Aid and Authoritarianism in Africa

Development without Democracy

Tobias Hagmann, Professor Filip Reyntjens, Tobias Hagmann, Filip Reyntjens

• Editorial: Zed Books
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783606313
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Geopolitics

In 2013 almost half of Africa's top aid recipients were ruled by authoritarian regimes. While the West may claim to promote democracy and human rights, in practice major bilateral and international donors, such as USAID, DFID, the World Bank and the European Commission, have seen their aid policies become ever more entangled with the survival of their authoritarian protégés. Local citizens thus find themselves at the receiving end of a compromise between aid agencies and government elites, in which development policies are shaped in the interests of maintaining the status quo. Aid and Authoritarianism in Africa sheds light on the political intricacies and moral dilemmas raised by the relationship between foreign aid and autocratic rule in Africa. Through contributions by leading experts exploring the revival of authoritarian development politics in Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Cameroon, Mozambique and Angola, the book exposes shifting donor interests and rhetoric as well as the impact of foreign aid on military assistance, rural development, electoral processes and domestic politics. In the process, it raises an urgent and too often neglected question: to what extent are foreign aid programmes actually perpetuating authoritarian rule?

1 | Discourses of democracy, practices of autocracy: shifting meanings of democracy in the aid–authoritarianism nexus

Rita Abrahamsen

Introduction

Since the early 1990s, democracy and good governance have been core tenets of development discourse and policy, with donors proclaiming the importance of freedom, rights and accountability for development and prosperity. Yet, not only does the process of democratization appear to have stalled in many African countries, foreign aid also seems to be flowing freely to some of the continent’s more autocratic and repressive states. As this volume shows, countries like Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda have continued to attract substantial donor support, despite their dwindling democratic credentials and decreasing respect for human rights and political freedoms. In other countries, democracy has fared better and multi-party elections are now a routine event across the continent. Nevertheless, when describing the results of two decades of democracy promotion, observers conjure unlikely terms like ‘electoral dictatorships’, ‘competitive authoritarianism’ and ‘hybrid regimes’, or point to continued presidentialism and the need to qualify democracy ‘with adjectives’ (Collier & Levitsky, 1997; Carothers, 2002; Diamond, 2002; Levitsky & Way, 2002; van de Walle, 2003; Lynch & Crawford, 2011; Peiffer & Englebert, 2012).

This chapter analyses the trajectory of African democracies in the context of the changing meanings ascribed to democracy in donor discourses. Put simply, I argue that the manner in which democracy is conceptualized in development discourse and democracy promotion has implications for the practice of democracy. Approaching democracy as an essentially contested concept, the chapter charts democracy’s shifting status and the meaning ascribed to it in development discourse and thus reveals its contingent and constructed character. Combining a theoretical and textual analysis with an empirical discussion of processes of democratization on the continent, it shows how the practical and political consequences of development discourse’s narrations of democracy can be the support and maintenance of authoritarian practices, and in some cases even authoritarian regimes. Emerging at the end of the Cold War, donors’ support for democracy has followed a path from an initial focus on economic liberalization, to poverty reduction, to increasing securitization. Thus, in the 1990s, the close association of democracy with economic liberalization had the paradoxical effect of contributing both to the creation and maintenance of (an imperfect) democracy and the persistence of social and political unrest, which in turn posed a continuing threat to the survival of pluralism. Despite the abandonment of structural adjustment programmes and the attention to poverty reduction in the 2000s, these tensions continue to haunt many African democracies. More recently as part of the merger of development and security, democracy has been subtly reconceptualized and incorporated into a broader security strategy, where democracy is valued for its perceived contribution to a more peaceful and stable international environment. The result is frequently a development policy that ends up privileging security and stability over democracy, despite donors’ insistence that the two are always and everywhere perfectly coterminous. Democracy, in other words, is not a definitional constant, but has its own history and is given meaning in interaction with the broader conditions of possibility of donor discourses and policies.

There are of course multiple complex reasons for democracy’s fate in Africa, and the relationship between foreign aid, democracy and authoritarianism cannot be captured in a singular narrative or explanatory frame. In arguing that the shifting conceptualization of democracy matters in explaining how foreign aid can end up supporting authoritarianism, this chapter rejects characterizations of the good governance agenda and democracy promotion as mere rhetoric, empty words or quite simply ‘spin’, but it does not suggest that development discourse is the only explanation. While democracy as a foreign policy objective is frequently trumped by national interests such as security and trade, the manner in which democracy is defined and related to other objectives and values influences how political rights and freedoms are promoted and put into practice. Particular interpretations of democracy legitimize particular political practices, while delegitimizing and marginalizing other models and possibilities. While the effects will play out differently in different settings, depending on the history and politics of specific countries, this means that engaging in debate about the meaning of democracy in development is not merely an abstract conceptual exercise, but an intrinsic part of broader global struggles over social and political power. In short, recovering the essential contestability of democracy is a political task alongside practical struggles for the widening of democratic space in Africa.

The absence and rise of democracy in donors’ development discourse

Historically, democracy has not figured prominently on donors’ development and foreign policy agendas. On the contrary, a neglect or even an outright dislike of democracy appears as one of the few invariants of development discourse and donors have traditionally interacted closely, if not always comfortably, with autocrats of variable brutality. Early political development theories and models of the 1950s and 1960s regarded democracy as the almost inevitable outcome of the relatively unproblematic transition from ‘traditional’ society to ‘modernity’. As Gabriel Almond put it, ‘in the new and modernizing nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the process of enlightenment and democratization will have their inevitable way’ (1970: 232). Such optimism, underpinned by a prevailing structural functionalism and determinism, soon gave way to a Cold War perspective that feared political freedom as a potential harbinger of Communism and upheld political order and stability as its main values (Pye, 1966; Zolberg, 1966; Pool, 1967; Huntington, 1968). In a classic statement: ‘in the Congo, in Vietnam, in the Dominican Republic, it is clear that order depends on somehow compelling newly mobilized strata to return to a measure of passivity and defeatism from which they have been aroused by the process of modernization. At least temporarily, the maintenance of order requires a lowering of newly acquired expectations and levels of political activity’ (Pool, 1967: 26).

Even as superpower rivalries faded, foreign aid retained a preference for political order and strong government, with democracy and freedom frequently seen as a luxury to be deferred until other, more pressing development problems had been solved. During the heyday of structural adjustment in the 1980s, for example, unpopular economic reforms had to be protected from the demands of an active citizenry, leaving little room for democratic participation and debate. As Depak Lal, an influential figure in the Research Department of the World Bank, put it at the time, ‘a courageous, ruthless and perhaps undemocratic government is required to ride roughshod over newly created interest groups’ (1983: 33). Foreign aid kept many reform-minded African governments in power during this period by providing them with sufficient resources to overcome (and suppress) domestic protest against adjustment, and thus simultaneously ensured the survival of authoritarianism (see Bangura, 1986; Beckman, 1992; Toye, 1992).

It took the end of the Cold War for democracy to emerge as the ‘new global zeitgeist’ (Diamond et al., 1988) and, almost overnight, democracy rose from obscurity to become the panacea for Africa’s development ills. There is thus a clear geopolitical dimension to the inclusion of democracy as a development objective. Freed from the restraints of bipolarity and intoxicated by the perceived victory of democracy and capitalism over Communism, donors were ‘free at last’ (Clough, 1992) to insist on democracy without fearing a loss of allies or the rise of the political left. The World Bank’s 1989 report ‘Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth’ marks a key turning point in this regard, although it presents the need for democracy in terms of ‘lessons learnt’ rather than geopolitics. By proclaiming that a ‘crisis of governance’ underlies the ‘litany of Africa’s development problems’, the report placed the concept of good governance at the heart of the development agenda for Africa. Defining governance in rather general terms as the ‘exercise of political power to manage a nation’s affairs’, the World Bank stressed the need not only for less, but for better government. ‘History suggests’, the Bank argued, ‘that political legitimacy and consensus are a precondition for sustainable development (World Bank, 1989: 60). Hence, the solution to Africa’s predicament was presented as greater openness and accountability, the rule of law, freedom of the press, increased grassroots participation, and legitimate, pluralistic political structures. The message of the report was unequivocal: liberal democracy was not only a human right, but also conducive to and necessary for economic growth (World Bank, 1989: 60, 192).

Where the World Bank leads, others follow. One by one, bilateral donors lined up to announce that henceforth development assistance would only be granted to countries committed to democratization. Already in February 1990, the United States announced that foreign assistance would be used to promote democracy and would favour countries pursuing ‘the interlinked and mutually reinforcing goals of political liberalization and market-oriented economic reforms’ (Clough, 1992: 57, 59). The British position was spelt out in no uncertain terms by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd in June 1990, when he announced that countries that ‘tend toward pluralism, public accountability, respect for the rule of law, human rights, market principles, should be encouraged’. Governments that ‘persist with repressive policies’, on the other hand, ‘should not expect us to support them in their folly with scarce aid resources’ (ODI, 1992: 1). A couple of weeks later in France, President Mitterrand announced to the Conference of Heads of States of Francophone Africa that he expected ‘true democracies with multi-partyism, free elections and respect for human rights’ to be established (IDS Bulletin, 1993: 7). The OECD and the European Council issued similar statements, linking continued support to democratic transition (ibid.: 8). The outcome of this newfound veneration for democracy was the birth of political aid conditionality, whereby foreign assistance was made conditional on specific reforms towards multi-party democracy.

In political theory, the meaning of democracy has been vigorously debated for more than 2,000 years. It is often classified as an essentially contested concept (Gallie, 1955–56) in the sense that any neutral definition is impossible as rival interpretations embody different and indeterminate social and political allegiances, operating within particular moral and political perspectives. Put differently, democracy is one of those concepts that ‘inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users’ (ibid.: 169). It is political, contested and open to multiple definitions. It is part of social and economic struggles for power and influence, and thus beyond consensus. Not so in development! Since its inclusion in official development documents and speeches in the early 1990s, democracy has been presented as an uncontested concept, an unquestionable ‘good’ about which there is little or no difference of opinion. In common with most mainstream literature on democratization at the time, lengthy theoretical discussions of the meaning and value of democracy are almost entirely absent from development discourse and the notion of contestability is expelled in favour of a convergence towards procedural and minimalist definitions of liberal democracy and an exclusion of more participatory models (see Abrahamsen, 2000; Kurki, 2010). More recently, the limits of focusing too much on elections have been acknowledged, giving rise to an emphasis on the quality of democracy and the extent to which citizens can participate in elections, influence decision-making and hold those in power accountable (see e.g. Klugman, 2002; Diamond, 2008; Levine and Molina, 2011). Nevertheless, as Milja Kurki observes, after more than twenty years ‘nothing fundamental has changed … in democracy promotion’ (2010: 363) and donor promoted democracy is primarily about certain key procedures, including elections, the institutionalization of the rule of law, and freedom of expression and association.

Liberal democracy in the form of elections, the rule of law and individual rights is undoubtedly valuable and worth fighting for, and it is not my intention to dismiss electoral democracy as unimportant. Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize how particular understandings and definitions of democracy, despite protestations to the contrary, can end up supporting authoritarian practices. Liberal democracy, like all models of democracy, is linked to social and political contexts and represents specific social and political positions and power relations (Held, 1987; Arblaster, 1999). The formation of development policy, as all forms of knowledge production, occurs within these social relations of power and is embedded within specific historical and political conditions and change in complex interaction with this wider socio-political environment. Thus, in order to understand how a development discourse that insists on the importance of democratization can end up supporting authoritarian practices, it is necessary to investigate in greater detail exactly how democracy is defined and how it relates to other development objectives, and to existing socio-political orders and power relations. Below, I do this by focusing first on how donor discourses conceive of the relationship between democracy and economic liberalization, and second, the relationship between democracy and international security.

Democracy and economic liberalization

When democracy emerged from the cold to become the centrepiece of development discourse in the early 1990s, it was touted as an unquestionable ‘good’ about which there could be little or no difference of opinion. The image in development documents and speeches was of a worldwide democracy movement with shared goals and aspirations, where donors and creditors joined forces wit...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: aid and authoritarianism in sub-Saharan Africa after 1990
• 1 Discourses of democracy, practices of autocracy: shifting meanings of democracy in the aid–authoritarianism nexus
• 2 Aid to Rwanda: unstoppable rock, immovable post
• 3 Authoritarianism and the securitization of development in Uganda
• 4 Ethiopia and international aid: development between high modernism and exceptional measures
• 5 Donors and the making of ‘credible’ elections in Cameroon
• 6 Foreign aid and political settlements: contrasting the Mozambican and Angolan cases
• Conclusion: democracy fatigue and the ghost of modernization theory
• About the contributors
• Index