World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [145]
Constitutional protection of minorities and private property require, for example, an independent (and not ethnically biased) judiciary as well as mechanisms through which the judiciary’s judgments can be reliably enforced. But these institutions are notoriously weak in non-Western countries. In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe proceeded with his popular seizures of white land in open defiance of a judicial determination that they were unconstitutional. And in Venezuela, populist President Hugo Chavez, while at the height of his popularity, oversaw the overnight enactment of a radical new constitution to support his anti-market, anti-elite agenda.
In short, while constitutional safeguards and human rights protections should of course be encouraged in developing and transitional countries, they cannot be relied on as an answer to the problem of market-dominant minorities. On the contrary, outside the West constitutional checks on majority will are often swept away by the very ethnonationalist risings they are intended to forestall.
Instead of looking for means to check or halt an already aroused hateful majority, the emphasis has to be on prevention. This means first and foremost that the process of democratization must be rethought. Throughout the non-Western world, if democracy and markets are to be peaceably sustainable, democratization cannot be reduced to shipping out ballot boxes for national elections—a process almost calculated to maximize ethnic politics in deeply divided societies. Ballot boxes brought Hitler to power in Germany, Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe, Milosevic to power in Serbia—and could well bring the likes of Osama bin Laden to power in Saudi Arabia.
Americans often forget that there are many different models of democracy, even within the Western nations. Democracy can vary along a large number of axes: for example, U.S.-style presidentialism versus U.K.-style parliamentarism; first-past-the-post electoral systems versus proportional representation; bottom-up democratization (starting with local village elections) versus top-down democratization (starting with national, presidential elections). These different versions of democracy can have significantly different effects on ethnic politics.
Finally, it has to be remembered that the democratization process occurring in the non-Western countries is nothing like the democratization process that unfolded in the West. In particular, as discussed in chapter 9, the rapidity of democratization in developing and transitional countries today contrasts sharply with the gradual extension of the suffrage in Europe and the United States. Universal suffrage emerged in the West incrementally, over many generations. By comparison, in the nations of the non-Western world, universal suffrage is being implemented on a massive scale, almost overnight. Limitations on the suffrage are not an acceptable option today. But there are other ways to slow down and stabilize the process of democratization.
China, although it does not have a market-dominant minority, is an interesting case in point. Conventional wisdom in the West has it that since 1980, China has been rapidly marketizing without democratizing. Politics professor Minxin Pei, however, questions this conventional wisdom in a recent Foreign Affairs article called, “Is China Democratizing?” According to Pei, China has pursued significant political liberalization over the last two decades. But these changes have gone largely unnoticed in the United States, because “American politicians and news media measure the progress of political reform in other countries against a single yardstick—the holding of free and open elections” at the national level.
27
China’s political reforms, however, have had far-reaching effects. Throughout China there are now semi-open local village elections,