Leashing predators

Have rapacious elites, here as well as in countries from Thailand, Kenya to Venezuela, triggered a “powerful authoritarian undertow” that’s choking democracy?

“A number of countries typically counted as democracies today –including Georgia, Mozambique, the Philippines, and Senegal – may have slipped below the threshold,” says the influential quarterly: “Foreign Affairs” (March-April 2008).

Hoover Institution’s Larry Diamond documents how avaricious governance and corrupted elections set off this skid. His analysis is titled: “Democratic Rollback: Resurgence of Predatory States”. 

It  picks up from where “Deepening Democracy in A Fragmented World”  study left off in  2002 The democratic wave, of the  early 1980s into mid-1990s, toppled dictators from Ferdinand Marcos to Mobutu Seseke,  this  UN “Human Development Report”  noted then.

Towards the century’s end, rising expectations curdled into frustrated hopes, “Of 81 countries that took steps to democratization, only 47 are considered full democracies,” HDR added. “Many do not seem to be in transition to anything. (Some) lapsed back into authoritarianism.”

Today, even success stories, like Chile, Ghana, Poland, and South Africa, grapple with festering disaffection, the “Foreign Affairs” essay notes. India is hemmed in by unstable dictatorial states. And Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain, among others, thwart democratic aspirations in the Arab world.

There are 50 plus of these “at-risk-democracies” today. Aside from the Philippines, these include: three of Asia’s eight democracies, most Latin America and Caribbean nations, all of post-Soviet democracies outside European Union ranks, plus virtually all of Africa’s democracies.  

In years ahead, democracy’s prospects will not hinge on whittling down remaining dictatorships like Burma or North Korea.  It will depend, instead, on how at-risk-democracies, like the Philippines or Kenya, curb endemic corruption and electoral fraud.

“The most urgent task of the next decade is to shore up democracy in these countries,” the study adds. “A January 2008 Freedom House survey found that, for the first time since 1994, freedom around the world suffered a net decline in two successive years -- the “worst since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

Therefore, “celebrations of democracy's triumph are premature,” Diamond cautions. In fact, ‘the world has slipped into a democratic recession. Predatory states are on the rise, threatening both nascent and established democracies”.

“Predatory states produce predatory societies”, the study adds. Only the names of oligarchs change.  Does Malaysia’s Daim Zainuddin differ from Indonesia’s Sigit Suharto whose family got slabs in 1,251 companies during the dictator’s lifetime? Who’d be Filipino equivalents for Pakistan’s Asif Zardari? Bongbong Marcos, Miguel Arroyo, Joseph Estrada, Lucio Tan, Eduardo Cojuangco, Enrique Razon, et al?    

Many democracy-at-risk nations are blighted by abusive police, domineering oligarchs, weak bureaucracies.  Elections “become a bloody zero-sum struggle in which…no one can afford to lose… Ordinary people are not truly citizens but clients of powerful local bosses… Every transaction is manipulated to someone’s immediate advantage”.

“These conditions make it easy for a predatory oligarchy to prey on an incoherent bureaucracy,” observes Filipino theologian Aloysius Cartagenas. The Catholic church should consider urgently ‘a prophetic cutting off relations with oligarchs and elite (who) prey on the nation”. 

Bishops wisely rejected having “the ultimate say to depose or not a corrupt president and install a new one,” this San Carlos Seminary professor writes in a paper titled: “Easter Imperatives.”  But they still must create a “structure that makes the poor real participants in shaping a public policy.”

“Predatory states cannot sustain democracy. Sustainable democracy requires constitutionalism, compromise, and a respect for law”, Diamond argues. But they can break free thru “vertical and horizontal accountability”. Free honest elections – from registering voters to counting votes – is a prime example of “vertical accountability”. So are public hearings, citizen audits, and a freedom-of-information act.

“Horizontal accountability” is seen in independent counter-corruption commissions. “In at-risk democracies, these institutions do not function well, largely because they are not meant to”. Civil service must be improved. “An inept state drives people toward informal and corrupt networks to get things done.” And reforms should limit state's role through an open market economy. This clips “graft by predatory elites.”

“Momentum is now going against democracy,” the quarterly notes “A resurgent and oil-rich Russia flexing its muscles, and China emerging as a major aid donor in the rest of  Asia and  Africa, makes it more difficult to encourage reforms”.

The international donors’ habit of keeping predatory states afloat must end. They can make foreign aid contingent on good governance. They’d help thereby “reverse the democratic recession”.

“There is hope,” Diamond insists. “Public opinion surveys show that majorities in every region believe democracy is the best form of government.  Social Weather Stations surveys, in fact, show that   53, out of every 100 Filipinos, preferred democracy over authoritarian rule.

“States must constrain the nearly unlimited discretion that predatory rulers enjoy…and hold them accountable,” the essay adds. “This is the fundamental challenge that all at-risk democracies face.”*

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