From the issue dated September 26, 2003
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Lessons From Lost DemocraciesThe collapse of elected governments may have something to teach us about nation-buildingBy DAVID GLENN Despite the chaos and conflict of the past eight months in Iraq, many ordinary Iraqis share the Bush administration's publicly stated goal: Build an authentic democracy amid the clamorous ruin of their nation. In doing so, the natural impulse might be to turn to the millions of words written during the past decade by political scientists who have analyzed the newborn democracies in South Korea, South Africa, and the former Soviet bloc. But perhaps the most important lessons for Iraq and other nation-building projects may be found not in the birth of nascent democracies, but in their collapse. A new study of the 20th century's most disastrous "democratic breakdowns" probes questions that seem vital to the endeavor to build a democratic Iraq: Under what circumstances can small bands of violent extremists destroy popular faith in democratic institutions? When and how do militaries seize control of the state apparatus? How do political leaders' unwarranted fears, wishful thinking, and other perceptual errors lead to the downfall of democracy? In Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton University Press, this month), Nancy Bermeo, a professor of politics at Princeton, argues that previous scholars of democratic breakdown have tended to place too much blame on ordinary citizens and not enough on the mistakes and machinations of political elites. "I really think she's hit the nail on the head," says Valerie Bunce, a professor of government at Cornell University who studies Eastern European regimes. "There has been a consistent tendency to blame polarized, angry mass publics for this stuff. But when you look at the actual process -- who's suspending the rules of the game, and for what reasons? -- it boils down to elites." Ms. Bermeo's work harks back to a previous era of scholarship. In the late 1970s, collapsed democracies were a central preoccupation of comparative political science. Scholars were grimly fascinated by the wave of contagion that had killed off European democracies between the world wars. (In 1920, all but two European countries were parliamentary democracies; 18 years later, half of those democracies had become dictatorships.) More urgently, political scientists wanted to understand the military coups that had snuffed out fledgling democracies in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina between 1964 and 1976. Two roughly harmonious theories dominated that Carter-era scholarship. The theory of "polarization" described a vicious circle: An economic crisis drives voters toward parties of the extreme left or right, and low-level political violence breaks out. In the next election cycle, still more voters choose extremist parties, partly out of fear of the "other side's" extremists. As centrist parties weaken and the ground for political compromise vanishes, democracy collapses and the state is seized by one or another extremist faction. The theory of "bureaucratic authoritarianism" suggested that in fledgling democracies, especially during times of economic stress, inexperienced citizens overwhelm the government with unrealistic demands for material goods. The government naturally fails to provide these goods, which leads to further political mobilization. Eventually, the citizenry grows disenchanted with democracy itself, and state bureaucracies develop a "coup coalition" to protect themselves from rising public demands. Ms. Bermeo finds both theories wanting. She studied 17 cases of democratic collapse, from both the 1930s in Europe and the 1970s in Latin America. In each case, she carefully retraced records of party membership, election returns, public-opinion surveys, and political violence. Her conclusion: In almost all instances, extremist parties did not actually capture the loyalty of very many voters. And in almost all cases, the great majority of the population remained committed to democracy even during times of severe recession and popular unrest. The implications for democracy in the new century, argues Ms. Bermeo, are serious. "There are a number of scholars writing pessimistically about our capacity to foster civil society and democracy abroad," she says. "A lot of scholars who study the '-stans' of Central Asia are very pessimistic. But their arguments hang on the inadequacies of current political elites," she emphasizes. There is no reason, she says, to conclude that the people of Central Asia are not desirous of or culturally ready for democracy. Polity and Patience Whereas previous theories of democratic collapse blamed the masses, Ms. Bermeo suggests a different interpretation. Take the case of Uruguay, where a democratic government was toppled by a military coup in June 1973. The coup happened after several years of low-level political violence and the emergence of a left-wing guerrilla movement known as the Tupamaros. In the 1971 elections, however, there was very little sign of mass polarization; 81 percent of the vote went to the two major parties that had dominated Uruguay for decades. An opinion poll taken in October 1972 found that Uruguayans preferred "democracy, even with disorder" (79 percent) to a "military, strong, ordered" society (13 percent). None of those facts fits neatly with the polarization or authoritarianism models. So what did lead to the 1973 coup? The precipitating crisis was the legislature's refusal to strip legal immunity from a senator who had allegedly aided and abetted the Tupamaros. Military leaders saw this is as treasonous, and as a long-term threat to their survival; weeks later, they seized control of the government. "Ordinary people did not opt for dictatorship over democracy in Uruguay," Ms. Bermeo writes. "The military toppled Uruguayan democracy. It did so largely to protect its own institutional interests." In Uruguay and elsewhere, Ms. Bermeo argues, the collapse of democracy was hastened by political leaders' errors of perception. Conservatives saw strikes and street demonstrations -- what the author calls "public polarization" -- as evidence of a popular shift away from the center. Leftists similarly overestimated the popular strength of their enemies. In many of her case studies, Ms. Bermeo says, "I recognized a kind of blindness that panic can sow in the eyes of politicians -- and how easily that can spread to the people who follow the politicians." Wishful thinking also plays a role, notes Ms. Bermeo. In several cases, citizens did not vigorously protest military coups because they wrongly believed that democracy would quickly be restored. Elected officials fell prey to similar errors. In the months before the Uruguayan coup, the legislature's leftist faction chose not to criticize the military in the vain hope that the army's "nationalist" and "progressive" forces would come to the fore. In today's Iraq, as American, Iranian, and Islamist forces all claim to speak on the people's behalf, similar misperceptions may arise. "That's a situation that could really lend itself to mistaking the actions of a few for the will of the many," says Ms. Bermeo. "Where you really don't have solid information about people's preferences, that's where you can get into lethal misperceptions. Political scientists and journalists and intellectuals really have an obligation to collect and disseminate as much information as they can about how ordinary people think." Ms. Bermeo's analysis touches rarely upon overt international interference -- say, conscious American efforts to destroy Chile's democratic government in 1973. A new book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New Press), by Peter Kornbluh of George Washington University's National Security Archive, contains hundreds of documents revealing American attempts to undermine the elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende. (The minutes of a 1970 National Security Council meeting suggest that Henry Kissinger has a certain grasp of polarization theory: "Mr. Kissinger, in the role of the devil's advocate, pointed out that the CIA program was aimed at supporting moderates. Since Allende is holding himself out as a moderate, he asked why not support extremists.") Ms. Bermeo concedes that external actors -- CIA agents renting mobs or Cuban agents training guerrillas -- did play crucial roles in certain Latin American cases. "They definitely set the fires of the kind of elite polarization that existed in Chile," she says. Uncivil Society The two cases Ms. Bermeo found of democratic collapse in which large numbers of ordinary people did embrace extremist politics were interwar Germany and Austria. She observes that part of the reason lay in German voters' deep-rooted doubts about the Weimar government's ability to contain political violence by left- and right-wing paramilitaries. (She also notes that dense networks of churches, unions, and fraternal organizations in Germany and Austria allowed Nazi anti-Semitism to spread very quickly -- a cautionary tale, she says, for scholars who claim that "civil society" is the guardian of democracy.) In addition, public disorder in Germany and Austria during the Weimar years paralyzed moderate political organizations, whose members in some cases were frightened even to walk the streets. "The assumption had always been that disorder is a mobilizing force," says Ms. Bunce, of Cornell. "But that isn't the way the story always plays out, to put it mildly." Here, too, lies a potential lesson for Iraqi democracy, Ms. Bunce continues. "This is the funny thing about how badly planned the war was," she says. "The assumption was that we'd get rid of Saddam, and there would be this automatic reconstitution of a functioning order." A lack of such order not only creates a populace that is too frightened to participate in building the structures necessary for civil society, but leaves the field open to extremists who will impose their own political agenda. Among Ms. Bermeo's conclusions is that political parties need what she calls "distancing capacity," or "the strength to distance a party and its members from acts of violence and lawlessness," even when the perpetrators advertise themselves as the party's friends. When parties appear to tolerate guerrilla violence or illegal military interference in civilian affairs, they delegitimize the notions of order and the rule of law. The resulting public fear, Ms. Bermeo says, can generate "pendular mobilization" of the kind described by polarization theorists. "If elites in power have a means of assuring the population and even other nonpolarized elites that the situation is under control, that things won't get worse, that order will be maintained, and that this threat, whether it's from the left or the right, is not going to snowball, then a democratic system is more likely to be sustainable," she says. "I think people will only give up their autonomy if they fear that other people are going to abuse their own autonomy." "People are more democratic than they're often given credit for," says Larry J. Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the co-editor of the Journal of Democracy. In his 1988 study of the breakdown of democracy in the Nigerian republic of the early 1960s, Mr. Diamond drew conclusions similar to Ms. Bermeo's. "Elite manipulation and calculation was at the root of the series of conflicts that led to the military coup and the overthrow of democracy in Nigeria," he says. Mr. Diamond has been dismayed by naysayers such as the syndicated columnist George F. Will, who cast doubt on the feasibility of building a democracy in Iraq. "Not every society has the prerequisites -- of institutions (political parties, media) and manners (civility, acceptance of pluralism) -- of a free society," Mr. Will wrote in an August column. Ms. Bermeo's refusal to blame the primary victims of collapsed democracies -- the people themselves -- makes her book a valuable addition to a now crucial debate, adds Mr. Diamond. "At a moment when you have a very prominent new book, The Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria," he says, "which takes a very elitist tone in thinking about democracy, and warns quite explicitly about the dangers of populism and the unbridled political mobilization of the masses ... the timing of Nancy Bermeo's book is very interesting." Ms. Bermeo does not expect to see many new full-fledged democratic collapses of the sort studied in her book. "What we're getting now, more and more, are seriously flawed democracies. There are a lot of states that are simply partially free. So when there's trouble, when there's a threat, they suspend some freedoms. They fix some elections. But, in part because militaries no longer want full control, you no longer see massive Pinochet-style coups." Iraq's most realistic prospect may be to muddle toward a feeble, half-free democracy. But if Iraqi democrats want to maximize their odds of doing better, they might do well to ponder carefully the history of democracies that failed in the 20th century. http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 50, Issue 5, Page A12
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education