Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places

Introduction:

DEMOCRACY IN DANGEROUS PLACES

MY SON DANIEL, NOW AGE seven, may live to see the eradication of war. Or he might die in one. Why each of these is a realistic prospect for today’s children is the subject of this book. War, like disease, has been endemic since the dawn of man. Diseases are now being conquered: in 1977 scientific advance and public action in combination eradicated smallpox. For the first time in history, the world economy looks capable of delivering the material conditions necessary for global peace. But global prosperity also increases the risks: an interconnected world is more vulnerable to any remaining pockets of chaotic violence. Just as the eradication of smallpox depended upon harnessing science through public action, so rising prosperity must be harnessed to secure the prize of global peace.

Wars, Guns, and Votes is about power. Why focus on power? Because in the impoverished little countries at the bottom of the world economy that are home to a billion people, the predominant route to power has been violence. Political violence is both a curse in itself and an obstacle to accountable and legitimate government. It is a curse because the process of violent struggle is hugely destructive. It is an obstacle because where power rests on violence, it invites an arrogant assumption that government is there to rule rather than to serve. You only have to look at the official photographs of political leaders to get the point. In the mature democracies our political leaders smile: they are desperate to ingratiate themselves with their masters, the voters. In the societies of the bottom billion the leaders do not smile: their official portraits stare down from every public building, every schoolroom, with a menacing grimace. They are the masters now that thankfully the colonialists have gone. Wars, Guns, and Votes investigates why political violence is endemic in the bottom billion and what can be done to curtail it.

Since the end of the Cold War two extraordinary changes have occurred, each of which may be opportunities for a decisive shift away from political violence. Both were consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union.

Elections spread across the bottom billion. The image of the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe inspired pressure for political change around the developing world. In the early 1990s national conventions sprang up around West Africa. By 1998 Nigeria, Africa’s largest society, sprang out of military dictatorship. Just as around the first millennium the leaders of Europe’s petty states had suddenly all converted to Christianity to get in step with the times, so around the second millennium the leaders of the petty states of the bottom billion all converted to elections. Prior to the end of the Cold War most leaders of the bottom billion had come to power through violence: success in armed struggle or a coup d’état. Now most are in power through winning elections. Elections are the institutional technology of democracy. They have the potential to make governments both more accountable and more legitimate. Elections should sound the death knell to political violence.

The other encouraging change is an outbreak of peace. For the thirty years prior to the end of the Cold War, violent conflicts were breaking out more rapidly than they were ending, so that there was a gradual proliferation of civil wars. Once started, civil war proved highly persistent: a civil war typically lasted more than ten times as long as an international war. But then, one after another of the ghastly and persistent civil wars came to an end. The war in Southern Sudan was closed by a peace settlement. The war in Burundi was similarly coaxed into a negotiated peace. The war in Sierra Leone was ended by international peacekeepers. The end of the Cold War unblocked the international community to exert itself against the continued struggle for power by means of violence.

The wave of peace settlements reinforced the wave of elections and promised a brave new world: an end to the pursuit of power through violence. How can we tell how these changes will play out? Can we do more than speculate? I think we can. Although the coincidence of these shocks is unprecedented, each can be analyzed based on how they have played out in the past. There have been previous experiences of electoral competition in the bottom billion. There have been many post-conflict situations. This book uses those experiences to analyze history in the making. As you read Wars, Guns, and Votes you may be struck by how fast the research frontier is moving. I get that sense morning by morning as I walk to work wondering whether, during the previous evening, Pedro, or Anke, or Dominic, or Lisa, or Benedikt, or Marguerite has cracked whatever problem we had crashed into by the time I left for home. I hope you get a sense of it too.

Political violence is one variant of the struggle for power. We now see it as illegitimate: might does not make right. In the high-income societies over the past century we have internalized the principles of democracy, and gradually we have come to regard them as universal. Ballots, not bullets, should pave the route to power. Since the end of the Cold War the high-income democracies have taken a further step: from merely regarding these standards as universal to actively promoting them. Despite the tensions over Iraq about whether active promotion should go all the way to enforced regime change or stop short at nonviolent encouragement and inducements, the international community is agreed on the goal. And it has largely succeeded: in the brief period of less than two decades democracy has spread across the low-income world. So what have been the consequences for peace?

The good news is that the world has been getting safer. In fact, despite the catastrophic period of the world wars, it has unsteadily but gradually been getting safer ever since humanity started. Contrary to all those images of the noble savage, early societies were murderous. There never was a peaceful Eden from which we have fallen: peace is something that has gradually been built, millennium by millennium, century by century, and decade by decade. The need for security from political violence has always been fundamental to human society. The great archaeological legacies of antiquity, such as the Great Wall of China and the massive barrier constructed across Jutland by the ancient Jutes against the Germanic tribes, stand as an enduring testimony to the overwhelming priority afforded to collective defense. This priority continued until very recently: for forty years the richest society on earth, America, devoted up to 9 percent of its national income to defense spending to meet the security threat from the Soviet Union.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union an era is over. Despite appearances, the last decade has been rather peaceful. The measure used in this grim academic niche is battle-related deaths. The Armed Conflict Data Set keeps a running tally both of the really large conflicts, those that cause at least a thousand such deaths during a year, and of the smaller ones that nevertheless caused more than twenty-five deaths. Here is what happened according to these measures.

Back during the time of late colonialism—1946 to 1959—the number of wars was running at around four a year and the minor conflicts at around eleven. From decolonization to the end of the Cold War in 1991 there was a pretty remorseless escalation. By 1991 there were an astonishing seventeen wars and thirty-five minor conflicts in various parts of the world running at the same time. If violence had continued to spread at that rate, by now we would be facing a nightmare. Instead, 1991 turned out to be a peak. The world is not as peaceful as during late colonialism but we are down to five ongoing wars and twenty-seven minor conflicts. So this break in trend looks to be consistent with the triumph of democracy: where people have recourse to the ballot they do not resort to the gun.

I have come to regard this comforting belief as an illusion. Our approach to political violence has been based on the denial of reality. In consequence there is a brave new world of electoral competition in ethnically divided societies, some of which have just emerged from years of civil war. From 1991 onward the visible trappings of democracy became increasingly fashionable. A president who had not been elected began to look and presumably to feel like the odd one out. It went beyond fashion: many donors began to skew their aid away from unelected governments. And so incumbent presidents braced themselves and decided to face the voters, sometimes emboldened by the knowledge that their people loved them. Sometimes the voters did not do the decent thing.

In the face of voter ingratitude presidents gradually learned how to adapt to the new circumstances. One or two got caught out before they could win. The first was the decent autocrat Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, who staged an election and lost resoundingly in 1991. At the time of writing, the most recent elections in a society of the bottom billion were those in Kenya, in December 2007. Shortly there will be an election in Zimbabwe. In the years following the defeat of Kaunda, incumbent presidents learned how to win. The Kenyan elections were won by the incumbent, President Kibaki. But within Kenya this was not hailed as a triumph of democracy. Koki Muli, the head of Kenya’s Institute for Education in Democracy, had offered the following description: It is a coup d’état.* As for the elections in Zimbabwe, you have the advantage over me since you know the result. I had no idea who would win the American election of 2008, but I had a pretty clear idea about the outcome of the Zimbabwean elections: I confidently expected that President Mugabe would be reelected. Presidents have discovered a whole armory of technology that enables them to retain power despite the need to hold elections. These elections play out in the context of weak checks and balances, ethnic divisions, and post-conflict tensions.

The triumph of the post–Cold War international community, settlements of the accumulated civil wars of the post-colonial era, is at the same time an alarming point of fragility. Post-conflict situations are dangerous. Historically, many of them have reverted to violence within the first decade. Increasingly since the 1990s, the healing balm for post-conflict tensions and hatreds upon which the international community has relied, and indeed insisted, has been an election. After all, an election should confer legitimacy upon the victor, and the need to secure votes should ensure that the victor has reached out to be inclusive. That comforting strategy has been based upon the denial of an increasingly evident reality.

If the problem of political violence is going to be addressed, we have to understand why small and impoverished countries are so dangerous. To face the reality of political violence we need to understand its technologies: guns, wars, and coups. I know that guns don’t kill people: people kill people. A government can conduct a very effective pogrom without any guns at all. The slaughter in Rwanda was done with machetes. But in a violent struggle between organized groups, the one with more guns will tend to win: guns do make violence a whole lot easier. And so I start with guns: both their supply and their demand turn out to be bizarre stories. There is an illicit trade in Kalashnikovs that furnishes supplies, and arms races in Lilliput that drive demand.

War has not yet passed into history, but it now happens elsewhere. Rich countries no longer fight each other, and they no longer fight themselves. Among the middle-income countries war has virtually disappeared. Even the big poor countries are now pretty safe: China and India have massive armies, but they haven’t used them against each other for more than forty years. The world may not hold the line on nuclear proliferation: from time to time more middle-size powers may wish to posture on the world stage by acquiring nuclear capabilities. But over the past sixty years the first use of nuclear weapons has built up into a formidable taboo that I cannot see any state breaking.

With the arrival of peace among the more powerful countries, the scale of warfare has diminished: we now have small wars in small countries. Usually the violence is internal: the country tears itself apart while the rest of the world watches. Sometimes the violence draws others in, mostly the neighbors, and sometimes the local regional power. Occasionally the international powers intervene: to prevent internal mayhem, as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; to expel an invader, as in Iraq 1; or to force regime change, as in Iraq 2. The uncomfortable fact is that a large group of impoverished little countries remain structurally dangerous. Wars in the bottom billion are nasty, brutish, and long. They are civil wars; their victims are mostly civilians and they last more than ten times as long as international wars. Although the incidence of civil war has dropped, this is because of a wave of peace settlements: there is still the same momentum for new conflicts to start. Quite aside from the conflicts that were not settled, in 2004 four new wars started up. The following year looked a little better, just one new war. But this was not a peaceful year: there were eight new minor conflicts. Wars were back in business in 2006 with three new ones.

Political violence does not have to take the form of warfare with its attendant battle-related deaths to achieve its goal of attaining power. Indeed, the most common and effective form of political violence often succeeds without any deaths at all: it is the surgical strike in the form of a coup d’état. The military, whose purpose is to defend citizens from organized violence, is sometimes in a splendid position to perpetrate it. Globally since 1945 there have been some 357 successful military coups. And for each successful coup there are a lot of failures. For Africa, the one region for which there is a comprehensive tally, in addition to the 82 successful coups there were 109 attempted coups that failed and 145 coup plots that got nipped in the bud before they could even be attempted. That is around seven planned surgical strikes for the average country. In many societies presidents are more likely to lose power to their army than through any other route.

Guns, wars, and coups have been the reality of the bottom billion. They have destroyed societies that were confidently expected to develop. The meltdown of Cote d’Ivoire, once the most celebrated society in Africa, shows all three of these technologies in ruinous action over the course of a decade.

Does it matter if political violence in its various manifestations continues to be the predominant route to power? Perhaps the whole notion of exporting our democratic values to these societies was merely a comfortable delusion and they are better left as they were? Of course it matters.

For one thing our democratic values are universal. Governments are not there to command their citizens: they are there to serve them. The journey from citizen servitude to government servitude has been a long one in our own societies. It will probably be a long one in the societies of the bottom billion. We have most surely underestimated the degree of difficulty and promoted the wrong features of democracy: the façade rather than the essential infrastructure. I will argue that in situations in which it is not feasible to build the infrastructure, creating the façade is likely to frustrate democratic accountability rather than fast-track it.

It matters because in the divided societies of the bottom billion, when political power is won through violence, the results are usually awful. The political strongman in a divided society is seldom a visionary leader; he is more likely to be self-serving, or in thrall to the interests of a narrow support group. Visionary leadership is important, but its role is to turn states into nations. The fundamental mistake of our approach to state building has been to forget that well-functioning states are built not just on shared interests but on shared identity. Shared identity does not grow out of the soil; it is politically constructed. It is the task of political leadership to forge it.

It matters because the process of violent struggle for power is hugely costly. Wars and coups are not tea parties: they are development in reverse. Wars may now be small in the sense of few battle-related deaths, but the increasing involvement of civilians, and indeed the blurring of the distinction between civilians and combatants, implies that even small wars can have highly adverse consequences. Political violence is not just a curse for the societies in which it occurs; it is an international public bad. Most particularly, it damages the neighbors, something that has profound implications for sovereignty.

The overarching problem of the bottom billion is that the typical society is at the same time both too large and too small. It is too large in the sense that it is too diverse for cooperation to produce public goods. It is too small in the sense that it cannot reap the scale economies of the key public good, security. But the only point of understanding the nature of the problems is that it helps in the search for effective solutions. If the problem is that societies are too large to have an inherited sense of common identity, state building is not, fundamentally, about institutions, which is the fashionable nostrum. There is a prior essential stage of nation building that takes more visionary leadership than has been forthcoming in most of these societies.

If the problem is that societies are too small to supply key public goods, then it is pointless to place national sovereignty on a pedestal. Given the structural deficiencies in their states, the citizens of the bottom billion have little choice but to have recourse to the international supply of essential public goods. To some extent they can do this by pooling their sovereignty, something that to date they have singularly failed to do. But that failure is itself symptomatic: much of the supply of the international public goods that the bottom billion need is going to have to come from the countries that already know how to cooperate to supply such goods: the high-income countries. Yet the indignant defense of sovereignty by the governments of the bottom billion, combined with the pusillanimity and indifference of leaders in high-income countries, radically constrains what international action can realistically achieve. The core proposal of this book is a strategy whereby a small intervention from the international community can harness the political violence internal to the societies of the bottom billion. This powerful force that to date has been so destructive can be turned to advantage, becoming the defender of democracy rather than its antithesis.

To harness the political violence inherent in the societies of the bottom billion as a force for good, we will need a very limited use of international force. After Iraq, international peacekeeping provided by the forces of the high-income countries is unpopular, both with voters in the high-income world and with alarmed governments of the bottom billion. But military intervention, properly constrained, has an essential role, providing both the security and the accountability of government to citizens that are essential for development.

I am aware that I walk a tightrope. Those who regard the societies of the bottom billion as an irredeemable quagmire will be predisposed to regard the proposals in this book as costly idealism. Those who regard these societies as the victims of neo-imperialism will be predisposed to regard the proposals as imperialism in disguise. Above all, those who regard internal political violence in any form as illegitimate will be predisposed to regard the proposal for harnessing it as breaching a fundamental tenet. But the proposals in this book are not costly idealism: they are grounded in analysis and evidence. Nor are they a backdoor form of imperialism. Citizens of the bottom billion have the same rights as the rest of us, including a legitimate aspiration to nationhood. Nor do they undermine the tenets of democracy. My message is that the aspirations to nationality and democracy cannot be achieved by the path currently being taken: fake democracy protected by the sanctity of sovereignty is a cul-de-sac. Just as the high-income world should provide a vaccine against malaria for the citizens of the bottom billion, so it should provide them with security and accountability of government. All three are public goods that will otherwise be chronically undersupplied. Only once they are properly supplied can the societies of the bottom billion achieve their aspirations to genuine sovereignty.

The defeat of political violence is where our illusions are most inextricably bound up with our hopes and our strategies. And it is where our errors, grounded in those illusions, are proving most costly. Each of the changes I analyze is potentially hugely hopeful. But it turns out that each is a two-edged sword. They might well trigger processes that substantially increase violence. But it is not simply a story of things might go wrong. Within the limits imposed by modern research methods, I think I can show what will determine whether democracy is going to be transformative or destructive. More alarmingly, to date democracy in the societies of the bottom billion has increased political violence instead of reducing it. But my message is not meant to denigrate the efforts of brave people who have struggled for their democratic rights: I am not an apologist for dictatorship. Only by moving on from illusion can we work out what practical measures could harness the undoubted potential of democracy as a force for good.

Part I

DENYING REALITY: DEMOCRAZY

Chapter 1

VOTES AND VIOLENCE

OUR TIMES HAVE SEEN A great political sea change: the spread of democracy to the bottom billion. But is it democracy? The bottom billion certainly got elections. They were heavily promoted by American and European pressure, and, as the most visible feature of democracy, they were treated as its defining characteristic. Yet a proper democracy does not merely have competitive elections; it also has rules for the conduct of those elections: cheating gets punished. A proper democracy also has checks and balances that limit the power of a government once elected: it cannot crush the defeated. The great political sea change may superficially have looked like the spread of democracy, but it was actually the spread of elections. If there are no limits on the power of the winner, the election becomes a matter of life and death. If this life-and-death struggle is not itself subject to rules of conduct, the contestants are driven to extremes. The result is not democracy: I think of it as democrazy.

The political system that preceded democrazy was personal dictatorship. Usually it did not have even the veneer of an ideology. Personal rule reached its apogee in President Mobutu of Zaire, whose extraordinary system of government is depicted in Michela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz. Personal rule meant ethnic favoritism and the erosion of the institutions of the state. Mobutu’s power came to rest on greed and fear: his patronage might reward loyalty with unseemly wealth,