Thinking Aloud

...But shrieks will usually be ineffective and unwise, in terms of the only criterion that matters, advancing the cause of liberty...

...they now tell us that the monolithic state is but a way station on the road to something better...

...cases, this did not happen...

...Such a depository must be an institution, but the eradication of potentially rival or stand-by institutions, however inoffensive they may be, is the most open ambition of the one-party ideologue...

...Hence the crucial role of formal and legitimate institutions standing forth against the onslaught of aggressive central power...

...Finally, if the wealthiest, most powerful and sophisticated of the modern world's one-party states cannot settle its processes of transition, what hope is there for Ghana or Tanganyika...

...Furthermore, before students like Wallerstein dismiss opposition parties so cavalierly, they ought to ask themselves what opposition parties do in states where they have been long established...

...At the moment when the State cries out that its very life is at stake, social selfishness must cease and party hatred be hushed...

...armies employed as the state police and the state doctrinal academy (Guinea...

...The USSR is the most inclusive and equalized democracy in the world...

...To begin with: the protection of private freedoms...

...The author of this sarcastic portrait is Chief Awolowo, onetime Prime Minister of Nigeria's Western Region...

...Or I could mention Ashanti separatism in Ghana, which led to serious violence from 1954-57...

...Again, Wallerstein argues that there is "widespread participation" within the one party, that dissent and democracy can flourish inside the one party as freely as between parties: "The one-party system in the African context is often a significant step toward a liberal state, not a first step away from it...

...Unless an opposition exists—as a 'shadow cabinet' capable of replacing the government—democracy becomes a sham...

...The choice [in Africa] is not between one-party and multiparty states...

...I am not clear what the Ritners would have governments do in the face of what, to use an old-fashioned term since the Ritners seem to demand their use, is classically known as "treason...

...Such a charge depends on the assumption that once we enter into the morass of "strong government," even for such basic motives as creating loyalty to the state, we shall never emerge...

...Certainly the demand for order has been abused by tyrants throughout the ages...

...When the party is coextensive with the state, this can be equivalent to banishment from the homeland, or execution...

...In cases too numerous to cite, these parties merged, or were merged, into one...

...that constitutional instruments like an independent judiciary or the two-party system are worthless to the governments of three-quarters of mankind...

...But the set of norms can only reinforce a more basic guarantee, which is found in having a society sufficiently complex and interdependent that the governmental structure cannot afford, in terms of its own objective, to crush these other institutions...

...What will trouble the reader is the sense of a recrudescence of what Dwight Macdonald called the "totalitarian liberalism" of the '30s...

...The second line of defense emphasizes the supreme urgency of the needs of economic development in these countries, requiring total control of state resources by an all-powerful, undistracted political government...

...But, though it takes an audacious man to draw it categorically, there is a line beyond which political and economic sectors are not necessarily or permanently complementary, and where their fusion is not to the long-run advantage of the society...

...It is that they tend to destroy the state in the process of trying to depose the acting government" (Wallerstein...

...from acting upon the basis of the agitated pronouncements of the Ritners...

...It is dangerous as well to allow its very basis to be undermined by the breakdown of order within the polity...

...It never was...

...The day-to-day decisions of men of good will wishing to create "good governments" in Africa or Asia today is not easy...

...The president was Thomas Jefferson...

...To guard pluralistic liberties and to channel dissent in a modern state, you need depositories of alternate or latent authority which are more or less independent of the existing regime, which can repair or cushion the accidents the ruling policy may bring on, which can, if need be, replace the regime altogether...

...For example, the African notions of time and space lend a less unpleasant aspect to arrest than they have to us, especially in cases of political detention prior to independence...

...Failure to tolerate the existence of an opposition party would be disastrous to the existence of democracy...

...Wallerstein denies that the oneparty system is totalitarian at all: "The image of a small elite imposing their will, through the party structure, on an inert mass fails to take account of the real dispersion of power that still exists in every African country...

...Now, since Peter Ritner has written previously about Africa that "nothing that happens there happens for the good," it is clear that those of us who are not quite so gloomy must be excoriated...

...There was, for example, one country where a president thought that a "licentious" press should be restrained "within the legal and wholesome limits of truth," and for the violators recommended that "a few prosecutions of the most eminent offenders would have a wholesome effect in restoring the integrity of the presses...

...The Ritners find the argument about the difficulties of achieving national integration in emerging countries comparatively "impressive," but, they say, the argument has overstepped its bounds...

...Frankly, I do not think you do it by expostulation...

...It is all very well to wish that Chad, or Ghana, or indeed India, had two parties that regularly alternated in office...

...or a single-party disintegrated into several...

...The fact is that they do not, and are unlikely to have such a structure for a long time to come...

...I might also mention the abortive Kingdom of Sanwi that a group of dissident civil servants and traditional chiefs tried to carve out of the Ivory Coast...

...Certainly in relatively backward cultures, as in medieval societies, the central power was incapable of suppressing secondary power centers, however badly it might have wanted to, and thus a thoroughgoing totalitarianism of the modern stripe was impossible...

...One wonders if they have ever wandered into a new nation where central order has temporarily broken down, as in the Congo, and seen how much personal liberty the individual has when he is at the mercy of the whims of the man who has a gun, a man subject to no rational, national discipline...

...There is no need to indulge in the luxury of a sterile and fratricidal opposition" (Keita of Mali...

...Even more to the point, however, are those instances where there existed several parties of somewhat balanced strength...

...Martin Kilson of Harvard has called into question the whole reality of intra-party dissent and participation on the African scene: "What kind of decisions, for instance, are influenced by participation and discussion in parties like the PDG [Guinea], CPP [Ghana], Tanu [Tanganyika], etc...

...the armed rebellion of the Karens in Burma...

...We even survived President Lincoln's unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus...

...Yet there are, after all, several general functions which good government can perform as can no other social institution...

...THINKING ALOUD Africanism's Constitutional Malarkey By Susan and Peter Ritner According to Herbert J. Spiro, a political scientist at Amherst, Americans still incline to view the rest of the world from too parochial, too rigidly "classic" a perspective...

...Plural parties accomplish more than lending symmetry to legislative chambers...

...It is easy for a fashionable doctrinaire, entrusted with the resources of the entire nation, for theoretical reasons stubbornly to follow his nose right into a majestic economic catastrophe...

...this is the purpose of an opposition...

...Glancing no further than the daily newspaper, you can tell what you could never tell from reading Africanist apologetics: that there is next-to-no chance that the one-man, one-party, ideological, totalitarian model of state, in or out of Africa, can satisfy these criteria of good government...

...paper synoikisms with states ideologically or geographically contiguous...

...And triumphantly, they demand, can I prove that this indictment "is often, if ever, an honest one...

...Of course it is true that the intensity of the hunger for economic development in the pauper states, the compression of the time-scale they must work within, makes any dispersion of power a difficult concept for them to accept...

...It was about this country that a French observer in the 1830s wrote...

...Nor is that country always happiest where every important decision is made at the political level —when, for example, as tends to happen in Africa, no talented youth dreams of becoming anything but a politician or an army officer...

...Usually this insistence on compulsory solidarity takes the form of harassment of an organized political opposition, or its outright prohibition...

...No one would want to see George Humphrey laying down United States policy in Latin America...

...To be sure, this only makes it possible, and does not guarantee it...

...a ruling elite arbitrarily defining the national emergency and arbitrarily devising the means of meeting it...

...No American would be much astonished if, when he picked up tomorrow's Times, he learned that Khrushchev had suddenly expired of the flu, that a dozen close associates had vanished, that Harry Schwartz had nominated Marshal Malinovsky as the new boss of the Soviet Union...

...Even today many of us do not appreciate, Spiro explains in a recent book (Politics in Africa: Prospects South of the Sahara, PrenticeHall), how unscholarly it is to judge the politics of the underdeveloped countries by Western rules...

...We survived this...

...No one of any influence today treats the new African systems as "diseased aberrations only because they do not fit into any of our already archaic constitutional categories...

...The American academic defense of the one-party, "communitarian," plebiscitarian state in Africa and elsewhere in the underdeveloped world stands on three legs...

...But when a politician (or party) has been permitted to destroy his opposition, his potential replacement, can he not survive long into the era when his own decay or ineptitude comprises the major threat to his people's welfare...

...plebiscitarian convulsions after which the president runs the government largely by decree and under which he enjoys, perhaps, lifetime tenure...

...Let us now presume, with the Ritners, that such a structure is a desirable state of affairs, because "to guard pluralistic liberties . . . you need depositories of alternate or latent authority which are more or less independent of the existing regime...

...I am accused of casuistry because I suggest that the effective choice today is not between one-party and multi-party states...

...But the demand is nonetheless a real and valid one, and it is not possible to be free in a country where it doesn't exist...

...is of little use to a Parliament most of whose members do not normally and habitually think in terms of mutually exclusive logical opposites...

...The claims about economic development cannot be dismissed so lightly, for a great many persons take it for granted that the exigencies of modern life leave no modern society much choice but broadly to centralize economic planning under a unified, moreor-less authoritarian political superintendence...

...In particular, we presume when we assume that Western institutions ever can or ought to flourish in such a place as Africa...

...But if you mean something more libertarian and constitutional by the word, you must realize that democracy is produced, not by solidarity, but by conflicts of interest, each interest for varying reasons insisting upon its own legitimation, and between them weaving the fabric of the constitutional state...

...No human judge exists to whom one's fate can or should be uncritically confided...

...I offer as exhibit number one, the Congo...

...Everything that can be said in apology or advocacy of the one-party system has been said innumerable times before, over the centuries, by innumerable other climbers reaching for power, by innumerable other intellectual and temperamental admirers of simplistic absolutism, of the unwholesome frisson of naked force...

...It is in spinning "interpretations" upon such a body of assumptions as these that Spiro achieves the rare jape of lecturing his readers not to judge harshly the imprisonment of opposition leaders in Ghana on the grounds that, as they have different "notions of time and space," they will not mind sitting in jail as much as Barry Goldwater would...

...The third argument, by far the most serious one, goes this way: Because the underdeveloped countries (in Africa anyway) consist of disparate fragments without a coherent political history, they must be coerced into "nationhood" for their own good—and during the confusions of the nation-building period political dissent cannot be tolerated...

...It will not if you have plowed through the bulk of the literature on politics and societies in Africa which has poured forth from American academic circles in the past 10 years—sponsored and subsidized by the army of specialized university institutes, foundation grants, and government aids that has sprung up in the same period...

...He cannot...

...Let me cite but four instances: the Congo again, the Sudan, Burma and Pakistan...

...At the time of our writing, Awolowo is in prison, bail denied, awaiting trial for "subversion...

...Immanuel Wallerstein, a frequent contributor, is associate professor of Sociology at Columbia and author of Africa: The Politics of Independence...

...African politicians are not the first politicians, nor will they be the last, to justify strong-arm methods by yelling about the seige without and the need for "commonweal" within...

...Constructive political dissent cannot exist in a state which prohibits the activities of opposition parties...

...This of course is to cite rather obvious examples...

...Yet what a world of tragic experience of totalitarian governments, what prospects of menace and anxiety and worse, are implied in his want of this astonishment...

...The Ritners call for more personal liberty...

...But this is an amenity of bygone days...

...Time was when figures like Bagehot and Dicey smoothly commended the Westminster model to the rulers of Trebizond for their political salvation, but it has been many years since a responsible Western statesman or scholar has followed their lead...

...Perhaps, as Wallerstein hopes, this eradication is impracticable, and it need not alarm us...

...in the fervid, quasireligious, African-style parties this becomes mobilization of unanimity...

...For themselves African leaders harp incessantly on the need for national "unity" and "integration": "This is our time of emergency...

...government ministers explaining that a man cannot be brought to trial because "A trial will often allow [a criminal] to escape through the complexities of the law or the use of a clever lawyer" (Adamafio of Ghana, an opinion ventured before he was trundled off to jail himself...

...Our American might perhaps feel a bit rueful, but he would not be astonished, for such a turn of events is all too clearly within the limits of possibility...

...There exists no doctrine, no party, no charismatic hero, no scientific management, no allknowing it or they which infallibly can plan economic, social, political policy, which is forever selfless, tireless, incorruptible...

...It seems, according to the Ritners, that a number of "Africanists" have become apologists for totalitarian regimes in Africa, whereas we should have stuck to our knitting, to wit, to be advocates of good government...

...The only useful question to ask, in the old-fashioned American pragmatic tradition, is how you get from here to there...

...slogans like "The Party is Supreme" and "Nkrumah is Immortal...

...The country where this statement was made had a one-party system and was known as the United States of America...

...The Sudan, Burma and Pakistan have outright military regimes...

...organized opposition parties stem from the Western "rules of the game" and do not suit Africa (Nyerere...

...Note the characterization of Western systems as "already archaic constitutional categories"—a typical touch...

...In some (fortunate...

...Mobilization of consensus is the essence of a party...

...The whole nation from the President downwards must form one regiment of disciplined citizens" (Nkrumah of Ghana...

...Then there are the crises of transition, perhaps the most profound challenge to face every category of government since the dawn of history—when the Lenins sicken, the Bismarcks age, the Napoleons go down to defeat, the Whigs grow slothful, the Depressions steal up on the Hoovers...

...A certain healthy separation of power-centers always gives you a safety factor...

...This then brings me to my second point...

...As Raymond Aron has said, "what is first needed is not an opposition, but a majority...

...That would be pardonable...

...How real is a choice of candidates for party and government office given to the masses in these single-party situations...

...Of course, if you choose to call "democracy" any government which boasts the current support of the majority of its people, you must be allowed your whim...

...It makes no more sense now than it did 25 years ago when those ineffable prigs, the Webbs, wrote such sentences as this one, just at the time of the Neronian bloodbaths of which Chairman Khrushchev has given so detailed an account: "The Communist party...

...the banning of strikes or demonstrations among college students on penalty of imprisonment...

...We'll take vanilla...

...They cite my statement that opposition parties tend to be destructive of the state in the process of trying to overthrow the present government...

...Most of this stuff must be read to be believed...

...He fails to add that proceeding full-steam against these "dispersions of power," wherever they exist, is the main preoccupation of every national leader in Africa—and there is small cause to suppose they won't succeed in their endeavors...

...There can be no room for difference or division" (Nyerere of Tanganyika...

...I should not have thought that too difficult...

...But to get back to the American academic, it is easy to pontificate that government must assume the whole economic initiative in African states because African "culture" does not give birth to entrepreneurial individuals...

...Yet the Ritners' pessimism goes against the evidence of history...

...This does not mean I approve of Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus...

...All the heroes of the Ritners, like Jefferson or John Stuart Mill, knew that...

...It is easy for an authoritarian regime to milk the economy for purposes of personal and party payoffs...

...This is a "new constitutional form...

...it is democratic in its internal structure...

...is not an oligarchy...

...Somewhat more obscure, I admit, is the case of one Albert Kalonji, who attempted a similar exercise with the "province" of South Kasai...

...but between the former, and anarchy or military regimes or various combinations of the two...

...Perhaps the Ritners have heard of Moise Tshombe, head of a certain provincial government, who at an opportune moment proclaimed the secession of his province from the nation...

...When critics of the leadership voice their objections inside such a party, the leadership invariably reacts by pasting on the dissenters the labels of heretic and traitor—and expelling them from the happy few...

...Coming from African politicians, this is all natural enough...

...Every mortal blow that is struck by an independent African nation at the vitals of democracy is rationalized by these theorists as the African's peculiar method of adapting democratic usages to his barbaric and primitive environment...

...The Ritners well know that similar rejections of the legitimacy of the state can be found in every "new nation" throughout the world...

...few parties withdraw voluntarily from the center of the stage when their inspiration begins to flag...

...mass-meetings where throngs are harangued on the Deliverer's battles against "imperialist, capitalist, colonialist stooges...

...In other words, the typical American Africanist not only warms up spurious justifications of his own pet Caesars, but, considered as a group of political scientists and political sociologists, American Africanists are singularly reluctant to commit themselves to the desiderata holding for all governments, a subject you might think would be of great concern to them...

...For sooner or later the "acting government," the Founder or Deliverer, the single party, the elite, the what-have-you—sooner or later he or they must stumble, lose their grip, and when their hour strikes the helm of affairs will need to be plucked from their hands...

...Next, because sooner or later something must go awry in the best-planned plans, the good government makes room for organs of criticism and dissent which can publicize and correct serious miscalculations before the society has veered beyond the point of rescue...

...I am ambivalent about it...

...modern governments must be strong enough to undertake such functions...

...What happened...

...They cannot do it because they lack, and expressly reject, institutions which are the only means of doing these jobs reliably...

...This is what totalitarian governments say about their oppositions, but can Wallerstein prove that the indictment is often, if ever, an honest one...

...it is proper for scholars to puff their subjects...

...But then, neither does a multi-party system, which has been historically insufficient to prevent the emergence of dictatorships in most of continental Europe...

...It is all reminiscent of the kind of thing Goebbels used to preach about the Social Democrats in the 1930s, and whom did history tap as the destroyer of that state...

...The forced industrialization of Argentina by Peron, China by Mao—the one by the Right, the other by the Left —show us how this can happen (there are other examples of the kind, great and small...

...It is easy to label the coercive governments of the underdeveloped world, as Robert L. Heilbroner incorrigibly labels them, "socialisms"— which has a mild flavor—when in reality, at least in Africa, they are totalitarianisms as bitter as their state powers permit them to be...

...the stamping out of opposition parties...

...Since multi-party systems exist virtually nowhere in Africa or Asia I should have thought that would be some evidence...

...Few politicians perceive when their usefulness lies behind them...

...The Congo had a long period of effective anarchy, and now has a coalition regime dependent politically upon two armies—that of the UN and, more relevant, that of General Mobutu...

...Frederick the Great...

...Above all, it is a literature of apologetics —contortionist apologetics...

...The denial o,f fundamental human rights, the destruction of the rule of law, and the suppression of opposition have been brilliantly and felicitously rationalized...

...There is nothing new in the proposition that the increased division of labor in a society (read, economic development) creates, in Durkheim's phrase, an organic solidarity which makes possible more and more indirect methods of social control (read, more individual freedom...

...Repeating the litany of grammar-school cliches about democracy is scarcely helpful...

...Respectable men worrying about the course of events in Africa are not doing so in order to cling pitifully to "conventional cherished devices" (Spiro) like bicameral legislatures...

...Their effective independence is of course guaranteed in part by a set of norms which argues the legitimacy of their independence from the government...

...If the argument can be put forward with regard to the United States, as it sometimes is, how much more plausible it sounds with regard to backward areas just launched into the storms of general modernization...

...So do I. Alas, wishing will not make it so, and they ought to know it...

...An Africanist's Reply By Immanuel Wallerstein The Ritners wish that nations in Africa and elsewhere would be more democratic...

...Exactly...

...And you find these assumptions hitting at the root of what men have learned, and sometimes sacrificed everything for, over centuries of labor on the political process...

...Along with the puffs in these Africanist treatises the reader is asked to swallow a heavy dose of assumptions, often sinister assumptions—sometimes concealed, in Spiro's case not so concealed...

...The implicit charge of the Ritners is that the "Africanists," by "apologizing" for "totalitarian" governments, are in fact delaying the advent of the good society...

...But in his apologetics for the one-party state on pseudotheoretical grounds the American Africanist steps across the line which divides comment from casuistry...

...It's a pious hope, but what real evidence have we that the dynamics of party structure ever accommodate practical dissent on matters of substance...

...One works to build such plural structures...

...They make mistakes, and would benefit by criticism when they do...

...The individual must forget his egoism, and feel that he is a member of the whole body...

...She is completing her doctorate in political science at Columbia University...

...It is the easiest invitation to dictatorship" (Azikiwe of Nigeria...

...Enough recent events in Africa and Asia have been of an unsavory nature that a few American Africanists have paused to hedge their bets...

...Over and over you find the American academic observer of the backward nations reiterating the same principles: that the personalities and cultures of today's Africa are brand-new, and cannot be judged in the light of 3,000 years of Western history...

...a steady stream of scandals implicating secondary party chieftains who have "weakened" under fiscal temptation...

...It is not then those in power alone who confuse state and government...

...To begin with, if there exist individuals in Guinea who oppose Touré"s government, forbidding their organizing a legal opposition party does not extinguish their opposition, but only modifies the form that opposition must take —and not for the better...

...They call for evidence...

...preachments about "socio-cultural traditions" (shades of the Teutonic comitia) which relieve the gifted race of the burdens of regular elections, competing parties, independent courts, the other impedimenta of "archaic constitutional categories," faith in which defines the "Anglophile fallacy" (Spiro...

...Yet the verdict is, Not Proven...

...Else, our cautious optimism may prevent some policymaker (in the United States, one wonders, or in Africa...

...He is Senior Editor at The Macmillan Company and author of The Death of Africa and The Society of Space...

...The most impressive argument for consolidated power in the emerging countries is that without this consolidation "nations" cannot be erected out of regions heretofore perhaps only conveniences of a colonial administrator, perhaps still largely in the tribal phase...

...First, the expostulation: How can Westerners arrogantly expect anything resembling Western systems to develop out of so different an environment and tradition...

...Whether in Africa or on the Moon, individual liberties cannot be maintained in a modern state without an independent judiciary, and relatively inviolable constitutional guarantees...

...For not only is the reader directed to view the problems of the "emerging" nations with an unjaded eye...

...The ordinary American is irked most by the staleness of it all...

...The case for consolidated power and the one-party system from the overriding requirements of national unity simply begs the important questions...

...What makes governments good governments used to be the one body of knowledge liberals prized most highly, but no one seems to care about it any more...

...a ruthless Gleichschaltung policy of assimilating trade unions, schools, fraternal societies, business associations to the government bureaucracy, which anastomoses with party headquarters...

...Which brings me to my last point...

...that private liberties so agonizingly and provisionally carved out over the years have no universal value...

...this is because Washington, in America, is not a man but a God...

...When was this contention demonstrated...

...The whole notion that sturdy libertarians may produce democracy by boring from within a totalitarian state is fantastic...

...Certainly in a modern state there are indispensable functions which the government must perform because no other interest in society will perform them...

...The charge of Western parochialism is a red herring...

...How to pass from one age into the next with the minimum of useless commotion, from peace into war, and war into peace—here is the severest test of a style of government...

...It is dangerous to trifle with the protections of human liberty...

...Since, as the Ritners observe, they are not over-anxious to encourage this criticism from within, it might be the place of observers from without from time to time to raise their voices...

...The two-party parliamentary system, for example, where "every topic for debate has to be stated so that members of parliament are forced to vote either for or against it...

...Susan and Peter Ritner's last collective contribution to these pages was "No Time For Cocoa" (August 14-21, 1961...

...Under bad governments personal liberties, eccentricities, properties, etc., live on narrow sufferance, as indeed they do in primitive societies, except perhaps where an individual pretty much has isolated himself from his fellows...

...plots, conspiracies, detentions without trial...

...It is not that [opposition parties] tend to be destructive of the government in power...

...careers like that of Ghana's K. A. Gbedemah are blithely ignored...

...Perhaps the tone of these remarks strikes you as peculiar...

...At least one major African figure has publicly resented the contempt of the African inherent in the view of the American apologists: "There is a newfangled theory now being propounded with erudition and gusto in the countries of the so-called Western democracies...

...Again the triumphant demand for evidence...

...Moreover," Spiro adds, "not only words but also actions take on a different meaning in a different environment...

...The one-party state suits Africa...

...We can take up these points one at a time...

...modern governments wield infinitely greater means of public coercion...

...Those who are devoted to human freedom must be more serious...

...they do not care for, as they have good reason not to care for, the substance and methods of these new governments as they see them evolving right in front of their eyes...

...To Washington alone, there are busts, inscriptions, columns...

...the half-dozen or so attempts since 1949 to establish secessionist states in various parts of Indonesia...

...rubber-stamp party conventions...

...it has been between one-party states and anarchy or military regimes or various combinations of the two" (Immanuel Wallerstein of Columbia...

...It cannot be proved that total political control of the economy, of the sort defended by most underdeveloped leaders and their American apologists, is the necessary or the soundest means of achieving even economic goals over the long haul...

...Look, for a moment longer, at what the reader is asked to accept in the guise of a "new constitutional form" (Spiro) in most of the African and other "emerging" countries—asked not by Africans, who could not care less what we think, but by scholarly fellow-Americans: the entire political life of the country dominated by a single party in total control of the government...