SubscribePeace among social groups within the nation reposes upon a dual foundation: the disinclination of the members of society to break the peace and their inability to break the peace if they should be so inclined. Individuals will be unable to break the peace if overwhelming power makes an attempt to break it a hopeless undertaking. They will be disinclined to break the peace under two conditions. On the one hand, they must feel loyalties to society as a whole which surpass their loyalties to any part of it. On the other hand, they must be able to expect from society at least an approximation of justice through a modicum of satisfaction for their demands.3. There are in fact examples of successful democracies in the developing world: India and South Korea come to mind.
... Amenga-Etego noted that these institutions, while spouting the need for increasing democratization, actually undermine democracy. The World Bank demanded that Ghana remove subsidies for the rice* and poultry industries. These industries collapsed – Ghana now imports rice from the US and poultry from Poland. In response, Parliament passed a law to protect these industries. Two weeks later the IMF instructed the President that the law was unacceptable as it discriminated against a fair market. The President, without Parliamentary approval, was forced to make an announcement on radio reversing the policy. Amenga-Etego continued, “Privatization, deregulation, liberalization has not only brought poverty, it has undermined our democracy, it has undermined our dignity as human beings, eroded our sovereignty and it has made us completely, not only marginal, but very vulnerable. We feel almost as if we are not human.”
Every government has a dual quality. It is in one sense the spokesman for the nation at large. Yet at the same time it is always the representative of a single dominant political faction, or coalition of factions, within the given body politic, and thus the protagonist of the interests of that political element over and against the interests of other competing political elements in the respective country. [Its policies] therefore do not necessarily reflect only the actual desiderata of the totality of the people in question; they may also be the reflection of the internal political competition in which the respective governmental leaders are engaged.This applies to democracies as well as to autocracies.
It was only when the period of internal evolution had resulted in the settlement of 1688-9, that the new Parliamentary England, based on freedom in religion and politics, was matched under William III and Marlborough against the new type of continental autocracy personified in the all-worshipped Louis XIV, Grand Monarch of France. ... The wars against Louis [the War of the League of Augsburg, 1688-1697, and the War of the Spanish Succession, 1701-1714] may be regarded as the ordeal by battle which demonstrated the greater efficiency of the free community over the despotic state.In the period immediately after World War II, Western democracy wasn't the only model available to developing countries. The Soviet Union was regarded as a model by many countries seeking to "catch up" to the rich countries, because that's exactly what the Soviet Union appeared to have done. Later, Maoist China became a similar model.
This result greatly astonished and impressed a world that had up till that time held a diametrically opposite theory of power. Despotism, it had been thought, was the secret of efficiency; freedom was a luxury to be enjoyed by small communities like the Cantons of Switzerland and the Seven Provinces of Holland--and Holland's power after a short period of glory was waning fast before the rising might of the French King. The victory of parliamentary England over despotic France was a new fact of the first order; it was the prime cause of the intellectual movement abroad against despotism in Church and State which marked the Eighteenth Century, from the time of Montesquieu onwards. The British Navy and Marlborough, the battles of La Hogue and Blenheim, gave to Locke and the other English philosophers a vogue on the continent seldom enjoyed by English philosophy in its own right. English institutions for the first time became an example to the world, though they remained somewhat of a mystery and were very imperfectly understood.
Mozambique's cashews are grown overwhelmingly by small farmers. The great majority of the country's 19 million people live on the land; at least a quarter of them grow cashews. Until 1995 farmers were forced to sell those nuts to a state monopoly at artificially low prices; the state company then processed the nuts, employing about 10,000 workers. ...(Note that Robert Naiman disputes Krugman's example. Dani Rodrik.)
In poor countries organized urban workers (and factory owners) typically have far more political clout than much more numerous but illiterate and unorganized farmers; the result is an often extreme policy bias against the countryside. Governments frequently tax the rural poor to subsidize urban industries -- industries whose workers are very badly paid by Western standards, but nonetheless receive much higher wages than most of their compatriots. This case -- in which peasants were forced to sell their crops cheaply in order to protect the jobs of 10,000 processing workers -- fits right into the pattern.
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Read Leslie Sklair. He's known as a Marxist, but he's not nearly as lopsided about this stuff as that term would suggest.
posted by mikel at 12:43 PM on October 27, 2006