Looks at the International State of Democracy
Pereira, Anthony W.
THE SECOND half of the twentieth century was an age of democracy. The women's movement, anti-colonial struggles, and challenges to what W. E. B. Du Bois called the "color line" won political...
...As a member of the EU, Spain received substantial funds due to policies aimed at reducing economic inequalities within the union...
...This process was extended when the former Soviet Union broke up, and communist regimes collapsed there and in Eastern Europe...
...These workers have no pension benefits, no unemployment insurance, no paid leaves of any kind, and no employment contract—they can be fired at will...
...Finally, although new information technology is used by states to organize elections, ordinary citizens often lack access to it...
...The U.S...
...Despite its apparently neutral language, transitology reflects ideological assumptions about new democracies...
...Similarly, in Algeria in December 1991, a militant Islamic party won the country's firstever parliamentary elections...
...government, or at least parts of it, led the way in the forging of the Washington consensus...
...In response, senior army officers forced then-president Chadli Benjedid to resign and suspended the electoral process, forming a regime that remains in power today...
...This is not a foundation for successful democracy...
...The preeminence of the market was reflected in terminology— developing countries became "emerging markets" in much of the literature, as if their only importance was as an open field for the exports and investments of rich countries...
...With the exception of Basque terrorism, there was a relative lack of ethnic tension or separatist sentiment in the country...
...government continues to maintain protectionist barriers against developing country exports in agriculture and other sectors...
...Burma (Myanmar), which the democratic activist Aung San Suu Kyi calls a "Fascist Disneyland," is one of them, as are Pakistan and, until 1999, Nigeria...
...It is a politically unsophisticated form of salesmanship that looks hypocritical, since the U.S...
...The transitology literature, then, overestimates the transformative potential of third wave democratization...
...and negotiated transitions always produce better democracies than those that result from a regime collapse...
...People can socialize it so that human values help to determine the conditions of production and the allocation of goods and services...
...Short-term, speculative investments in currencies, stocks, and other liquid assets flow in and out of developing countries quickly and erratically, subject to the wild swings of the international investment community...
...In 18 n DISSENT / Winter 2001 POLITICS ABROAD South Korea, for example, surveys reveal that the most popular former ruler of the country is the late Park Hung Chee, the autocratic leader of a military regime from 1961 to 1979...
...Democracy is seen as useful because it can generate the marketizing and commercializing changes that are "necessary" for the world economy...
...Courts are often neither legitimate nor competent...
...Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—which now spends roughly $700 million per year trying to promote a particular version of democracy overseas...
...In addition, the globalized world economy is highly volatile...
...Although many new democracies now exist, therefore, it is striking that large numbers of people in these countries prefer authoritarian leaders and are indifferent or hostile to current democratic governments...
...the ecu preceded the euro), or almost one-quarter of the EU's total structural-aid spending in that period...
...even surplus-generating state enterprises should be privatized...
...Another political scientist, Philippe Schmitter, wryly refers to the work of Huntington and the legions of other scholars and practitioners who write about democratic transitions as "transitology...
...The Washington Consensus requires sharp attacks on fiscal deficits (and therefore cuts in government spending), financial liberalization (letting the market determine interest rates), trade liberalization (lowering tariffs and other barriers), privatization of state-owned enterprises, deregulation, and more rigorous enforcement of property rights, including intellectual property rights...
...Certainly, the revolution in information technology has benefited some developing countries...
...Grassroots movements have on occasion used technology—the Zapatistas in Chiapas used the Internet effectively after 1994, for example, and the Grameenphone program has recently provided cellular phones to 100,000 subscribers in 250 villages in Bangladesh...
...Furthermore, many new democracies are illiberal, unable or unwilling to guarantee their citizens important political and civil rights, even if regular elections are held...
...In short, the prevailing development model excludes large numbers of people who are not property-owning stakeholders, but who live instead with a high degree of economic insecurity and deprivation...
...Such a perspective is intrinsic to the U.S...
...And please remember that we can't consider articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...If the generation of 1968 demanded a revolution, the generation of 1978 actually created one—but it was technological, not political...
...In Portugal and Spain, long-lasting fascist dictatorships ended...
...According to Freedom House, a nonprofit institution that issues an annual assessment of political and civil rights worldwide, there were only twenty-two democracies with 31 percent of the world population in 1950, out of a total of eighty sovereign states...
...With the rise of nation-states in Europe after the French Revolution, domestic movements with their tactics of strikes, petitions, demonstrations, and marches were born...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...He directly appointed twenty of the hundred and fifty members of parliament, while his loyal followers controlled the electoral system, and liberation war "veterans" (many too young to have actually fought in the war) replaced politically unreliable schoolteachers as polling station managers...
...With a singlemindedness that would make the old apparatchiks of the Soviet Union proud, U.S...
...It is in economic matters that the differences are most striking...
...Indeed, the judiciary performs too well from the point of view of former dictators such as Chile's Augusto Pinochet and Guatemala's Efraim Rios Mont, both of whom have been investigated and charged with crimes against humanity in Spanish courts...
...They make the McCarthy period in the United States look genteel by comparison...
...Why is democracy in such political systems so tenuous...
...Widespread crime and violence vitiate the effective exercise of democratic rights for millions...
...Politics signifies engagement in political affairs...
...Fear and suspicion remain entrenched, hampering the creation of the civic micro foundations of democracy...
...U.S...
...it is open to the possibility of new political winners and meaningful change...
...Nondemocratic regimes still exist...
...Violence continues, especially in rural areas, where landowners, state officials, and other powerful groups use armed forces of various kinds to enforce their rule...
...exporters, investors, and other companies (who after all bankroll its elected representatives) rather than the whole of its population, and changes in developing countries should be evaluated solely in terms of the opportunities they provide to those interests...
...They became, in the words of Malawian political scientist Thandika Mkandawire, "choiceless democracies...
...Democracy is increasingly about who makes the global rules, not just about who replaces authoritarian leaders in individual countries...
...THE QUESTION is complicated, but one way to answer it is to compare new democracies to what I've already called the emblematic case of third wave transition...
...Many of these political systems are marked by deep disjunctures between the sophistication of their elections, on the one hand, and the legitimacy of their governments and the actual enjoyment of rights by their citizens, on the other...
...Today, there are 120 electoral democracies representing 58 percent of the world population, out of 192 sovereign states...
...in Latin America, brutal military dictatorships ran aground...
...In addition, some of the world's states have imploded, rendering the form of their regime irrelevant: Sierra Leone, the Congo, Colombia, and Sri Lanka today...
...Patronage and clientelism rob elections of much of their deliberative content, and while they serve as a redistributive mechanism in societies without extensive welfare states, their ability to ensure democratic accountability is diminished...
...In 1980, the International Labor Organization estimated that 40 percent of Latin America's nonagricultural workforce was in the informal sector...
...These funds improved infrastructure and boosted employment, especially in Spain's poorest regions...
...It is likely that there will be more, and that international intervention, when it occurs, will not be entirely successful in promoting peace and rebuilding the state...
...The only acceptable criterion of state reform is efficiency, measured by the bottom line of the business world...
...But the fight is well worth the effort...
...Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Haiti, Liberia, Rwanda, and Somalia a few years ago...
...The fact that so many third wave democracies emerged precisely during the rise of the Washington Consensus meant, paradoxically, that their ability to manage their own economies was markedly curtailed...
...With so many people so vulnerable, elections in Latin America have a different character than those in rich countries...
...in Africa and Asia, one-party machines lost their hegemony...
...dollars...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...A Wall Street Journal survey estimates that 57 percent of those people who regularly surf the Web live in the United States...
...By 1998, informal-sector employment had climbed to 58 percent, a majority of the workforce...
...Much of the violence had an ethnic dimension, making it particularly difficult to ameliorate after a democratic transition...
...Whenever new forms of political authority are consolidated, social movements can open new space for democratic contestation...
...Nor do regular elections necessarily prevent the rule of dictatorial leaders...
...Spain today has a more egalitarian distribution of income than the United States and a human development score (calculated by the United Nations Development Program) higher than that of Belgium and the United Kingdom...
...firms must take precedence over local needs, and that top priority must always be given to the wishes of the largest financial conglomerates and multinational corporations...
...Global institutions such as the WTO should not be opposed in toto, but reformed and used as structures within which democratization can take place...
...Polls of Russians reveal the same sentiments about the Brezhnev era...
...BUT OTHER new democracies frequently lack one or more of the variables that contributed to the success of the Spanish transition...
...China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam are nominally communist, one-party regimes whose leaders deeply distrust multiparty democracy...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...Eighteen percent said that in some circumstances, authoritarianism was preferable, and 29 percent thought that it made no difference...
...pERHAPS most important, certain kinds of democratic transition are taken to be inherently better than others...
...ANTHONY W. PEREIFtA teaches political science at Tulane University in New Orleans...
...When economies are volatile, so is politics...
...The number of people in these countries is 20 percent of the world's population...
...Transitologists extract certain lessons from the Spanish model that they hope democratizers elsewhere will use: the "masses" threaten to destabilize transitions, and their mobilization should be feared, not encouraged...
...Political and civil rights are therefore nonexistent for large segments of the population in many new democracies...
...Global Economic Trends In addition to these problems, the transitology literature fails to link democratic transitions with changes taking place in the global economy...
...Powerful international forces push developing countries to adopt a single prescription DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 2I POLITICS ABROAD for their economic troubles, one that leaves them, especially the smaller ones, with little room for alternative policies...
...The goal of nineteenth-century radicals still lies visible on the horizon in the twenty-first century...
...The managers of the global institutions of "governance," and the corporate and state interests that prop them up, will not accede to change without a fight...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...A survey of the situation suggests that many of them are in trouble, and only sustained transnational pressure to democratize globally will create the political DISSENT / Winter 2001 I7 POLITICS ABROAD conditions in which they can flourish...
...And finally, a relatively moderate ruling class was willing to accept, without violence, the re-emergence of the unions and the left that the end of authoritarian rule engendered...
...This is true in other parts of the world as well...
...An entire international regime of election specialists mushroomed in the 1990s, and the United Nations monitored and sometimes ran elections in many places...
...In its foreign economic policy, the United States has rarely deviated from the Wall StreetTreasury Department line...
...But they can only do that by questioning and challenging the vision of economic and political change promoted by those who run the world's economy...
...In the period between 1989 and 1993, Spain received about twelve billion ecus (about ten billion U.S...
...the U.S...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...The "Third Wave" and "Transitology" Given all this, what can be said about the world's new democracies...
...It had a relatively egalitarian distribution of income compared to that of most developing countries...
...For example, in Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe succeeded in terrorizing the rural population into at least partially endorsing the continued rule of his Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) Party...
...Because of these manipulations and (it is widely suspected) ballot rigging, Mugabe was able to maintain his hold on power despite a strong showing by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the parliamentary elections of June 2000...
...But for many countries, previously huge socio-economic inequalities with rich countries have widened, as have domestic inequalities...
...A retreat into fortified, nationalist, autarchic states would probably be the worst thing that could happen to democracy in the world today...
...They are so indebted to and dependent on international financial institutions that they are not really free to make basic democratic decisions about which of their goods and services are to be allocated through the price mechanism and which are not, how certain markets should be regulated, or how their economic reforms should be carried out...
...In agriculture, where work tends to be seasonal, that figure would be far higher...
...In Latin America, for example, there has been a marked jump in informal-sector employment in recent years in a region that is already the most unequal in the world...
...Each of these deserves some attention...
...government, the IMF and World Bank, and private banks and foundations...
...Observers speak of these polities as "democracies without citizenship" or "delegative democracies"—political systems in which plebiscitary elections create mandates for powerful chief executives who rule virtually unchecked...
...The view of politics fostered by the Washington Consensus is a utilitarian one...
...It exaggerates the degree to which deep historical divisions within countries can be crafted out of existence by the correct decisions of democratizing elites...
...But democratic politics is feared as well as desired, because it gives rise to views opposed to the consensus...
...In some cases, a mature and growing economy, a well-functioning state, and civic micro foundations are all missing...
...In addition, Spanish state institutions perform relatively well...
...This was a significant transfer of resources that most countries in the developing DISSENT / Winter 2001 • 19 POLITICS ABROAD world cannot hope to attain...
...Finally, Spanish society had a fairly high degree of consensus, at both the mass and elite level, at the time of its transition...
...Advocates of democracy need to transcend the narrow confines of the transitology approach and take account of the global economic environment in which democratic transitions do, or do not, take place...
...And as globalization proceeds, new social movements are emerging, capable at the very least of stopping the most egregious corporate and governmental manipulations...
...The most violent period of repression had ended three-and-a-half decades earlier...
...Today, the terminology is different, and no one is seriously talking about eliminating markets...
...Finally, changes in patterns of economic and political organization have shifted authority upward to regional and global institutions (the European Union [EU], the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA], the World Trade Organization [WTO], the International Monetary Fund [IMF], the World Bank, multinational corporations, and financial markets) and downward to local and provincial governments...
...THE EDITORS DISSENT / Winter 2001 • 23...
...20 n DISSENT / Winter 2001 POLITICS ABROAD Much the same story could be told in the area of state institutions, which were seriously debilitated in many developing countries as governments cut spending to cope with the debt crisis of the 1980s...
...While some economic changes facilitate openness, transnational networking, and similar developments supportive of democracy, others severely restrict the choices of governments in developing countries...
...Among women in the nonagricultural labor market, the figure was even higher, 65 percent that same year...
...The second allows for conflict between fundamentally different visions and parties...
...In Burma in 1990, the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) won an election by a large margin but then was prohibited from taking office by the military...
...The percentage of the world's population living under some form of democracy nearly doubled in the last fifty years...
...And in Brazil, only 47 percent of respondents in a recent poll agreed with the statement, "Democracy is preferable to any other form of government...
...If you are submitting to Dissent electronically, our e-mail address is editors@dissentmagazine.org . (4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...Elections certified as "free and fair" by international election observers may be marred by widespread intimidation prior to the vote that is not easily monitored by short-term visitors...
...The U.S...
...Leaders with a dictatorial bent manipulate political systems to prevent genuine competition or to steal elections...
...Governance refers to the administration of people and things...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...New information technology was allied to the political transformations of the third wave to produce a sense among many analysts that the expansion of democracy was limitless, irreversible, and conducive to all sorts of other positive changes, such as economic development and international peace...
...Spain in 1975, the year of its democratization, had three advantages that are not shared by many other countries: a mature economy, a functioning state bureaucracy, and a society with a high degree of consensus...
...policy, insisting that any government's attempt to limit the mobility of capital is unacceptable, that developing countries should seek always to privatize their industries and lower tariffs, that the intellectual property rights of U.S...
...Actually Existing Democracy In fact, transitology is of limited usefulness in understanding the politics of new democracies...
...Elections are also sometimes ignored when the results do not favor incumbents...
...All these were strengthened in the years after Franco's death as Spain entered the EU, continued to grow economically, and staged successive elections that resulted in the alternation of ruling parties...
...The first assumes that the challenge facing the world economy is to make the management of the status quo more efficient...
...Beginning in the 1980s, the so-called "Washington Consensus," or neoliberal orthodoxy, came to dominate official thinking about economic development in the U.S...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...In the mid-1970s, Spain had a mature capitalist economy in which low-wage agriculture was no longer the leading sector...
...government should aggressively represent the interests of U.S...
...The difference is telling...
...On the board of the International Monetary Fund, for example, two-thirds of the voting rights are in the hands of representatives of the United States, Japan, and Europe, who speak for less than one-eighth of the world's population...
...For this reason, much of the writing about the global economy from Washington these days uses the term "governance" rather than "politics...
...it takes the dominance of the current orthodoxy for granted...
...22 n DISSENT / Winter 2001 POLITICS ABROAD But many social movements are engaged in a similar project at a global level, attempting to apply the principles of parliamentary democracy to the institutions that manage the international economy...
...Many NLD members, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, remain under house arrest or in prison...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...However, much of the current literature about the emerging democracies reflects assumptions that don't hold universally and agendas that embody the interests of powerful external actors...
...Few would question the value of such events for people living in these countries...
...Global grassroots movements might be able to force this and other institutions to move closer to the principles of universal suffrage and democracy, and thus produce a more humane global economy...
...The supremacy of the market is aggressively asserted over all other values, and the supposedly "statist" policies of the past are characterized tout court as failures...
...government should not seek to protect an over-arching public interest distinct from the preferences aggregated by the market—indeed, there is no public interest distinct from the market...
...But all too often ordinary people in developing countries are still excluded from the new technology networks...
...The relentless repetition of this economic formula does not amount to genuine global leadership...
...This was a historic shift of epic proportions...
...The conflicts that had created the Franco regime lay in the distant past...
...political scientist Samuel Huntington christened the democratic transitions of the mid-1970s and after as the "third wave," a successor to the first wave of democratization in the nineteenth century and the second wave during and after World War II...
...What the economist Jagdish Bhagwati calls the "Wall Street-Treasury complex" has been firmly in control of U.S...
...To Our Contributors A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...The women's movement, anti-colonial struggles, and challenges to what W. E. B. Du Bois called the "color line" won political inclusion for many people throughout the world...
...And starting in the mid-1970s, electoral democracies replaced authoritarian regimes in southern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Africa and Asia...
...AS THE LAST century began, socialist and other radical movements were attempting to democratize politics at the national level by applying the principles of parliamentary democracy to the management of the "commanding heights" of the economy...
...The scope of the nationstate's power has diminished as its institutions have, more and more, been democratized...
...Information technology has great potential to reduce the cost to grassroots organizations of spreading information and organizing...
...The creation of new democracies in the late twentieth century involved the demise of many different kinds of regimes...
...In these regions, only affluent elites have access to the information that the Internet provides...
...The killing fields of Cambodia are one horrific example of this kind of violence, but there are many others...
...trade officials, State Department employees, and USAID technicians repeat the mantra in international conferences and in the capitals of developing countries: governments should be minimally involved in the economy...
...And military regimes of the kind so common in developing countries in the 1960s and 1970s survive...
...For example, democracy tends to be defined minimally as competition between elites in competitive elections...
...Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Swaziland are traditional monarchies...
...In many developing countries, but not in Spain, cold war conflicts were large-scale and recent...
...The emergence of what political writer Andrew Sullivan calls "dot.communism," in which universal access to the Internet's plethora of free information, goods, and services creates genuine political equality, at least in cyberspace, is far from a reality...
...When the political form of the nation-state was carried by European powers to Africa and Asia, those colonized people used the rhetoric of European nationalism to win their own political independence...
...There was a strong consensus on both the right and the left that the horrors of the civil war should not be repeated...
...And it uses as a model Spain's transition, which on closer inspection looks exceptional, with favorable conditions impossible to match in most other new democracies...
...It became markedly easier to organize elections in poor countries with limited transportation and communications infrastructures...
...Federal Reserve Bank estimates that economic volatility, measured by the variation in the growth rate of the gross domestic product from one year to the next, is almost three times as high in Latin America as it is in the countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD...
...As democracy deepened, the EU encouraged Spain to modernize its legal system and incorporate Europe's human rights provisions...
...It is seen primarily as the product of conscious crafting and deal-making and not, as an earlier generation of scholars believed, of long-term historical conflicts between rulers and ruled...
...Although they often declare their intent to supervise a democratic "transition," such regimes do not respect the democratic principles of universal suffrage and elected government...
...The poor seek patrons in the political system, and politicians give away material benefits to win votes...
...the prerogatives of the market, as defined by the most powerful actors in the global economy, should not be challenged...
...Jeremy Rifkin estimates that 65 percent of the current world population has never made a telephone call...
...The third wave involved technology as well as ideas...
...The commanding heights of the global economy are still run by small oligopolies of "Davos men": people, corporations, and states rich enough to have an influence on the rules of the game...
...Portugal's 1974 revolution, for example, tends to be downplayed in the transitology literature, because it involved mass insurrection, the collapse of the old regime, and curbs on the prerogatives of business and private property in its early phase...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...Western triumphalism about the "end of history," however, was never justified...
...What some analysts call the "civic micro foundations" of democracy—trust, tolerance, respect for opposition, and acceptance of equal citizenship—were firmly in place in Spanish society before its transition...
...This is the logical next step in the struggle for democracy, which alone can sustain the third wave of democratization...
...The market is not sacrosanct...
...Furthermore, as Spain weathered its first crises as a new democracy, its economy continued to grow, and it faced the enticing prospect of joining the largest and most successful common market in the world, the European Union (EU)—which it did in fact join in 1986...
...For this reason, Freedom House classifies thirty-five of the world's hundred and twenty democracies as "electoral" but not "liberal" democracies...
...Although elected civilian governments are far more common in the world than they were thirty years ago, the continuing or revived popularity of former dictators is remarkable...
...South Korea manufactures silicon computer chips and India produces software...
...In contrast, the more conservative and negotiated Spanish transition of 1975, even though it was actually more violent than its Portuguese counterpart, is the emblematic transition in the transitology literature...
...Once again, the European Union's influence on Spain was strong and significant...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...Only 1 percent live in the Middle East, 1 percent in Africa, and 5 percent in Latin America...
...social goals should not be taken into account when evaluating government performance...
...In a recent poll of Paraguayans, 70 percent said that they were better off under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89) than they are today...
...In the words of political scientist Benjamin Barber, the triumph of market ideology means "no government intervention (however mild) is safe from criticism, and no market mechanism (however violent and unjust) is subject to rebuke...
...The information and communications revolution involving satellites, cellular telephones, digital technology, the Internet, fax machines, and the computer chip made data gathering, processing, and transmission cheaper and easier than ever before...
...government's "democracy promotion" bureaucracy—including the U.S...
...He is the author of The End of the Peasantry, which deals with the rural labor movement in northeast Brazil...
Vol. 48 • January 2001 • No. 1
