislation regulating working conditions, which led to agitation for broader welfare state policies like pensions and publicly provided health care.

Fourth, by the middle decades of the twentieth century, the working class simply stopped growing, both in absolute numbers and as a share of the workforce. Indeed, the relative size of Marx's proletariat shrank as workers saw substantial increases in their standards of living that allowed them to move into the middle class. They now owned property and had better educations, and were therefore more likely to vote for political parties that could protect their privileges rather than ones pushing to overturn the status quo.

Fifth, a new class of poor and underprivileged people emerged below the industrial working class, often consisting of recent immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and other marginalized people. These groups worked in lower-paying service jobs or remained unemployed and dependent on government benefits. Workers in manufacturing industries who were represented by trade unions became a kind of aristocracy within the labor force. The vast majority of workers had no such representation; in countries where benefits like pensions were tied to regular jobs, they entered the informal sector. Such individuals had few legally defined rights and often did not possess legal title to the land or houses they occupied. Throughout Latin America and many other parts of the developing world, the informal sector constitutes perhaps 60 to 70 percent of the entire labor force. Unlike the industrial working class, this group of “new poor” has been notoriously hard to organize for political action. Rather than living in large barracks in factory towns, they live scattered across the country and are often self-employed entrepreneurs.

Finally, the political Left throughout the world lost its focus on economic and class issues, and became fragmented as the result of the spread of identity politics. I have noted already how working-class solidarity was undermined by nationalism at the time of World War I. But the rise of new forms of identity in the developed world by the middle of the twentieth century around black empowerment, feminism, environmentalism, immigrant and indigenous rights, and gay rights created a whole new set of causes that cut across class lines. The leadership of many of these movements came out of the economic elites, and their cultural preferences often stood at cross-purposes to those of the working-class electorate that had once been the bulwark of progressive politics.

The displacement of class politics by identity politics has been very confusing to older Marxists, who for many years clung to the old industrial working class as their preferred category of the underprivileged. They tried to explain this shift in terms of what Ernest Gellner labeled the “Wrong Address Theory”: “Just as extreme Shi'ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for
classes
, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to
nations
.” Gellner went on to argue that in the contemporary Middle East, the same letter was now being delivered to religions rather than nations. But the underlying sociological dynamic was the same.
2

The first four of these six developments unanticipated by Karl Marx all center around a single phenomenon, which was the conversion of the working class into a broad middle class. At the conclusion of the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century, the developed democracies of Europe and North America finally found themselves in a happy position. Their politics was no longer sharply polarized between a rich oligarchy and a large working class or peasant majority, who engaged in a zero-sum struggle over the distribution of resources. The old oligarchies in many developed countries had either evolved into more entrepreneurial capitalist elites or had been physically eliminated through revolution and war. The working classes through unionization and political struggle won greater privileges for themselves and became middle class in political outlook. Fascism discredited the extreme Right, and the emerging cold war and threat from Stalinist Russia discredited the Communist Left. This left politics to be played out among center-Right and center-Left parties that largely agreed on a liberal democratic framework. The median voter—a favorite concept of political scientists—was no longer a poor person demanding systemic changes to the social order but a middle-class individual with a stake in the existing system.

Other regions were not so lucky. Latin America had a legacy of high levels of inequality, and in many countries the old landowning oligarchies had not been eliminated through the political struggles that consumed Europe. The benefits of economic growth were shared by the organized working classes but not by the mass of workers in the informal sector, and as a result a highly polarized politics emerged reminiscent of nineteenth-century continental Europe. The persistence of radical, antisystemic groups—the Communist parties led by Cuba, the Tupamaros in Uruguay, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the FMLN in El Salvador, and most recently the Bolivarian movement of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela—was a symptom of this fundamental class conflict.

From the days of Aristotle, thinkers have believed that stable democracy would have to rest on a broad middle class; societies with extremes of wealth and poverty are susceptible to oligarchic domination or to populist revolution. Karl Marx believed that the middle classes would always remain a small and privileged minority in modern societies. Yet by the second half of the twentieth century, the middle class constituted the vast majority of the population of most advanced societies, thereby undercutting the appeal of Marxism.