Peter Calvert

Promoting democracy abroad

Contemporary scholarship is now well past the point where it was valid to say the international dimensions of democratization had been neglected. In fact there has been growing interest among academics in studying the promotion of democracy abroad, not least because objectives relating to freedom and democracy have moved closer to the heart of the foreign-policy discourse of the main western powers and the United States specifically. The number of democratization support agencies and the resources put at their disposal have also increased accordingly. The relationships with goals of national security and international peace (the ‘war against terror’), linkages to national economic objectives and to the prospects for economic development in the countries singled out for democracy support have all aroused intellectual inquiry. The state of the discourse today is well reflected in the collection of articles brought together in this issue, all of which were offered and considered for inclusion in the journal’s general issues at different times during the last 12 months or so. The journal’s editors decided to combine them in a single issue titled ‘Promoting Democracy Abroad’. While all the articles have a direct connection to this overall theme, they offer complementary evidence and contrasting insights in the course of ranging over many important questions and directly relevant sets of issues. In the United States the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established in Washington, DC in 1983, is perhaps the best-known actor in the field of democracy promotion internationally. It was at the organisation’s 20th anniversary celebration in November 2003 that President Bush, reviewing worldwide progress towards democracy over recent decades, articulated his administration’s ‘new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East’. Its importance was shown by its difficulty: ‘the advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country . . . Working for the spread of freedom can be hard.’ The article in this issue by James M. Scott and Carie A. Steele, ‘Assisting Democrats or Resisting Dictators?’, shows how difficult this challenge has proven to be for the NED. The authors use statistical techniques to find that democracy interventions by the NED may be more effective in weakening or resisting authoritarian regimes than in actually promoting democratization per se or giving added momentum to democratic consolidation that is already under way. They conclude: ‘NED aid neither produces democracy nor follows democratization’, and put forward a ‘dictatorship resistance’ hypothesis instead. They make some specific recommendations for further development of the research agenda on democracy support more generally. If their current findings are corroborated in the future and if they apply also to other democracy-promotion

Revolution: The Politics of Violence:

I N this paper I wish to attempt to set the subject of revolution, as a subject for the attention of political science, in its general context as an expression of the politics of violence, and then to suggest some questions we should want to ask about it and what I conceive to be the sort of approach most likely to give us insight into the nature of revolution. To begin with, the study of revolution is considerably complicated by the orientation imposed by the subject itself. Revolution destroys pre-revolutionary sources, provides few contemporary ones, engenders strong ideological currents in all observers and endangers the lives of those who venture too close. Assessment of what it changes, if anything, is correspondingly difficult, and, as Sir Denis Brogan has pointed out, historically fallacious.’ Yet instead of assuming, as logic demands, that analysis must be based on the assumption of minimal change, as we would do in the case of (say) an election, we are constrained by the emotional effect of the revolutionary logic to assume the reverse. Far reaching social changes may be bound up with change of rule by violent means, but of course they may not. This, the second problem, is therefore of crucial significance. What are popularly called ‘revolutions’, that is, forcible interventions, either to replace governments, or to change the processes of government, are extremely common. In the past twenty years (194M5) there were 135, or an average of 6.75 annually, compared with a total (estimated) since 1900 of 367, representing an annual mean of 5.56. Many of these can be regarded as phenomena connected with the role of the military, a role which has been and is being studied in some detail both in this country and in the United States.2 But many have not. A few, a very few, have been followed by widespread social change. These are what some call the ‘Great Revolutions,, and others would argue that the title of ‘revolution’ should be reserved for these alone.3 Again, widespread social change has taken place

The challenge of interdependence: Mexico and the United States

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Land and Liberty

Latin America is the product of conquest. Conquest is the seizure by others of the sole basic economic resource, land. Without access to land, hunters and gatherers cannot find food and crops cannot be grown. But land is clearly not a standard product of uniform quality. Its value depends on its nature and composition, the prevailing climate and its proximity to markets. The conquerors, as far as their limited technical knowledge allowed, took the best land for themselves. The indigenous inhabitants were left with land of poor quality, mountain or forest land far from ‘civilization’, desert land lacking water resources or areas where excess rainfall and tropical diseases made colonization unattractive. The distribution of land, therefore, has been and remains a major theme in the story of Latin America in the twentieth century.

The Mexican Revolution: Theory or Fact?

Social scientists make a fundamental assumption about the nature of the relationship between theory and fact. For them, theories are seen, not as guides to individual behaviour, but as tools for the clinical investigation of social processes. The end of this search is a better theory. A theory has most chance of acceptance if it seems elegantly to order a very large number of hitherto unrelated facts.

Autocracy, anger and the politics of salvation

Anger is not just a journalistic convention, but a key motivation in politics. Certainly, it is one thing to say that anger is relevant; it is quite another to suppose that it is routine. Residual anger is relatively common and distorts decision‐making, but is generally ritualised. Democratic politicians confronted with intractable realities may be tempted to adopt authoritarian solutions, but democratic systems restrain this. Dictators frustrated in this way turn to the armed forces as skilled practitioners of violence to enforce their ideal vision of society on the untidy reality of ordinary everyday life. Military governments characteristically employ the imagery of the politics of salvation to defend a military autocracy. Paradoxically, authoritarian regimes, from fear of challenges to their own order, vent their anger on the weak; hence, the persistence of anger, as well as other empirical evidence, casts doubt on the theory of the democratic peace. The analogue of military autocracy is to be found in revolutionary organisation, which is also concerned with the politics of salvation. Hence, there is indeed a parallel between the politics of a revolutionary elite and the military politics from which it draws at least part of its rationale. Both are about the use of physical compulsion to create a better order, whether people want it or not. Hence, it is in anger that we find the link between autocracy and the politics of salvation.

REVOLUTION IN THE 1960s

THE decade from 1961 to 1970 was marked not only by a sudden increase in academic interest in the phenomena of revolution, but also by a large number of attempts to put revolutionary ideas into practice. It is not surprising, therefore, that an unusually large number of attempts were successful. Revolutionary incidents-that is to say, occasions on which governments were overthrown by physical force or a convincing threat of itl-rose to ninety-three during the decade, as compared with sixty-two in the decade 1951-60. The previous record for a decade in this century was eighty-three in the period 191 1-20. Study of these incidents enables us to make comparisons with the evidence presented for the period 1901-60, which may in themselves be illuminating.2 However, since this is the first occasion on which a set of data for revolutions has been assembled since the improvement of mass communications to the point at which they can be watched actually in progress, this data set appeared to us to be particularly convenient as a place at which to begin to test the relative merits of typologies which have been previously proposed. Analysis of this kind has hitherto been severely limited by the nature of the evidence available. The purposes for which the evidence was gathered differed widely from incident to incident, and past observers have, in any case, seldom been sufficiently specific by modern standards to provide a satisfactory account. Such measurements as we have are limited by the accidents of reporting; they are, in any case, basically the things which we can measure and not those things we should like to measure if we could. Such limitations certainly still constrain the present investigation in some degree, The problem of measurement, for example prevents us from commenting further on the widely popular theory of Ted Gurr that revolution is the product of perceived relative depri~at ion.~ Similarly, we are aware that the majority of the incidents considered are in Marxist terms ‘bourgeois revolutions’, though (like Marx himself) we do not on that account think them any the less worth studying. But we do not have enough exact information on the social composition of revolutionary groups, or on the precise social content of revolutionary programmes, to be able to draw a hard-and-fast line between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘socialist’ revolutions-at least as these terms have been reinterpreted during the period under review. Two general typologies which can be examined using existing data are those of Chalmers Johnson4 and James N. R o s e n a ~ . ~ Johnson gives a six-fold typology :

Postscript: Rio and After

The Rio Conference of 1992 briefly focused world attention on some of these problems, which are, of course, of world-wide significance. As ever, though, Latin America is uniquely well placed to act as a mediator between North and South. When in 1988 the idea that the United Nations should take the lead in problems of environment and development was first suggested, President Jose Sarney was quick to suggest that the proposed ‘World Summit’ should be held in Brazil. In the event it was his successor, President Collor, who welcomed more than 120 heads of state and government to Rio and presided over the conference, and ex-President Sarney was not even invited.

The Olive Branch and the Arrows

The single most important influence on post-war Latin America has been the emergence of the United States as a global superpower. Nevertheless, the surprising thing is not that Latin America has been drawn into the sphere of the United States or involved in its confrontation with the Soviet Union, but that it has not been more involved and that the involvement came rather slowly. Yet this is not hard to explain. For the conflict was from the beginning a northern one, in which the two superpowers and their allies confronted each other over the Arctic. The remoteness of the South American continent from the scene of confrontation and the limited value of its states in terms of the world balance of power gave it a degree of isolation which enabled its leaders to indulge their own ambitions in largely rhetorical terms within a protected environment. When any serious challenge to US hegemony appeared to be on the way, Washington was not slow to act against it.

The Military and Development

The attempted kidnapping and killing of US Ambassador Gordon Mein in Guatemala in 1967 heralded an outbreak of urban violence which took many forms: bombings, political assassination, hijacking of aircraft and kidnappings. The choice of diplomats and executives of transnational corporations for kidnapping and ransom demands was no accident; the Left saw the political systems of Latin American countries as integrated with and hence sustained by the world capitalist system, led by the United States. This rise of urban terrorism in Latin America, coupled with the emergence of left-wing governments in Peru, Bolivia and Chile, formed the pretext for changes that in the 1970s led to the emergence of a new wave of military governments in Latin America.