Political Order and Political Decay (63 page)

Statistical averages of economic growth and governance of course mask important differences within each region. Latin America includes extremely poor Haiti, Guatemala, and Paraguay, as well as Brazil, which exports high-tech products such as jet aircraft to the rest of the world. Nonetheless, each of these regions has certain characteristics that make countries within them similar to one another and different from those in other regions. Many Latin American countries have experienced a cycle of rapidly rising inflation, currency crisis, devaluation, and economic downturn, most recently during the debt crisis in the early 1980s (and, in Argentina, in the early 2000s). East Asia's fast-growing economies, by contrast, got through this period largely unscathed. Sub-Saharan Africa experienced a similar and even more severe debt crisis than Latin America a few years later, which led a number of countries to require debt relief from their creditors before they could start growing once again. While Latin America is largely democratic today, this was not always the case; during the 1960s and '70s, repressive military governments took power in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and other places. Most of what are labeled “developmental states”—countries that have successfully used state power (often under authoritarian regimes) to promote rapid economic growth—have clustered in East Asia. It is hard to find comparable countries in Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa.
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PATHS OF DEVELOPMENT

Part II began with various theories put forward to explain contemporary development outcomes as the result of geography, climate, and colonial legacies. All of these have some merit. But the nature of human social behavior is so complex that few theories that trace outcomes to single factors hold up across the board.

Theories that link political (and consequently economic) development to geography and climate can explain certain important outcomes. Economists focus on endowments of natural resources: the requirements of gold and silver mining, or of plantation agriculture, led to the enslavement of indigenous peoples or the importation of slaves from Africa. The exploitative industries created an economic basis for authoritarian governments on New World soil.

But authoritarian institutions in Latin America were overdetermined. The political orders created in Peru and Mexico were settler colonies that succeeded in eradicating virtually any institutional trace of the dense pre-Columbian state structures that preceded them. As settlement colonies, they tended to replicate the class-based, mercantilist society found back on the Iberian peninsula, in which indigenous laborers and mestizos took the place of the white European peasantry. The Spanish Crown initially tried to create a strong form of absolutist direct rule in the Americas, but the realities of distance meant that it was able to exert substantially less authority over its colonies than it could at home. The Spanish form of absolutism was a weak one, unable to tax adequately or meet its own revenue needs in Europe, and even less able to do so with respect to its restive Creole colonists in the New World. The Creoles thus created for themselves oligarchic governments based on privileges rather than liberties, which survived the transition to independent states when the colonies broke away from Spain in the early nineteenth century. Latin America in the twenty-first century continues to live with this legacy as the most unequal region of the world.

Geography was important in other ways as well, as Montesquieu pointed out. Certain topographies were better suited to the raising and deployment of large armies. In Eurasia (China and Russia primarily), relatively open land encouraged consolidation of large centralized states, while in sub-Saharan Africa, the difficulties of projecting power across vast deserts and tropical forests inhibited state formation. Europe was somewhere in between: its geography encouraged the formation of medium-sized political units, but it prevented any one of them from growing to a size that allowed conquest of the entire region.

Latin America's geography put it closer to sub-Saharan Africa than to Europe. The continent as a whole was divided by mountains, jungles, and deserts, and by the prevailing north-south lines of communications, into mutually inaccessible regions that did not facilitate the creation of large territorial empires. Following the demographic collapse of the region's indigenous populations, there were few parts of the continent with population densities great enough to support powerful states. Moreover, once Spanish and Portuguese colonization began, surpluses were not locally reinvested but exported back to the home country under highly inefficient mercantilist rules.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Latin America as a whole didn't look that different from Europe in political terms. Both were dominated by autocratic regimes and economic oligarchies that used political power to protect their privileges. Yet in the succeeding two centuries, Europe underwent a profound series of political changes that left it much more democratic and economically equal than Latin America. One of the principal reasons for this was the extraordinarily high level of violence experienced by Europe during this period, beginning with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, continuing through the wars of Italian and German unification, and ending with the cataclysms of the two world wars. High levels of military competition led to the formation and consolidation of strong, modern states, as in the Stein-Hardenberg reforms in Prussia. At the same time, rapid industrialization was drawing millions of peasants off the countryside and into dense, diverse cities. This shift created the conditions for the emergence of modern ethnolinguistic concepts of national identity, which in turn provoked further military competition. Nationalism helped to facilitate the consolidation of modern states. And both internal revolution and external war succeeded in wiping out entire social classes, like France's venal officeholders and the Junker class in Germany, which had been pillars of the old oligarchic order.

Latin America's development path was very different. There was no equivalent of the French Revolution to unseat old oligarchies, nor was there prolonged international competition to stimulate the formation of modern states. National identities remained weak, due to ethnic diversity and slow or absent industrialization, which meant that conflict was more often an internal one between classes rather than an external one between nations. By 1945, Europe's exhausted elites were ready to concede both liberal democracy and redistributive welfare states to ensure social peace. While Latin America's elites faced the threat of social upheaval, especially after the Cuban Revolution, it was never severe enough to promote either state building or redistribution on a European scale. There was no European-style social consensus built around moderate center-left and center-right parties, but rather sharp polarizations between rich and poor. Only in the 2000s does a more European type of political order appear to be emerging in Chile and Brazil.

Geography, climate, and colonial legacies do not explain present-day outcomes across the board. Argentina, whose climate and colonial history freed it from the inequality and slow growth of the rest of the continent during the nineteenth century, should have continued to flourish. It did not do so because of the poor choices made by its elites in the early twentieth century. Despite its more favorable climate and geography, it inherited some of the political culture from the older parts of Latin America, such as caudillismo and personalistic leadership. Conversely, Costa Rica should have evolved into another Central American banana republic characterized by dictatorship and civil conflict, and yet it developed into a stable democracy because of good choices made by elites at a certain critical historical juncture.

The situation in sub-Saharan Africa was completely different. The deadly legacy of European colonialism was not an “extractive” authoritarian state but rather the profound absence of strong institutions altogether. The scramble to colonize Africa came very late, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, when the Spanish and Portuguese territories in the New World were already four and a half centuries old. Unlike in Latin America, early European colonialists did not find either large populations or substantial mineral resources to exploit in Africa. Tropical diseases and climate, moreover, made the region inhospitable to extensive European settlement, except for more temperate regions in the south. There simply weren't the time or resources to build institutions before demands for independence arose in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The fact that the African colonies could barely be made to pay for the costs of their own administration led the Europeans to seek a cheap way out through “indirect rule,” using local African agents to extract taxes or force young men into corvée labor. This ramshackle system, imposed over territories that reflected the outcomes of strategic competition rather than ethnic realities, was the political legacy bequeathed to much of sub-Saharan Africa on independence after World War II.

Also unlike in Latin America, postindependence Africa did not have deeply entrenched elites who could pull strings behind the scenes. Independence from colonial rule opened up opportunities for new elites to emerge, largely the urban educated class that had been close to the colonial administration. Not having a secure social base either as a landed aristocracy or in the small capitalist economy, many saw the state itself as their main route to economic advancement. Low-capacity states were thus stuffed with patronage employees, vastly increasing their size and further weakening their ability to deliver real services. Politics came to be a neopatrimonial contest over capture of the state and its resources, with different groups lining up for their “turn to eat.” Under these conditions, there was no permanent bureaucracy that could represent a broader public interest or that could discipline elites and force them to play by economically rational rules.

It is commonly observed that many of sub-Saharan Africa's travails are due to the fact that the territorial boundaries bequeathed to newly independent states did not conform to the realities of existing ethnic and tribal identities. This bit of conventional wisdom is misleading insofar as it implies that a more intelligent form of boundary drawing would have led to more coherent postindependence states. This is true only to a limited extent: Sudan, for example, could have been spared two long and costly civil conflicts if South Sudan and Darfur had not been attached to the Arab core around Khartoum by the British. But for much of the rest of Africa, ethnic groups were far too small and intermingled to become the basis for a modern European-style nation-state. In contrast to East Asia and Europe, strong indigenous state-level units had not performed the hard and violent work of identity formation prior to European colonization. To the extent that the colonial powers shaped identity, it was replacing tribalism with ethnicity—that is, replacing small-scale kin groups with much larger ones, done for the sake of divide-and-rule. The colonial rulers of Africa had neither the time nor the incentive to create strong states that could help shape national identity, and most of the elites that emerged after independence did not make nation building a priority. Weakness of national identity in sub-Saharan Africa is thus far more a matter of omission rather than commission. Tanzania is the exception that proves the rule. Nyerere's creation of a Tanzanian identity demonstrates that where elites did embark on such a project, it could be a success despite considerable prior ethnic diversity.

Societies with strong state institutions and equally strong national identities existed, prior to their confrontation with Western colonial powers, in other parts of the world, primarily in East Asia. China indeed invented the modern state at the time of the Qin unification, some eighteen hundred years before its rise in early modern Europe. The Chinese created a state that was centralized, bureaucratic, and impersonal, ruling a vast territory with far greater uniformity than its Roman counterpart. The power of the Chinese state waxed and waned over the following millennia, as it was recaptured by internal kin groups or invaded by barbarians from without. Nonetheless, China and surrounding countries like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam developed governments based on the strong-state model and succeeded in reaching levels of political organization substantially higher than any of the indigenous societies of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. These state-building efforts were enhanced by great ethnic homogeneity, the result of many centuries of conquest and assimilation. These societies had a strong sense of shared culture based on a common written language and widespread elite literacy.

It should be noted that these generalizations do not apply to East Asia as a whole. Many of the countries of Southeast Asia have had very different political development trajectories. As noted in chapter 22, Indonesia did not even exist as a state in the nineteenth century and was nearly as fragmented ethnically as Nigeria. Singapore and Malaysia were direct creations of British colonialism, whose modern success did not depend on the existence of precolonial indigenous states. It is interesting to note, however, that even so, they were able to build relatively strong and coherent states. How this came about is a fascinating story that unfortunately remains outside the scope of this book.
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Early state institutionalization in East Asia made it easier to resist threats from the outside. Japan was the most successful in preventing Western colonization. And although China was attacked and partly occupied by the Western powers, and the Qing court in Beijing repeatedly humiliated during the nineteenth century, the Western powers never managed to fully dissolve the connective tissue of the Chinese state. While state authority did break down briefly in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s during the period of warlordism, civil war, and Japanese occupation, a strong centralized state was soon reestablished under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. Similarly, though Vietnam was occupied by France, it succeeded in eventually ousting the colonial regime and defeating its American-supported successor. It is no accident that East Asia was host to the two best-organized and most powerful nationalist revolutions in the world, those of China and Vietnam, whose leaders converted their military prowess into state power immediately upon victory in their civil wars/wars of national liberation.