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Democratizing Democracy: A Postcolonial Critique of Conventional Approaches to the ‘Measurement of Democracy’

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13510340701768075

1743-890X

Thomas A. Koelble, Edward LiPuma,

Political Philosophy and Ethics

Abstract In most approaches to measuring democracy, the underlying assumptions are highly a-historical and a-cultural. This article is a critique of such approaches and provides the outline for an alternative interpretation. It argues that different histories and cultures produce different democracies. Conventional measuring paradigms are insufficient to adequately measure progress towards democracy in postcolonial settings. The article offers four arguments as to why democracy in the postcolony will not, and cannot, develop in a similar fashion to those in the North American and Western European settings. It focuses on the different historical trajectories of state construction; the limits of the postcolonial state in terms of its domestic capacities; the positioning of emerging market economies and democracies in the global financial system; and, finally, the variety of cultural conceptions of the proper relationship between community and individual. These four factors ensure that postcolonial democracies will differ in their trajectories from those of their Western counterparts. The article concludes that it is high time to 'democratize democracy', so that postcolonial attempts at creating democratic systems are given equal weight in the debates concerning progress towards democratic regimes and that different trajectories and conceptions of the meaning of democracy are take into account in Western democratic discourse. Keywords: democracypostcolonystate formationglobal financeemerging marketssovereignty Acknowledgements Thomas Koelble would like to acknowledge support from the South African National Research Foundation under grant GUN 2069058 as well as scholarship support in July 2005 from the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and Prof. Dr Wolfgang Merkel, Director of the Division for the Study of Democracy. The authors would both like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Notes 1. The Conference on Thirty Years of the Third Wave of Democratization took place in December 2004 at the Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin. Thomas Koelble was the only participant based at a university in a postcolonial setting. 2. See Benjamin Lee, Talking Heads (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 265–9. 3. Fareed Zakaria, 'The Rise of Illiberal Democracy', Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 6 (1997), pp. 22–43. 4. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, 'The Causal Link between Democratic Values and Democratic Institutions', Paper presented at the Conference on Thirty Years of the Third Wave of Democratization, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, 10–11 December 2004. 5. Aurel Croissant and Wolfgang Merkel, 'Conclusion: Good or Defective Democracies', Democratization, Vol. 11, No. 5 (2004), pp. 199–214. 6. Richard Joseph, 'Democratization in Africa', Comparative Politics, Vol. 29, No. 3 (1997), pp. 363–72. 7. Martin Brusis, 'Measuring Transformation: The Bertelsmann Transformation Index', paper presented at the Conference on Thirty Years of the Third Wave of Democratization, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, 10–11 December 2004. 8. Robert Dahl, Polyarchy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971). Dahl outlines eight criteria which he thinks define an institutional democracy. These criteria include the freedom to form and join organizations, freedom of expression, voting, eligibility for office, competition for votes, alternative sources of information, fair and free elections, and accountable institutions. These eight criteria shape much of the political science debate concerning the definition of democracy and provide the basis for an entire industry of political analysis that concerns itself with measuring the 'quality of democracy'. See, for instance, Markus Crepaz and Vickie Birchfield, 'Global Economics, Local Politics', in Markus Crepaz, Thomas Koelble, and David Wilsford (eds), Democracy and Institutions (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 197–224. 9. The term 'postcolony' in this article is used in its widest sense. We refer here to nations where processes were put into place that did not encourage the emergence of rights-bearing citizens but of subjects; where a state structure was put in place for the extraction of resources and surplus value for foreign rather than domestic benefit; where economic sovereignty was not established; and where notions of subjectivity developed that do not coincide with Western notions of individual rights and preferences. While these developments took place largely in colonial contexts (most of Africa and Latin America, and much of Asia), there are some states, nations, and spaces where such developments also took place without the establishment of a conventional colonial super-structure (e.g., Eastern Europe after 1945). For a discussion of the term see Achille Mbembe, On the Post-colony (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 10. The term 'habitus' is borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) to suggest that the politics of democracy is a mutually constituting interaction of structures, dispositions, and practices. On this account, the politics of democratic governance is a result of the way institutions work (e.g., NGOs, judicial system) and of the embodied dispositions toward governance engendered by a people's historical experiences. Functionally, the structures of governance and embodied (and thus situated) knowledge of those structures shape enduring orientations to action which serve to reproduce those structures (which is why postcolonial governance often reproduces a colonial-like model). However, neither the structures of governance nor citizen's political practices and responses mechanistically follow from those orientations. They are also produced by a process of improvisation which is, in turn, defined by a nation's cultural orientations, the constraints it must overcome, the personal trajectories and capacities of its politicians, and the ability of its people to engage in politics 11. We employ the term inflected modernity to indicate that the varied paths taken by the postcolonial countries will be deeply and persistently influenced by EuroAmerican concepts of modernity, but will critically diverge from that EuroAmerican version according to their own specific histories. 12. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, ed. Thomas Bottomore (London: Pluto Press, 1992 1950), pp. 3–51. 13. Achille Mbembe (note 9) and Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 14. See Philip Gourevitch, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2000) p. 57. 15. Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2005). 16. See e.g., John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005); Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Michael Clough, US Policy Towards Africa and the End of the Cold War (New York: Council of Foreign Relations Press, 1992); and Abdisalam Issa-Salwe, Cold War Fallout: Boundaries Politics and Conflict in the Horn of Africa (London: Hahn Associates, 2000). 17. As David Held indicated in Models of Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987) the foundation of all these theories of democracy is participation and competition by rights-bearing citizen-subjects within a sovereign national space. 18. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 19. Nelson Mandela, From Freedom to the Future (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2003). 20. Amy Chua, World On Fire (London: Heinemann, 2003). 21. Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 22. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2002). 23. Thomas A. Koelble and Edward LiPuma, 'The Effects of Circulatory Capitalism on Democratization: Observations from South Africa and Brazil', Democratization, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2006), pp. 605–31. 24. Barry Eichengreen, Capital Flows and Crises (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Barry Eichengreen, 'Governing Global Financial Markets', in Miles Kahler and David Lake (eds), Governing in a Global Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 168–98. See also Padma Desai, Financial Crisis, Contagion and Containment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 25. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2002). 26. Edward LiPuma, 'Modernity and Forms of Personhood in Melanesia', in Michael Lambek and Andrew Strathern (eds), Bodies and Persons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 53–79; John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (eds), Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 27. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 28. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). 29. Ibid. (note 28), p. 476. 30. Chakrabarty (note 25), p. 31. 31. Inglehart and Welzel (note 4), p. 2. 32. Tanya Boerzel and Thomas Risse, 'One Size fits All! EU Policies for the Promotion of Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law', Paper presented at the conference 'Thirty Years of the Third Wave of Democratization', Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, 10–11 December 2004, p. 3. 33. Alec Russell, Big Men, Little People (London: MacMillan, 1999). 34. Thomas Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modern India (Delhi: Longman, 1985); Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004) all make this central point about Indian democracy. 35. Marshall (note 12). 36. Chakrabarty (note 25), p. 83. 37. Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (New York: The New Press, 1997). 38. Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 39. Juergen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 40. Leroy Vail (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). 41. Richard Werbner, and Terence Ranger (eds), Post-colonial Identities in Africa (London: Zed Books, 1996). 42. Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 43. LiPuma and Lee (note 21). 44. Patrick Bond, Uneven Zimbabwe (Trenton: African World Press, 1998). 45. Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio (eds), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1991). 46. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 47. Roger Southall, 'Black Empowerment and Corporate Capital', in J. Daniel, R. Southall, and J. Lutchman (eds), State of the Nation: South Africa, 2004–2005. (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2005), pp. 455–78. 48. Richard Stacey, 'We the People: The Relationship Between the South African Constitution and the ANC's Transformation Policies', Politikon, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2003), pp. 133–48. 49. Colm Allen, 'Corruption, Oversight, and Accountability', Paper presented at the 2nd National Anti-Corruption Summit, Pretoria, March (2005), p. 4. 50. Crais (note 42). 51. Sue Parnell, Edgar Pieterse, Mark Swilling, and Dominique Wooldridge (eds), Democratising Local Government (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2002). 52. Dani Rodrik, The New Global Economy and Developing Countries (Washington DC: Overseas Development Council, 1999), p. 97. 53. Alan Tourraine, Can We Live Together? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 54. Habermas (note 39). 55. Stephen Gelb, 'An Overview of the South African Economy', in J. Daniel, R. Southall, and J. Lutchman (eds), State of the Nation: South Africa 2004–2005 (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2005), pp. 367–400. 56. Linda Chisholm, 'The State of South Africa's Schools', in John Daniel, Roger Southall, and Jessica Lutchman (eds), State of the Nation: South Africa 2004–2005 (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Centre, 2005), p. 208. 57. Benjamin Roberts, 'Empty Pockets, Empty Stomachs', in J. Daniel, R. Southall, and J. Lutchman (eds), State of the Nation: South Africa, 2004–2005 (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2005), pp. 479–510. 58. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 59. Beth Simmons and Zackary Elkins, 'Globalization and Policy Diffusion', in M. Kahler and D. Lake (eds), Governance in a Global Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 275–304. See also B. Simmons and Z. Elkins, 'The Globalization of Liberalization', American Political Science Review, Vol. 98, No. 1 (2004), pp. 171–90. 60. Geoffrey Garrett, 'Globalization's Missing Middle', Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 6 (2004), pp. 84–96. Also Rodrik (note 52). 61. John Eatwell and L. Taylor, Global Finance at Risk (New York: The Free Press, 2000); Barry Eichengreen, Real Exchange Rates, Devaluation, and Adjustment: Exchange Rate Policies in Developing Countries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); B. Eichengreen, International Monetary Arrangements for the 21st Century (Washington DC: Brookings Institute, 1994); B. Eichengreen, 'Governing Global Financial Markets', in Miles Kahler and David Lake (eds), Governance in a Global Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 168–98. 62. Layna Mosley, Global Capital and National Governments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 63. Koelble and LiPuma (note 23). 64. Simmons and Elkins (note 59). 65. Rodrik (note 52), p. 4. 66. Mosley (note 62), p. 22. 67. Gregory Noble and John Ravenhill, Causes and Consequences of the Asian Financial Crisis, in G. Noble and J. Ravenhill (eds), The Asian Financial Crisis and the Architecture of the Global Finance. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–35. Also Desai (note 24). 68. Anna Tsing, Friction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 55. 69. Eichengreen comes to the conclusion that international regulation of hedge funds would not solve or even begin to curb the 'hedge fund problem' as the hedge funds, as powerful as they are, represent only a small part of the international financial system in which speculative capital circulates the globe looking for a high return. Eichengreen, 'Governing Global' (note 61), p. 178. 70. Raymond Parsons (ed.), Manuel, Markets and Money (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2004). 71. Chakrabarty (note 25), p. 28. 72. We seek a more nuanced position, which transcends the opposition between 'structure versus agency'. And for this reason we have adopted the notion of the habitus which assumes that agents employ schemes that are informed, but never determined, by their structural position and by their acts of position-taking within a field of action. The expression of agency in respect to these structuring forces is thus variable, and subject to the political labours of agents to gain more freedom. While political leaders such as Mandela certainly make a difference in establishing democratic benchmarks, at this historical juncture, the structural limits imposed on emerging democracies in emerging market societies are such that the attainment of Western democratic standards becomes difficult. This is precisely because the structures laid down by apartheid and the structure of the global economy today often place constraints on liberal democratic practices and attempts to realize its emancipatory goals. While it may be tempting to position Mandela as a champion of democracy and Mugabe as his opposite, it should be recalled that Mugabe was, for several years, the 'poster boy' of IMF reforms and seen as a model African leader by much of the Western press. The collapse of the Zimbabwean economy in its transition from autarchy to a globally open economy is at the heart of the current political debacle and less an example of poor agency as of blinding structural constraints on an agricultural economy that followed IMF prescriptions and paid a heavy price for that mistake. For an analysis of the development of the Zimbabwean crisis see Bond (note 44). 73. There are reports that, in the period February 2006 to May 2007, some 200,000 households have moved from townships to suburbs in the metropolitan areas of South Africa. These households are referred to as 'Black Diamonds' and constitute the core of the 'new black middle class'. The size of this new black middle class is the subject of much controversy with some observers claiming that it constitutes well over three million individuals and others arguing that it is much smaller. See Sunday Times Business Times (Johannesburg), 20 May 2007, p. 1. The point is that it has taken over a decade for such a class of individuals to emerge and for that class to move from township to suburb. 74. Steven Robins, 'Grounding Globalization from Below', in David Chidester, Philip Dexter, and Wilmot James (eds), What Holds Us Together? (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2003), pp. 242–74. 75. Thomas A. Koelble and Edward LiPuma, 'Traditional Leaders and Democracy', in Steven Robins (ed.), The Limits of Liberation (London: James Currey, 2005), pp. 74–96. 76. Chatterjee (note 27), p. 4. 77. Similarly, the issue of rationality in the postcolonial environment should be subject to a much more careful analysis than the knee-jerk reaction of Western modernists who are quick to dismiss value and religious systems of beliefs as superstition. Clifton Crais' (note 42) magisterial analysis of witchcraft beliefs in the Eastern Cape establishes that these beliefs have much to do with the politics of misfortune and trying to root out 'evil' in impoverished communities. 78. Nelson, Mandela, The Long Walk to Freedom (Randburg: MacDonald Purnell, 1994). 79. We discuss the deliberative model of democracy in view of the attempts of a coalition of 'traditional leaders' to appropriate the model for their own ends in a paper titled 'Deliberative Democracy and the Politics of Traditional Leadership in South Africa', currently under review with another journal, as well as in our chapter quoted above (note 75). There are several interpretations of a model of deliberation at work, and we argue that only one subject to vigilant oversight institutions at the provincial and national level as well as vibrant local participation is capable of producing democracy worthy of the name. The 'deliberative democracy' model certainly resonates with rural community traditions in Africa and could provide the basis for a more indigenous (as well as inclusive) form of democracy. Additional informationNotes on contributorsThomas A. KoelbleProfessor of Business Administration at the University of Cape Town, South AfricaEdward LipumaProfessor of Anthropology, University of Miami, USA.