Category: Politics

The “Ramadhan Discussion” last night was similar to almost every conference that I’ve attended. It involves a lot of bluster, talking, blah blah blah, not a lot of substance. Let me break it down.

Fareed Zakaria (the guy who wrote the article) introduces the problem of Islam and democracy by arguing that there is no part of Islam that is any more contradictory to democracy than some parts of Christianity, Judaism, Confucianism, Hinduism, etc. I agree. Come on, Indonesia, Turkey, Bangladesh, all democracies. He also claims that culture is an insufficient explanation, because Egypt pre-Nasser and Iraq pre-Saddam were wellsprings of modern intellectualism, liberalism, and social tolerance. I agree to this as well.

The essential problem is this. The Middle East is a region full of autocrats who have a powerful trump card. They can say–correctly–that if there were an election right now in their country, radical Islamists would probably win. Not because Muslims are inherently anti-democratic, not because they are poor, not because they are evil, but because Islam is the only institution that the state cannot outlaw in these societies, and it has become the rallying point for the nascent opposition, and moderate Islam has been drowned out after 50 years of ineffectiveness against autocracy. Autocrats like Mubarak and King Hussein are better than fundamentalists, so goes the argument. Forcing democracy on the Middle East will lead to the good old “one man, one vote, one time” syndrome of just electing a new dictator, but this time one that hates everything the West stands for.

What Zakaria suggests is that Western governments, instead of focusing on elections and formal democratic institutions, should focus on pressing for “constitutional liberalism” in the Middle East. Whatever that means. I think it means developing a society where minority rights are respected, democratic discourse is the norm, political parties flourish, women get education, all those good things. In essence, Zakaria is explicitly repeating the argument about timing in democratization: you need to have a democratically-minded society before you have democratic elections. So, let’s work on making a democratically-minded society, which is easier for Middle Eastern autocrats anyway because they don’t have to put themselves up for election.

Here’s the problem. The whole problem of authoritarianism is that the people cannot punish the government for not following through on its promises. There’s no accountability. It is unreasonable to suggest that these regimes would fully implement such policies because they know that they would threaten the regime in the long run. How is the society supposed to punish the government if its members can’t unelect it?

(Tom just went outside to check on the kitty that likes to hang around the Institute-this is the noisiest cat we have ever heard. It seems that going halfway around the world did not get us away from noisy cats! jm)

People tend to forget that democracy is not the end. It’s the means. The end is a just and fair society. Now, I believe that democracy is, in the long run, the only way to get this. Democracy has to be part of the solution. But democracy is a means of aggregating preferences within society in order to determine who gets the job of leading it. Democracy is not liberty; we just think that democracy is the best way to get liberty.

The point is that Zakaria sums up nicely all the frustrating parts of imposing democracy on people, and then comes up with a policy that just redefines the problem. The point is, I don’t know how to fix it. And neither does Fareed.

(Speaking of women and education, I found it interesting that there were only four women besides me there last night. There were maybe 50-60 people total, and most were young men who had the air of students about them. I wonder where all the girls were…)

My dissertation is in political science, so even though I spend a lot of time reading about the logic, causes, and consequences of economic policy decisions, the real point I have to make is about politics. Furthermore, policy does not come from economic science, it comes from politicians. There is a political logic to why policy makers decide what they decide. Economics as a science shows us the consequences of how little parts of the economy work together. But long-term economic goals always impose short-term costs on members of society. (This is the tirade of every political scientist who studies the economy, and something that economists just put up with because we’re not quite so good with equations and they feel sorry for us.) My work focuses on political configurations within different autocratic governments lead autocrats to make particular economic policy decisions.

To do that, you need to know politics. So I’m learning a lot about that too. An odd but rather understandable feature of political studies of non-Western countries is that they often tend to be written by people who really think that these non-Western states are inherently different than their Western counterparts. While most (but not all!) mainstream political science studies “real” politics with presidents, parliaments, courts, and constitutions, non-Western countries that don’t have these are left by the wayside. The people who study politics in non-Western settings seem far more willing to tell you that their country is incredibly different than the West. Mainstream political science (read: focusing on the West) imagines little individual utility-maximizers bumping into objective institutional constraints. Studies of non-Western politics are usually either simple (not “simple,” but rather non-theoretical) histories or grand accounts of cultural conceptions of politics that explain why these foreigners act so differently. Mainstream political science emphasizes sameness, while non-Western political studies emphasize difference. I find this both intellectually unsatisfying and a little colonial.

Today I read Benedict Anderson’s Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Anderson is a famous social scientist on the Government faculty at Cornell but widely read instead by anthropologists and Asianists. In this book he sets out a particular thesis about the fact that Indonesians, and in particularly Javanese, just think of politics differently than Westerners. This is the theoretical foundation for a larger project of understanding how Indonesian politics works.

He identifies four differences. (1) “Power is concrete. This is the first and central premise of Javanese political thought. Power exists, independent of its possible users. It is not a theoretical postulate but an existential reality.” (2) “Power is homogeneous. It follows from this conception that all power is of the same type and has the same source. Power in the hands of one individual or one group is identical with power in the hands of any other individual or group.” (3) “The quantum of power in the universe is constant…concentration of power in one place or in one person requires a proportional diminution elsewhere.” (4) “Power does not raise the question of legitimacy…power itself antecedes questions of good and evil.”

I just don’t get how these things are different than the West. On (1), saying that power is “concrete” is too vague, and he doesn’t elaborate later. He does not mean that power is something that you can grasp, but if he just means that power is (in the scientific realist sense) something that has a causal effect on society, then that’s the same as the West. On (2), I’m not sure that this statement has any real meaning. I’m open to suggestions. On (3), this I know to be the same as in the West. This is the heart of the realist international relations school and zero-sum noncompetitive game theory. On (4), this is also the same as in the West. You can talk about power without talking about whether or not power is good or bad. In fact, it is only in the application of power that raises normative issues.

The point of this is at least (1) that Anderson is wrong, and perhaps (2) also that I can discount culturalist explanations in studying Southeast Asian politics because even if they appear to work in reality, they fall apart in theory.