Waves of Democracy

Social Movements and Political Change, Second Edition

John Markoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317249320
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The second edition of this classic text covers contemporary democracy movements including the Arab Spring and its aftermath, Occupy, and new nations as well as old issues from the Balkans to Africa, from Latin America to Ukraine. The author has traveled widely around the world to take the pulse of transition and to profile journeys toward democracy and journeys away from democracy, too. At the same time, the book addresses important challenges that have emerged in even well-established democracies. These show up in declining voting rates, diminished membership in political parties, and, in some countries including the United States, negative views of central democratic institutions (like the US Congress).

CHAPTER 1

A QUICK HISTORY OF MODERN DEMOCRACY

For many social scientists, the 1960s and 1970s were decades of considerable doubt about the future of democratic institutions. The Soviet Union and its communist clients and allies seemed remarkably successful in repressing dissent and controlling opinion through state-run institutions. Most of Latin America was under the sway of very different antidemocratic forces and even countries with long democratic histories were taken over by their armed forces. In Africa, postcolonial democracies crumbled and were replaced by military leaders and “Presidents for Life.” In Asia, hopes for democratic evolution were dashed by martial law and mass violence. Even in the United States and western Europe, the democratic heartland, antigovernment protests were spinning off into the terrorist tactics of kidnapping and bombing.

Then, unexpectedly, from the mid-1970s into the 1980s and beyond, the antidemocratic wave was dramatically reversed. Antidemocratic countries in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa suddenly embraced democratic principles. Most astounding of all, in 1989 one communist regime after another was replaced by an at least ostensibly democratic government.

But surprises didn’t stop with this enormous wave of democratic transitions. In the early twenty-first century enormous protests were happening not only in nondemocratic countries but in places where people sometimes boasted of having a democratic society. In those countries social movements were challenging the kind of democracy in place. Why did movements for democratic change blossom so widely in so many different sorts of social settings? Why were new movements arising that were asking for something different, even in democratic countries? To answer these questions, we need to look at the history of democracy.

Democratic (and Antidemocratic) Waves

Described above is one cycle of what I call “waves”: an “antidemocratic” wave from the late 1950s through the 1960s and into the mid-1970s and a “democratic” wave from the mid-1970s that has lasted at least into the early twenty-first century. Each wave is a group of political changes happening close together in time in different countries.

During a democratic wave, the organization of governments is altered—sometimes by peaceful reform, sometimes by dramatic overthrow—in ways that are widely held to be more democratic. During such a democratic wave, there is a great deal of discussion of the virtues of democracy, social movements often demand more democracy, and people in positions of authority proclaim their democratic intentions. During antidemocratic waves, governments are transformed in ways that are widely held to be antidemocratic, social movements proclaim their intention to do away with democracy, and government fgures proudly express their hostility to democracy.

Of course, democratic and antidemocratic movements can coexist at the same moment in history, with some powerholders proud of democracy and others hostile to it. Often these powerholders denounce each other. Some governments may claim they are becoming more democratic at the same time that others claim to be less so. What defines a democratic or antidemocratic wave is that during a certain stretch of historical time (from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, for example), the changes in governments are preponderantly of one or the other kind.

Note that I have not said here what democracy is. This is a very important question indeed but not so much in the sense that social scientists require precise definitions. Rather, it is important because one of the things under contention during democratic and antidemocratic waves is the very meaning of democracy.

Democratic and antidemocratic waves did not just begin in the 1960s and 1970s but two hundred years earlier. If we take a much longer time perspective, we will see that there have been several such waves.

Eighteenth-Century Breakthrough, Nineteenth-Century Fallout

In the 1700s, the word democracy had already been known for a long time to political theorists, and more generally to the educated, as one of three types of political systems distinguished in ancient Greece (alongside aristocracy and monarchy). The term appeared often in abstract and learned discussions of idealized political systems and was often used negatively, as it had been by Aristotle. When people talked about ancient democracy they knew that decisions were taken by an assembly in which all citizens could participate. They also knew that important positions were generally selected by lot, not by election campaigns, and they knew that while all citizens equally could participate, others who lived in ancient cities might be excluded. Those with rights of participation in the best-known instance, Athens, were men, not women, adults, not children, the free, not the slaves, and Athenians, not foreigners. In the 1700s, it was commonly held that democracy would encourage the less well off to plunder the wealthier, that it would foster rebellions, and that it was not practical on a scale larger than a city. It was rare, therefore, for people to use the term to describe any actually existing political arrangements or any they might hope to bring about. People who fought in the American Revolution in the 1770s, therefore, did not claim to be fghting for democracy, but the new term started to spread in the next decade.

In the 1780s, people in the Low Countries—today’s Belgium and Holland—made a major conceptual breakthrough. People began using democratic and aristocratic to describe two kinds of society and two rival social movements in discussing political arrangements that actually existed or that they hoped to bring into existence. Some people were seen as benefting from or enlisting in the cause of a social order that was hierarchical, corporate, and ordered by God—that is, a social world in which people were regarded as inherently unequal, in which collectivities like village communities were seen as the central elements of society, and in which social arrangements followed a divine plan. These people were “aristocrats.” By contrast, those who believed in contractual arrangements among free and equal individuals, arrangements that could be changed when people wished to change them, were “democrats.” Eighteenth-century democrats held that governments should derive their powers from a contract with the governed or even—a more daring notion—a contract among the governed alone.

A series of revolutionary movements from North America to Poland appealed to such ideas in the late eighteenth century, but the United States and France played special roles in this first wave of modern democracy. The United States secured its independence from Britain, the greatest maritime power of the age, through a diffcult war. The armies of France, a few years later, overcame the armies of Europe’s kings and held Europe in a grip that, for a while at least, extended from Madrid to Moscow. From the moment that sacred monarchy was successfully challenged by force on both sides of the Atlantic, claims to base government on the people became an increasingly striking part of public life.

What, more precisely, were the institutions that constituted democracy? As used in western Europe and North America in the 1780s and 1790s, democracy did not at first refer to representative institutions such as a congress or a parliament but was more likely to suggest direct popular decision making in an as yet unspecifed institutional form. At the time, democracy never meant competitive political parties, which were, in fact, seen in the fedgling United States and in Great Britain as corrupt betrayals of the search for the common good and in revolutionary France as virtual treason. Nor did democracy mean that all could vote in the new United States, where women and slaves were excluded, or in France, where the poor, women, and servants were excluded in the first elections. Democracy never referred to elections that satisfed the standards of honest counting and freedom of choice that we take for granted today; the general use of secret ballots was a later development.

In the long period from the 1780s to about 1910, very important battles were fought whose outcomes gradually came to specify what we understand as democracy:

• Struggles for the authority of elected parliaments over decision makers (the struggle for parliamentary control over ministers in Britain, for example)

• Struggles over the expansion of the suffrage (elimination of property qualifcations, for example)

• Struggles to make powerholders subject to the will of electorates (as in Great Britain, where the unelected House of Lords exercised signifcant power until 1911)

• Struggles for honest electoral counts (as in France, where as late as 1913 politicians provided already-marked ballots to villagers, who, visible to all, placed them in ballot boxes, a practice still noted in some rural areas many decades later)

• Struggles for acceptance of organized political parties as legitimate social actors and contestants in elections

• Struggles to emancipate populations from ties of personal dependence that made a mockery of any claims that the entire people were freely choosing their government (as in the slave emancipations in the western hemisphere and the gradual ending of “feudal rights” over rural majorities in Europe)

Every one of these struggles has its own history, but without any one of them, the meaning of democracy in our time would be quite different. If none of these struggles had taken place, democracy would be vacuous.

According to the usages of the early twenty-first century, very few states in the world in 1910 even approximately ft notions of democracy. From two to perhaps eight states could have been called democracies, depending on how strict the defnition. We can count as many as eight only if we are not very demanding about suffrage rules, for example, as only in New Zealand, Australia, and Finland did women have full voting rights.

Western Europe and some of its English-speaking offshoots seem the heartland of these nineteenth-century battles, but there were important developments in Latin America as well, with Chile in particular approximating a European timetable. And other places already were adopting democratic elements: weak representative institutions in Russia, a Japanese parliament modeled on Prussia’s, and the like.

Twentieth-Century Oscillations

The history of democratization from about 1910 to the present gives a first impression of sudden, explosive changes of course. From about 1910 into the mid-1920s, there was a great spurt in democratic claims by governments: considerable parliamentary reform in western Europe, the extension of the suffrage to women in several countries, the formation of democracies in some of the new countries carved out of monarchies ruined by World War I, emulation by weaker countries of the constitutional forms of the victorious democratic powers. Then in the 1920s and 1930s, fascist movements, authoritarian monarchs, and antidemocratic militaries expelled democratic forces from the political stage in much of Europe and Latin America. German armies conquered most of the rest of democratic Europe during World War II.

The military defeat of the fascist powers brought in its wake, in the 1940s and 1950s, a diffusion of the political systems of the victors—either a democratic or communist model and sometimes both in contested succession. The United States helped restore democracies in western Europe in countries that had been conquered by the Germans (but were these democracies as they had been before, or were they changed?); the armies of the Soviet Union ensured the installation of compatible communist regimes in central and eastern Europe. The United States also presided over the attempt to plant the roots of democracy in the western part of Germany and in Japan, countries that were held to have previously proved infertile soil, and re-created democracies in Italy and Austria as well. Greece and South Korea, soon in armed struggle with proponents of the communism associated with the rival successful model, proved less enduring cases when anticommunist antidemocrats seized the polity.

Buoyed by their military success in World War II, the Americans and the British tended to promote democratic models as the way out of colonialism; after World War I, in contrast, the democratic victors had manufactured new monarchies. Malaysia, the Philippines, India, and various African countries achieved independence following World War II under democratic constitutions.

Latin America followed the multicontinental trends in the 1940s and 1950s, and several important countries shifted to democratic forms. The Brazilian military ended the authoritarian regime of Getúlio Vargas, who had ruled since 1930. Venezuela had the first genuine attempt at democratic government in its history in 1945 and its first peaceful presidential succession in the elections of 1958. It is symptomatic of the historical moment that in 1956–1957 Colombia terminated its extraordinary Violencia—a period of extensive and murderous violence between people associated with the major political parties—with a series of pacts that adhered to formal democracy.

The postwar wave of democratization was seconded by a wave of optimistic notions on the part of North American social scientists. Their hopes were buoyed by the military destruction of European fascism, the reestablishment of democracies in Nazi-held Europe, the implantation of democracy by the United States in such previously unpromising places as Germany and Japan, the new democratic constitutions of postcolonial Africa and Asia, the ouster of a nondemocratic regime in South America’s largest country, Brazil, and the establishment of the first democratic government ever in previously chaotic Venezuela. Many social scientists, especially in the United States, argued that democracy was part and parcel of the modern world and would naturally accompany economic development.

Democracy in Trouble Again: The 1960s and Early 1970s

By the 1960s, however, social scientists’ rosy view of democracy’s prospects was beginning to look out of date. There was now considerable doubt about the future of the sort of democratic institutions characteristic of western Europe, North America, and a few far-fung offshoots of western colonization, such as Australia and New Zealand. The division of Europe that had followed World War II seemed frozen, and the communist East seemed remarkably successful in repressing dissent and controlling opinion through state-run mass media and well-thought-out domination of the educational system. Even without the direct backing of the Soviet army, forces allied with the Soviet Union were showing an impressive capacity to fght their way to power in poorer countries and to hold their own in the face of major challenges. Communist parties had come to power in the world’s most populous country, China, and had managed to fght the United States and its allies to a standstill in Korea. They were in the process of defeating the large U.S. force in Indochina. And the Caribbean island of Cuba seemed to some to demonstrate that a determined revolutionary government of even a very small country could stand up to the wealth and power of the United States.

At the same time, most of Latin America was under the sway of very different kinds of antidemocratic forces. Mexico had long been ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose offcial slogan of “effective suffrage” was contradicted by the reality of its elections. The application of force and fraud was so pervasive that no opposition party had ever been permitted to win a state governorship in Mexico, let alone seriously aspire to the presidency. Impoverished Central America was, for the most part, under murderous generals. Even the more economically developed countries of South America seemed to be falling into the hands of uniformed tyrants. The most shocking instance was Chile, with a long and deep tradition of democratic practice that came to an end in a coup in 1973. The violence of the military takeover was only a prologue to a long period of government-initiated terror. Uruguay, proud of a tradition of peace and democracy that had made it known as the Switzerland of Latin America, was also taken captive by its own armed forces, more gradually but with similar savagery.

In the 1960s and 1970s, economic growth seemed no protection for democracy. Such industrializing countries as Argentina and Brazil sustained military takeovers. In Brazil’s case, the military ruled with a level of violence that violated Brazilians’ beliefs about the ability of their elites to resolve problems with each other peacefully. By the mid-1970s only three Latin American countries (Costa Rica, Colombia, and Venezuela) still had serious claims to democratic politics.

In Africa, initial hopes for postcolonial democracy crumbled as one country after another threw out its initial democratic constitution, often derived in part from some European model. African governments variously declared that the rule of one party (no competition allowed) was more appropriate for their circumstances, that a great leader of the independence struggle should be “President for Life,” or that military rule was essential for orderly progress. The army of the largest independent African state, Nigeria, overturned its democr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. A Quick History of Modern Democracy
• 2. States, Social Movement Challengers, and Elite Reformers
• 3. Eighteenth-Century Revolution, Nineteenth-Century Eddies
• 4. Twentieth-Century Pendulum Swings
• 5. Semidemocracy, Pseudodemocracy, Democracy
• 6. Beyond the Great Democratic Wave
• 7. Into the Twenty-First Century: New Challenges, New Opportunities
• Appendix: The Geography of Democratization
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author