Category Archives: democratic reform overseas

postcolonial reaction

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Two recent articles by Pankaj Mishra put very different valences on the same fundamental story.

In “Modi’s Idea of India” (The New York Times, Oct 24), Mishra decries the “intellectual insecurity, confusion and aggressiveness” of Hindu nationalists and links it to the “grandiose intellectual conceits” of Russian nationalism (resurgent under Putin) and “Japan’s descent into unhinged anti-Western imperialism in the early 20th century.” All are reactions to the perceived humiliations of European and North American colonialism that spawn ressentiment and “fantasies of racial-religious revenge and redemption.”

In “The Western Model is Broken” (The Guardian, Oct 14), Mishra decries the “brutality” that underpinned European industrialization and nation-building in the 19th century, which “turned out, in the next century, to be a mere prelude to the biggest bloodbath in history: two world wars, and ferocious ethnic cleansing that claimed tens of millions of victims.” The West’s “liberal democracies,” he argues, have been “experienced as ruthlessly imperialist by their colonial subjects.” Efforts to turn formerly imperialized nations into copies of the West have been cruel, arrogant, and foolish and have bred inevitable resentment and reaction.

It is interesting that Mishra chooses to denounce Modi, Putin, et al. in the American establishment newspaper, while he attacks “Davos Man,” Francis Fukuyama, and The Economist in the more leftish Guardian. But the overall story is consistent. The main dynamic of our age is not a struggle “between liberal democracy and totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism and communism.” That was “a largely intra-western dispute.” The “most significant event of the 20th century was decolonisation, and the emergence of new nation-states across Asia and Africa.” It is in that context that we must understand regimes as varied as Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey.

I would add that post-colonialism and anti-imperialism generally took the form of anti-capitalist, egalitarian, and statist movements from 1900-1980, but today’s critics of Western hegemony in countries like China, India, Russia, and Turkey are friendly to their own billionaires and business enterprises, tolerant of inequality, enthusiastic about consumer technology, and generally favorable to foreign direct investment. (See, e.g., “the Communist Party battles against equality“). They also defend traditional sexual mores against Western decadence. Perhaps, as Mishra says, the struggles between liberalism and authoritarianism were intramural Western affairs, yet it matters that the most powerful post-colonial societies now have conservative rather than socialist leaders–albeit with some variation.

One legacy of colonialism is that certain Good Ideas–e.g., accountability of governments to their people, individual rights, and cosmopolitanism–are now coded as “Western,” even though the main actual impact of the Western nations was depredation and humiliation. Under those circumstances, leaders who wish to ignore accountability, restrict personal rights, and close their countries to the world can present themselves as bulwarks against imperialism. But that is bad for their own people.

The Good Ideas always had precarious and limited followings in the countries that we call Western, which ought to be equally well known for trans-Atlantic slavery, fascism, and Stalinism. And the Good Ideas also have roots in other civilizations. It appears that modernity (marked by phenomena like individualism and deep social critique) was not invented for the first time in Europe ca. 1800 but has sprung up several times, e.g., in South India in the 15th century. That does not mean that every culture has been equally modernist at every point (far from it), but we should drop a simplistic equation of modernity with the West. This is hard to do, since modernity came with gunboats and Gatling guns to many parts of the world. Modernity is a mix of good and bad. Yet such institutional forms as competitive elections and freedom of speech are as much the birthright of Asians and Africans as of Europeans; and it would be the ultimate tragedy if they lost those rights in the name of anti-imperialism.

See also: “on modernity and the distinction between East and West“; “avoiding the labels of East and West” “on modernity and the distinction between East and West” and “the West and the rest.”

the Communist Party battles against equality

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The profound irony of this kind of story seems under-appreciated:

The Beijing-appointed leader of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, said Monday evening that it was unacceptable to allow his successors to be chosen in open elections, in part because doing so would risk giving poorer residents a dominant voice in politics. ….

Mr. Leung, who has received repeated backing from the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership, argued that the way to remedy social grievances was to expand the supply of housing and spur economic growth. He stressed the importance of maintaining the confidence of Hong Kong’s corporate elite. …

Recall that the Chinese Communist Party, which backs Mr. Leung, was once totally committed to Mao Zedong Thought, which officially remains one plank in its ramshackle platform. Mao Zedong Thought demands an implacable and total People’s War against all vestiges of capitalism, the Mass Line (perfect identification of the Party with the poor masses), and Cultural Revolution (a struggle against bourgeois tendencies that must continue even after the masses have seized all power in a violent revolution). Now the same organization seeks to “insulate candidates [for Hong Kong’s government] from popular pressure to create a welfare state” and wants instead “the city government to follow more business-friendly policies to address economic inequality. …”

I’m not saying that Maoism was preferable to the present ideology. Maoism was worse, killing tens of millions and ruining countless additional lives. But the Party’s volte-face perfectly exemplifies the limited impact of ideas. During the Cultural Revolution, the government of the world’s biggest nation used every tool imaginable to stomp out capitalist enterprises, norms, and instincts. A generation later, the same government, dominated by the same families, won’t even allow a popular vote in Hong Kong because poor residents might request some modest restrains on global capitalism. So much for ideology. The Chinese Communist Party remains officially Maoist, but it is also a unitary hierarchy that monopolizes the legitimate use of force within the borders of China. Hence, in the long run, it will simply act in the self-interest of its leaders and rationalize its decisions using convenient arguments. The lesson is: pay careful attention to constitutional and institutional design.

propaganda in Russia and in the USA

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(Washington, DC) Russian media serves a steady diet of stories about how the crashed Malaysian airplane was filled with already-dead bodies; definitive proof that Ukraine shot it down to frame the Russian separatists; and even evidence that it’s the same Malaysian jet that vanished in March in the southern hemisphere, stored secretly and deployed now in a plot to hurt Russia. (For a sample of this coverage—I don’t know how representative—see the English version of Pravda today.) Maria Snegovaya reports that the Russian media generates very strong domestic popular support for Putin’s policies.

Western writers like criticize Russian propaganda. Russians write back in the comment fields to denounce such criticism. Many make tu quoque arguments: America does all of this, too (i.e., the propaganda, the killing, or both). They are correct that the following problems are not limited to Russia but are also prevalent in countries like the USA:

  1. Deliberate manipulation of public opinion by governments and media companies;
  2. Macho, militaristic nationalism and its reliable appeal to mass publics;
  3. Confirmation bias, or the preference for information that reinforces one’s existing views and interests; and
  4. Valuing the lives of one’s own countrymen far above the lives of foreigners.

Without these phenomena, it would be hard to explain why the US invaded Iraq after 9/11, how most Americans can forget US involvement in Central American genocide when the victims’ children try to migrate across our borders, or how we can tolerate assassinations by drone missile.

On the other hand, making the tu quoque argument is not good for Russia or for Russians. The United States and other democracies have mechanisms for error-correction and accountability that may be badly flawed and frayed today, but that are still hard-won and worth fighting to defend. They are absent in Putin’s Russia. Russians are the primary victims of that lack.

One mechanism is partisan competition. George W. Bush dominated American public opinion at the onset of the Iraq War. But a little-known Illinois state senator was one of those who strongly criticized the invasion. Six years and a few months later, that state senator succeeded Bush in the White House, having benefited politically from his opposition to the war. I am not satisfied by the Schumpeterian justification for elections—that they allow us to vote the incumbent idiots out when their performance becomes intolerable. But a Schumperian democracy is better than none at all. Incumbents are vulnerable; the opposition has powerful incentives to criticize them. Those protections are missing in Putin’s Russia.

Additional protections come from a genuinely independent civil society and press. I realize it is hard to demonstrate that the press and civil society are more effective in the US than in Russia, since they are not working all that well here. Mark Kleiman writes:

Russian mass media is now dominated by an extreme-nationalist lunatic fringe, built up by Putin and his cronies but no longer under their detailed control. … It’s a scary picture. What’s scarier is that, if you change the names, it applies to the relationships among the plutocrats, the GOP apparatchiki, and the world of the Murdochized press, the Koch-driven think-tanks, and Red Blogistan.

That is a claim of equivalence. I heard a similar argument in June from a Russian delegation of academics who visited me in my office. They insisted that they have more NGOs (millions!) than we do and that Putin funds them to ensure their independence from Western influence. I had no crisp refutation to offer, nor was I interested in asserting our system’s superiority. The worthwhile question is not which country has a better public sphere. But I am highly skeptical that Russians are, in fact, being served by an independent press or a robust civil society. If my skepticism is correct, then they and their neighbors (not Americans) are the ones who will suffer.

Mike Edwards on civil society

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The third edition of Michael Edwards’ invaluable book Civil Society is newly out, and Mike makes a strong argument on OpenDemocracy.net that draws from his book.

He notes that nonprofit organizations are growing (by almost all measures) and offering significant benefits to the people and communities that they serve directly. There are, for example, 3.3 million registered charities in India. In our own work, we find that the number of nonprofits in a US community, adjusted for population, predicts that community’s economic performance (holding many other factors constant).

And yet, as Mike Edwards notes, the world is slipping backward on many fronts, as “economic inequality is rising, democracies are being hollowed out, climate change is worsening, and discrimination based on race, gender, ability and sexual orientation remains endemic.”

These are the kinds of issues that are traditionally addressed by governments. In turn, governments are helpful when broad-based social movements hold them accountable. (Benign elites are possible–but rare and usually short-lived–and, by definition, they cannot address a problem like the hollowing-out of democracy.)

Civil society–defined as an array of nonprofit organizations–can support broad-based social movements:

When one looks at the few times in history when civil society has functioned as a powerful and lasting moral and political lever – like the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s – large numbers of people became active in translating ethical action into power structures at every level, from the family to the courts and corporations.

In this sense, civil society is like an iceberg, with the peaks of protest rising above the waterline and the great mass of everyday citizen action hidden underneath. When the two are connected – when street protests are backed up by long-term action in every community, bank, business, local government, church or mosque, temporary gains in equality and diversity have more chance of becoming permanent shifts in power and public norms. In that respect it’s not the Arab or any other ‘Spring’ that really makes the difference, but what happens in every other season, of every other year, across every generation.

Unfortunately these episodes of large-scale, joined-up action are quite rare, and the long-term trend has been the opposite, at least in Europe and North America.

Edwards sees two functions for civil society at its best: connecting everyday local action to policy, and building human solidarity across lines of class and race so that citizens support private and public action in the common good. Neither is achieved by civil society understood as a set of social enterprises or social networks. Instead, we need civil society as coalitions of organizations committed to political and social change.

Edwards concludes that “the strength of civil society is declining even as its size continues to expand. … But since civil societies are ours to lose, they are also ours to reclaim, to refresh and re-energize.”

(I make somewhat similar arguments in my qualms about a bond market for philanthropy and can nonprofits solve big problems?)

youth Participatory Budgeting in Boston

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On Friday, I had the opportunity to observe about 50 Boston young people at work on the city’s youth Participatory Budgeting initiative. I will write the whole story for GOOD Magazine, so this is just a teaser. In essence, volunteer young people (ages 12-25) have brainstormed more than 400 projects that the city could support out of its capital budget. I watched committees of youth come together to study, refine, and screen these proposals. In June, as many youth as possible will be recruited to vote for their favorite proposals at meetings across the city. The city will then allocate $1 million of its capital budget to fund the top-scoring projects.

This is an example of Participatory Budgeting, a process that began in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989 and has since spread to 1,500 locations in many countries, according to the Participatory Budgeting Project. It bears some resemblance to other processes, including the New England town meetings that began in the 1600s and still survive in some towns in our region, not to mention the 265,000 village councils of India and other participatory government mechanisms around the world. It is nevertheless an innovation. The three-step process (brainstorming, project-development, voting); the application to big cities; and the allocation of capital budgets are all distinctive features of Participatory Budgeting. Boston’s process is not the first to restrict the franchise to young residents (regardless of US citizenship status, by the way), but that remains unusual.

I will have more to say about the details as the process unfolds. See also: “the rise of urban citizenship“; “participatory budgeting in Recife, Brazil wins the Reinhard Mohn Prize“; “participatory budgeting in the US“; and my chapter entitled “’Social Accountability’ as Public Work.”