Governance
The Atlantic recently asked its panel of 40 foreign policy experts about prospects for democracy, publishing the results in March.
One question–do you believe the proliferation of democratic government is inevitable in the long run?–yielded these results:
Skeptics’ comments included these:
- “We seem to have forgotten that democracy is an organic phenomenon–that … it is the outcome of specific histories, cultures, ethnicities, and events.
- “New models quite far from Jeffersonian democracy (China’s ‘Market-Leninism’) could begin to catch the imaginations of transitional societies.”
Someone in the “yes” camp offered this remark:
- “Despite the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, people who are free to choose (as Mrs. Thatcher said) do choose to be free. And the information revolution enables more people to see lives in free countries.”
Image: Racoles (Flickr)
Weak governance and warfare in Africa chronically threaten the continent’s wildlife.
The Washington Post today notes a particularly dire case, the loss of mountain gorillas in barely-governed Congo. More than half of the world’s 700 remaining mountain gorillas are in Congo’s Virunga National Park.
Gorillas in Uganda are doing somewhat better, but their population is still low.
Writing in the Post, James Mann argues that China is increasingly a political model for the world, combining an authoritarian system with successful wealth creation.
He notes that the Chinese middle class is content with or at least acquiescent to the current system, indicating “that a nation’s elite can be bought off with comfortable apartments, the chance to make money, and significant advances in personal, non-political freedoms (clothes, entertainment, sex, travel abroad).”
It is not clear that the China offers a long-term model for authoritarianism, however.
- Political freedom has increased too — the “non-political freedoms” that Mann lists all used to be within the realm of politics and thereby restricted. This pattern continues, and even allows for thousands of protests a year, and — spottily — discussion of issues that fall clearly in the realm of politics.
- Mann suggests that the “business community is hardly independent of the party; in effect, it is the party, linked to China’s power structure through financial connections or family ties.” That in itself is a route to political change: Chinese business interests may be at odds with authoritarianism. For instance, to participate in global stock markets effectively, ever more Chinese will have to have unfettered access to global news flows. Business will have an interest in predictability that militates against arbitrary Party / bureaucratic interferences.
- China’s engagement with the world does constrain the Chinese political system. Consider the current scandal about tainted products. Part of the outcome is likely to be increased transparency to the outside world, and additional limits on the power of connection and money in the economy, replaced by objective criteria partially imposed by the outside world.
- The middle class continues to be trained for a more democratic system, making more decisions for themselves in more spheres, gaining access to ever-broader information streams, and glimpsing more and more alternatives to the present Chinese political model.
Such are the depths of corruption and power-abuse in Africa that a Sudanese mobile phone billionaire is offering an annual $5 million prize to a freely elected leader who governs well and hands over power to an elected successor.
He is thus offering positive reinforcement to oversight and other tools.
Skeptics might wonder if $5 million is enough when you can run off with hundreds of millions if you run a successful kleptocracy.
And, writes a commentator in the NYT, Africa needs more — “It needs a permanent source of political pressure from citizens and business groups — not just general disgust, but advocacy for specific reforms.”
In terms of governance, former Soviet Georgia is one of the holes in the world.
What this can mean in practical terms is revealed in this WP article: counterfeit money from the renegade region of South Ossetia is showing up in the United States.
By one measure of government reach compiled by Future Atlas, Georgia scores only a 22 out of 100, placing it 164th out of 202 countries rated.
President Hu reiterated the danger of widespread corruption to the Communist Party “with a stern warning that rampant corruption could erode the party’s popular legitimacy and undermine its hold on power,” according to the Washington Post.
Corruption is a primary driver of China’s evolution because it threatens continued economic growth and undermines the deal that the Party has struck with population: that people acquiesce in Party rule in return for some kind of shot at prosperity.
The Ford Foundation is attempting to address Africa’s preeminent problem, governance.
As reported by the NYT, it is funding a new Group, Trust Africa, that will support “an expanding network of nonprofit groups across the continent that seek to hold governments accountable.”
Thomas O. Melia, deputy director of Freedom House, […] said efforts like those of Trust Africa represent the next frontier in deepening democracy in Africa and elsewhere. “What has been missing, even in places establishing electoral democracy, is independent voices — think tanks, nongovernmental organizations, university centers — able to monitor government performance.”
The Senegal-based group will also seek support from African emigrants abroad, hoping that their interest in their homelands will translate to engagement in pan-African issues.
Writing in America Abroad, Ivo Daalder points out the problems with the new UN Human Rights Commission.
The central problem is a perennial one: human rights abusers end up on the commission. New members include Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan, Russia, and Cuba.
The ideal solution would some criteria for membership could be applied. Consider, for instance, the political rights rating from Freedom House. The problematic countries above are rated thus:
- Saudi Arabia — 7 (not free)
- Cuba — 7 (not free)
- China — 7 (not free)
- Pakistan — 6 (not free)
- Russia — 6 (not free)
If the countries with free and high partly free ratings (4 or less) were allowed to serve on a human rights body, they would still constitute a majority of countries, and would not include any of the worst violators.
It won’t happen of course, for any number of reasons:
- China and Russia would use their positions on the Security Council to block such a reform.
- Excluded countries and their friends would decry “cultural imperialism.”
- Many regions would be left with rather few representatives. For instance, the Middle East has only one “free” country — Israel — but it gets a “not free” rating (6, the same as Iran) in the areas it occupies, and would seemingly be excluded on that basis, leaving “partly free” Kuwait to represent everything from Morocco to Iran.
Imperfect mechanisms will have to do for now. Daalder concludes:
It may well be that the new requirement that the human rights activities of all UN members, starting with those elected to the council, be carefully examined provides an opportunity to prove this skeptic wrong. But first indications are hardly encouraging.
Foreign policy and the Fund for Peace have released their annual Failed States Index, a valuable tool for tracking potential instability.
Foreign Policy explains:
The category of “failed states” has become part of the strategic vernacular, and it has many definitions. For the purposes of this index, a failing state is one in which the government does not have effective control of its territory, is not perceived as legitimate by a significant portion of its population, does not provide domestic security or basic public services to its citizens, and lacks a monopoly on the use of force. A failing state may experience active violence or simply be vulnerable to violence. The great majority of the states listed in the index are not presently failed states. The index measures vulnerability to violent internal conflict. It is an index of country risk, not of countries that have already failed.
The 20 most endangered states are concentrated in Africa, and include many of the least-governed countries. Ranked from most in danger downwards, they are:
1. Sudan
2. Congo, Dem. Rep. of the
3. Ivory Coast
4. Iraq
5. Zimbabwe
6. Chad
6. Somalia
8. Haiti
9. Pakistan
10. Afghanistan
11. Guinea
11. Liberia
13. Central African Republic
14. North Korea
15. Burundi
16. Yemen
17. Sierra Leone
18. Burma
19. Bangladesh
20. Nepal
The status of all 148 rankings is mapped here.
Instability in Pakistan is potentially disastrous: it could be the first nuclear-armed state to fail, and some of the parties that might get hold of the country’s nuclear weapons have links to Islamic extremist groups.
Number 31 on the list is Egypt, a lynchpin state of the Middle East, and right behind it at 32 is Indonesia, one of the largest countries in the world.
Impunity for Africa’s leaders shows signs of ending, suggests the CSM, citing the arrest of former Liberian president Charles Taylor and the corruption trial of the ex-president of Zambia.
Efforts to hold African leaders to account are the result of both external pressure and internal African initiatives.
Poor governance is the single largest obstacle to African peace and development. A remark by a citizen of the Congo a couple of years ago can be applied across the continent:
“The most sorrowful thing I have to live with is that we are incapable of coming up with an elite that can run things with Congolese interests in mind.” — Congolese in Blaine Harden, “The Dirt in the New Machine,” New York Times, August 12, 2001.
These are only the first signs of what would have to be a protracted process.
(The CSM article also suggests that the US role in Taylor’s capture “implicitly binds the US to helping keep the peace in Liberia, should the trial of the still-popular” leader cause instability.)