Chapter 5 - Democratization without Illusions

The democratization process of Afghanistan started in 2001, amidst continuing battles, promised-but-not delivered economic aid and, generally, in lack of a working concept what to do with a country that needs basic security, infrastructure, livelihood and functional government. State-building and democratization paradigm were applied, only to be instrumentalized by local militant entrepreneurs, as we saw in chapter 1.

Nevertheless, the institutional achievements of state-building and of the symptomatic post-conflict elections were proclaimed successful, due to the “habit of conceiving democracy in procedural rather than substantive terms and of failing to get beyond the most tangible level of political activity in a complex transitional society to the underlying realities of power and tradition” (Carothers 2004:15). This part will describe the state-building and democratization paradigm, to find their procedural-institutional approach as another enabling condition for creation of a warlord democracy.

The rationale is as follows: the state-building paradigm is based on the imaginary arrow anarchy->state. However, neither anarchy nor full state ever existed in Afghanistan. Instead, there has been historical competition between a permanently weak state, traditional communities and, most recently, warlords. The contemporary phase, behind a formally democratic regime, is a continuation of the competition between the same actors, leading neither toward anarchy nor toward a full state, as we shall see in the following sections.

The democratization paradigm, on the other hand, is based on another imaginary arrow autocracy->democracy. Traditional oligarchy, with merely formal autocracy (royalty), and poly-centric form of ruling has historically been prevalent on Afghan territory. The democratic regime re-established another form of oligarchy, based on warlord rule.

What makes the state-building and democratization paradigms? We shall next examine the assumptions built in these concepts to show inherent mechanisms which helped the legitimization and political establishment of a warlord democracy in Afghanistan.

6.2. State-building, Nation-building and Security

Post-conflict state building and internationally managed democratization are relatively recent concepts. These two forms of international interventionism have two novel components: first, that states should be rebuilt, and not dismantled or left to their own fates; second, they should democratize. The international community, according to Ottaway and Lieven, has tried three approaches to volatile states: first, proxy-stabilization through local power-holders – abandoned through failure ; second, letting problematic countries sort out their problems themselves – abandoned because of escalating regional instability. The third, most recent approach is related to the democratic-reconstruction model. The package contains the following general agreement:

The parties involved in the conflict must reach agreement on a new permanent political system. Elections must be held as soon as possible. The new state must be multiethnic, secular, and democratic—regardless of whether this has any basis in local tradition, or whether it is what the inhabitants of the country want. While the accord is being implemented, peace and order are guaranteed by an international force, as well as by the presence of a large number of UN administrators. (Ottaway/Lieven 2002).

From this concise description, we can see the characteristics of the state-building paradigm: each aspect listed in the quotation above is oriented and limited to institutions. The aim of this paradigm is to institutionalize the political life in the country. However, it omits to perceive the overwhelming incentives for local and international actors to build manageable, weak institutions, which can be circumvented and instrumentalized.

“The state’s prime function is to provide the political good of security… Other political goods can be supplied only within a framework of security,” says Rotberg. The often advocated first item on the post-conflict agenda, security, is often overlooked due to its costliness. Security has been a key value for Afghans for decades. It seems that, historically, whoever could provide security for the population, would gain some sort of wide legitimacy. Security is on the state- and nation-building agenda.

While state-building refers to establishment of formal institutions of democratic governance, nation-building refers to a creation of a national identity in ethnically divided societies. State-building and nation-building go together in the aftermath of a civil war. Etzioni (2004:4) observes that all historical attempts of deliberate construction of a nation, controlled by external agents or public authorities, have failed or under-delivered massively, while most communities who have overcome their inter-ethnic or inter-religious conflicts have done so independently of external interference, spontaneously or in spite of the occupying force, in their own way and time.

Each element of the nation-building agenda, and therefore of the democratization process, is influenced (that is, undermined or rendered meaningless) by the lack of security. In states where no-one holds the monopoly on the use of violence, but a number of forces attempt to control it, aspects of nation-building become prey to inter-warlord games. The great hopes of constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms are not fulfilled, but are instrumentalized, practiced selectively or used as trumps in dealing with the international community.

The reality in state-less, restless and nation-less countries is one of overwhelming civic powerlessness for non-violent and economically not predominant individuals, where the only available options are to withdraw on the margins of power competitions, or to enter the networks of militant entrepreneurs. Without security, nation-building and its component democratization fail, go awry and produce non-secure, non-democratic institutions. Elections are then likely to turn into sham-exercise establishing either foreign-backed protégés or local power figures into key governmental positions. These may have incentives and the opportunity to fulfil foreign or non-democratic agendas, and are difficult to be removed from the power-positions in the subsequent years.

5.2. Democratization Paradigm

What is nowadays called “democratic regime” is thought to be the best normative model for a dynamic balance in egalitarian distribution of power, coercion, liberty, responsibility, laws, justice, rights, limitations, ruling and representation. However, the democratic enthusiasm is tamed by two facts: firstly, there is no regime today that fully practices democracy; secondly, democracy is not an ideal regime that solves all national problems. Democracy should be cautiously described as a changing system, whose best feature, to agree with Derrida (2003:114) , is a “perspective open to perfectability” - the attitude of active openness toward knowledge-based self-criticism and self-revision.

Unfortunately, precisely this feature is sometimes undermined by the very practitioners of the democratic paradigm. The very openness toward changeability and perfectability is overlooked if democratization is practiced as a mechanical duplication of procedures and institutions, in a manner in-sensified to local needs, historical and cultural complexities, and phenomena which surpass the domain of a single state. “Wrong ideas about democracy make a democracy go wrong,” warns Sartori. Correspondently, wrong ideas of “democratization” may go so awry so as to sabotage their own mission, establish clearly anti-democratic rule and help massive abuses of human rights, illicit economy and regional, or even global, insecurity.

The following sections will dismantle several wrong assumptions of the democratization paradigm: (a) the assumption that actors want either a strong state or no state to be built; (b) the assumption that elections express the free will of the voters; and (c) that a democratically elected government will attempt to build a strong state in order to lead gradually the country toward the ideal model of democracy. To counter-argue this set of assumptions, I will present here a sequence of concepts offering critical overview of aspects of “wrong” democracy and democratization; next, I will isolate mechanisms that make defective democracies achieve some sort of equilibrium of dys-functionalities, which keep them in a continual transition stage between non-democracy and democracy.

5.2.1. Electoralist democracy

Perhaps the most simplistic, popular and dangerous definition of democracy is the one equating democracy with regular holding of relatively free and fair elections. This definition has further deteriorated in international unilaterally or multilaterally organized elections, often limited to the first round of national elections, which has enabled the global community to turn a blind eye to the subsequent non-democratic rule and cease interest in deeper democracy building in the particular state.

What is so important about elections? Sartori (1987:86-87) notes that, ideally, it is precisely in the act of elections that we find the demos in governing instead of governed role. However, he critically assesses the electoral consequences: firstly, in-between elections the government can do more or less whatever without directly consulting the public opinion. Secondly, the elections hardly measure a general will or knowledge of the people: instead, they draw the heterogeneously influenced opinion of a part of the people. Although Sartori states that “free elections with unfree opinion express nothing” (Sartori 1987:102), voters can “freely” prefer autocratic, totalitarian or traditional regimes for perceived benefits they provide them (such as security, national identity, tradition, income or privilege). We saw in chapter 1 that votes can be simply bought or extorted.

I shall critically summarize what the vote expresses: the needs, the constraints and the beliefs of the voter, where the degree of freedom exercised in the act of voting is culturally, economically and militarily determined. Elections meaningfully express also the lack of choices, information and political awareness of the voters, as well as their economic and security needs, the economic and military power of the candidates, and the cultural preferences of the entire community. In a more cynical view, it can be said that elections express more the negative limitations of the voters rather than an affirmative collective choice.

5.2.2. Post-conflict Elections

In his analysis of the role that elections have played in 14 transitions from conflict to peace in the 1990s, Roland Paris shows that premature elections can create more long-term disadvantages than advantages. In the light of his study, this seems more acute in presidential systems, like Afghanistan’s, where one wins, the other players lose, some do not want to play, and many do not understand the rules. Post-conflict state building theorists, according to Ahmed (2005), agree on the sequence of establishment as: the army, the police, and the judiciary, and that only after elections can be exercised without abuse from dubious local figures.

But military campaigns are expensive, and any sort of legitimacy of a national government, as faltering as it may be, deflects aggression from the foreign intervening presence. Thus, elections are hastily performed, citizens are given the right and the opportunity to choose who will govern them, but are not the power to exercise that right freely, nor alternatives of credible and experienced candidates.

Political scientists note that elections are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for democracy. Flawed elections have been too often used to promulgate autocratic regimes hiding behind ineffectual democratic constitutions. It seems that democratic regimes are uniquely susceptible to manipulation due to their complexity (the number of opinions and values it has to evaluate, negotiate, aggregate or put aside, as opposed to the comparative simplicity of the autocratic rule). Democracy is a sensitive regime and allows for a wide range of abusive and nominal practice by opportunists, demagogues and autarchs. Elections inherit that sensitivity liable to manipulation by local and international actors, as we saw in the analysis of the Afghan Elections 2004 and 2005.

5.2.3. Between Democracy and Autocracy

Robert Dahl draws out two key criteria for measuring the presence and the absence of democracy, on the scale whose poles oppose “autocratic regimes” to “competitive polyarchies.” Sartori starts from Dahl’s terms to counterpoise democracy and autocracy – the rule of the majority versus the rule of the one: “democracy is non-autocracy,” he claims (1987:206). This negative definition is especially helpful for understanding the democratization paradigm, as it delimits the two poles of movement from autocracy into polyarchy (democracy). Obviously then, “democratization” is about movement from less to more: from more or less autocracy, toward more or less polyarchy, with many points in-between, and not all of them on the same line.

I will add: midway between autocracies and polyarchies, oligarchies, the rule of the few, can be characterized as regimes where a few individual actors enter more or less balanced power-relations with each other, enjoy some support from a community of followers, invest themselves with the power to rule and set their own limits and conditions of exercising their power.

5.2.4. Hybrid Regimes

Dahl’s typology of autocracy and competitive polyarchy moves in the modern world of ideal models – the relentlessly non-ideal present places countries in-between these two poles, whilst none fully embodies either model. In focus of political science often are explicitly contradictory states, which are nominally democratic and practically largely autocratic. The assessment of these states is typically done from the perspective of the ideal type of competitive polyarchies (democracies).

Levitsky and Way call these dysfunctional regimes “hybrid.” One type of hybrid regimes they examine, competitive authoritarianism, is especially applicable to mature warlord democracies, where (2002:52) “formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principle means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate these rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.” They can be characterized by different violations of democratic sub-regimes, in each aspect in a various degree: massive electoral fraud, abuse of state resources, restricted media access to opposition, harassment of political opposition and their supporters; journalists, opposition politicians and NGO workers may be spied on, threatened harassed, imprisoned, exiled or murdered.

Although Levitsky and Way (2002:53) opt against naming such regimes as democratic at all, they admit that incumbents usually do not openly violate democratic rules, but strive to disable, circumvent them and reduce them to a façade, which they cannot do fully. Instead of open violation, preferred means include bribery, co-optation and abuse of legal powers, such as tax authorities, judiciaries and other state agencies “to ‘legally’ harass, persecute, or extort cooperative behaviour from their critics.” This is a relatively lasting solution. Practicing such mechanisms, a state can be called democratic, can be treated as such by the international community, can continue to receive reconstruction and economic aid, and can still practice a harsh autocracy.

Hybrid regimes tend to fall into a deadlock of conflicting yet balanced powers and interests. They often maintain and profit on a blurred line between executive and legislative powers, lack of check and balance system, circumvention of parliament or judiciary, and deliberately and chronically damaged rule of law. Political processes are generally informal, political and personal power overlap. Critical periods of instability, so long as they last, are used to justify critical (and often non-democratic) decisions and practices. A formally democratic regime can function in such a way over an extended period of time, and may serve political actors to develop and consolidate their reliance on extra-legal resources. Such merely formal democracies gain short-term stability at the expense of their long-term chances for improving the degree of democratic rule in the country.

The result is a potentially stable, yet hybrid political system: a democracy with serious defects. In the long run, these defects diffuse citizens’ support for democratic norms and shake citizen’s belief in the legitimacy of the concept of democracy as a whole.

Critique of Democratization

Democratization programmes stem from understanding of democracy as political scientists try to define. One can draw a direct line from science to reality through policies, and this line in out case would go directly through the practice of internationally designed and led democratization process in post-conflict settings. Up until now, the democratization programmes have tended to be an exercise of political, predominantly institutional change, without understanding how change occurs outside institutions.

Thomas Carothers’ article “The End of the Transitional Paradigm” (Carothers 2004) claims that the basic notion of democratization stemming from this paradigm has outlived its usefulness; the failures of establishing and consolidating democracy today, according to him, are due to misleading assumptions inscribed in precisely this paradigm. He names five such assumptions: (1) movement from autocracy is necessarily movement toward democracy, (2) democratization happens in a sequence of stages (opening, breakthrough and consolidation), (3) elections equal democracy, (4) conditions (economic, social, political, institutional, etc.) are not major determinants, and (5) democratization occurs in states which do not need (and consequently democratization does not include) state-building.

The reality confronting these assumptions, according to the author, is as follows: (1) liberalization does not imply transit of the country away from autocracy, and much less toward democracy; (2) transitional countries may move backward, in their own direction neither toward democracy or autocracy, or they may stagnate for an indefinite period of time somewhere in-between, as most “third wave” democracies do ; democratic teleology is misleading; real change happens in a chaotic manner, with a lot of jerks, shifts, repetitions, in all directions at once; (3) elections are a partial democratic regime, and may serve to perpetuate a status quo, or even movement toward autocracy; (4) conditions matter; in some cases these are decisive kernels of political change or the lack of it; and (5) democratization and state building are not two sides of the same coin; moreover, democratization focused on institutional change tends to overlook the real needs of failed, collapsed or dysfunctional states. The resources needed for “starting up” a country may be devoured by the democratization process, make institutional practices (such as constitution, laws and elections) serve the interest of the power groups and enable them to obtain legal control over more power and resources.

All five points are applicable to Afghanistan: (1) political liberalization brings militant figures to legitimized power, wherefrom they expand and legally immunize their informal networks; (2) a post-modern warlord democracy is established; (3) elections were the means of achieving the previous. two points; (4) the conditions provided by the opium market and international engagement in the country helped, or even motivated, the process; (5) the institution-bound democratization paradigm unintentionally acted as an accomplice in the legitimization of the violent regime.

Notes:

Marina Ottaway and Anatol Lieven: “Rebuilding Afghanistan” (Current History, March 2002).

The warlord model, a former habitual stabilization method for a failed state, Ottaway and Lievin say, “was freely employed, for instance, by the United States during the cold war and by France as part of its neocolonial strategy in Africa. It is not ethically appealing, but it is cheap, can be effective or a time, and requires little effort on the part of international actors, who delegate the job of imposing order to local leaders.” (Ottaway/Lieven 2002:135)

Robert I. Rotberg: “Nation-State Failure: A recurring phenomenon?” NIC 2020 project (6 November 2003).

According to Tarzi, even the Taliban’s “initial popularity stemmed from their ability to stop kidnappings, rapes and assaults on civilians by warlords or gangs who exploited the lack of security provided by the central government,” and only later they lost it, by losing grip of their own allies’ torture and abuse of civilians, (Amin Tarzi: “Afghan Demonstrations Test Warlords-Turned-Administrators”. In “Analysis of Events and Trends in Afghanistan,” RFE/RL: 11, vol. 4, No. 9., March 2005).

According to Etzioni (2004:1), the primary meaning of nation-building used to be construction of some sort of government, democratic or not, but stable. Today the term is used for construction of democratic and stable governments. State-building and nation-building include three different and interrelated tasks: community-building (peaceful cohabitation of disparate ethnic groups; building a sense on national identity to unify and over-ride ethnic identities), democratization; and economic reconstruction. It also may include improvement of governance, which means rule of law, anti-corruption, democratization and freedom of the media.

The reasons for his scepticism are as follows: “over-ambitious. societal engineering seeks to overcome prevailing social forces and long-established societal structures and traditions and to generate new ones. It vainly tries to quickly undo deeply ingrained cultural and psychological predispositions, strong emotional ties and (often) religious. beliefs, as well as very powerful reward allocations by tribal chiefs of warlords, and equally quickly to substitute alien frameworks..” (Etzioni:2004:15)

“Previous international efforts to build democracy after violent conflict counsel one clear, overriding lesson: ‘It's security, stupid.’.” (Larry Diamond: “An Eyewitness to the Iraq Botch,” Los Angeles Times, 10 June 2004).

Jacques Derrida: “Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Autoimmunity – real and symbolic suicides.” Interview by Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Giovanni Sartori: “The Theory of Democracy Revisited: The contemporary debate” (Chatham House Publishers, Inc., 1987:3.

For more on Paris’ study and the UN missions in Afghanistan and in Iraq, see No Size Fits All by Salman Ahmed, in Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005.

Schmitter and Karl, while assigning crucial importance to elections, emphasize that democracy “cannot be reduced to the regular holding of elections,” (Phillipe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl: “What Democracy is… and Is Not,” Journal of Democracy, vol. 2, issue 3, 1991: 75-88).

Larry Diamond warns that “ill-timed and ill-prepared elections do not produce democracy, or even political stability, after conflict… Instead, they may only enhance the power of actors who mobilize coercion, fear, and prejudice, thereby reviving autocracy and even precipitating large-scale violent strife.” (Larry Diamond: “”Building Democracy after Conflict: Lessons from Iraq,” Journal of Democracy, vol. 16, No. 1, January 2005: 9-23).

Robert A. Dahl: “Polyarchy” (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1971).

Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way: “Elections without Democracy: The rise of competitive authoritarianism” (Journal of Democracy, vol. 7, No. 2, April 2002).

The authors opt for re-naming these regimes as “diminished authoritarianism”, instead of “diminished democracy,” although such regimes fall short of full scale authoritarianism as well.

“Authoritarian governments may coexist indefinitely with meaningful democratic institutions. As long as incumbents avoid egregious (and well-publicized) rights abuses and do not cancel or openly steal elections, the contradictions inherent in competitive authoritarianism may be manageable using bribery, co-optation, and various forms of ‘legal’ persecution, governments may limit opposition challenges without provoking massive protest or international repudiation.” (Levitsky/Way 2002:58-59).

Carothers (2004:171) summarizes: “By far the majority of third-wave countries have not achieved relatively well-functioning democracy or do not seem to be deepening or advancing whatever democratic progress they have made. In a small number of countries, initial political openings have clearly failed and authoritarian regimes have resolidified… Most of the transitional countries, however, are neither dictatorial nor clearly headed toward democracy. They have entered a political grey zone.”