The Future of Populist Politics

Colorado College's 125th Anniversary Symposium
Cultures in the 21st Century: Conflicts and Convergences

Delivered at Colorado College on February 6, 1999 at 12:00 PM
in a discussion forum with the same title.

by

Robert Kaplan

It’s a great honor to be here and especially to listen to some of the seminars. The one this morning with Ken Minogue and Dani Rodrik was truly brilliant, and I hope I can live up to that.

If I was talking to you one hundred years ago in this place, and I was on the speaking circuit, I would be like most public speakers of the time in the late 1890s, very optimistic about the future of democracy, politics, the world. And that is because three words were not in general usage at the time. In fact, I don’t think these three words existed in any dictionary at the time. They are totalitarianism, fascism, and inflation. In other words, we may not even have names yet for the evils and the troubles that may confront us in the twenty-first century. And these three words basically came about because of the way populist politics chain-reacted with the industrial revolution to create the real cataclysms of the twentieth century.

Therefore, I think that the real question we all have to ask ourselves is, because, in the twentieth century, democratization throughout Europe and the culmination of the industrial revolution led indirectly to Nazism and to Fascism, how does democratization throughout the world now chain-react with the post-industrial revolution? What kind of new disease variance will that lead to? What kind of troubles will that lead to, what kind of opportunities? Because I am very worried about the future of populist politics, I don’t think democracy is necessarily good. I repeat that I don’t think democracy is necessarily good. I think democracy, like technology, is value neutral. It all depends on the circumstances in which it is applied. It is a magnifier of both good and evil. Hitler and Mussolini both came to power in democratic circumstances.

I’m going to divide this up into two parts. I’m going to talk a bit about democracy, a bit about technology and put them together and give you a bunch of case studies around the world.

It’s my experience as a foreign correspondent that democracy works best when it is instituted last as the capstone after a whole bunch of other social and economic developments. When there are already institutions manned by literate bureaucrats; when there are already borders that are more or less agreed upon; when there is more or less agreement about the big issues [such as] which ethnic group, if any, controls what territory; when there is already a middle class that pays its taxes. Then, when democracy is instituted, as in Taiwan, Chile, and other places, it has really deep meaning and leads to a betterment of society. Unfortunately, throughout the world now, elections are being held under Wiemar conditions—in places where you have inflation rates, unemployment rates, weak institutional situations that are worse than in Germany in the 1920s, Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 1930s. So we have to think, what is this going to lead to, what kind of problems?

Some examples. The wars of the Yugoslav succession…are basically about an authoritarian system collapsing and people getting democratic rights in the various republics. A number of the war criminals came to power through democratic circumstances, and a number of others have been legitimized in power through free and fair elections. Rwanda, 1992, occurred partly as a result of a democratization process whereby political parties were formed, and, because there was no class system because there was no economy, people could only divide up according to ethnic and regional groups. Political parties thus institutionalized already existing ethnic divisions and made those divisions even more lethal than they were. Algeria held an election in 1992, and that chain-reacted with a bunch of other circumstances that led to the ongoing civil war and anarchy there now. Tunisia, on the other hand next door, has decided to hold only fixed elections where the leader makes sure he gets ninety-nine percent of the votes—and Tunisia is an emerging middle class society at peace.

Again, with all these examples, I’m not trying to disparage democracy so much as I’m trying to show that the world is a much more complicated place than people think. We have to look at each place on its own, and not every place is going to be better served by pushing elections on it overnight. As a journalist, I covered the first free and fair elections in Sudan’s post-colonial history in 1985. The foreign communities, all the international experts cheered on free and fair elections, and everything was monitored. Within a year, the system collapsed into the most brutal military tyranny in Sudan’s post-colonial history. Why? Eleven percent of Sudanese women could read; the literacy rate over the whole country was twenty-two percent; no institutions whatsoever; [the] ethnic and religious divide between north and south; and on and on it goes. Venezuela, [with] forty years of democracy, [has] very little to show for it—the elite has most of its money in Miami bank accounts. Azerbaijan. There’s a cliché that democracies don’t go to war. Democracies that are middle class and have strong institutions don’t go to war. Armenia and Azerbaijan democratized in the early 1990s, and that led to a war in which 20,000 people were killed and 250,000 people were made refugees.

The most troubling examples are China and Russia. Chinese autocracy has led to more personal freedoms and a more dramatic rise in material conditions in the last fifteen years for more people, more dramatically, in a quicker time span than any time in recorded economic history, I believe. Russian democracy has led to the collapse of the country. Russia’s inflation rates throughout the 1980s were very, very high; China’s were very, very low. On and on it goes in terms of what the average Chinese has compared to fifteen years ago, compared to what the average Russian has compared to fifteen years ago. Homosexuals in China can live together; people can buy videos, open bank accounts, travel across the country without internal travel permits; unmarried couples can live together—these are personal freedoms, not political freedoms. Economic growth delivers personal freedoms; democracy only delivers political freedoms, often.

In fact, the real issue about civil society in the 21st century is the middle class. Places that have large and competent middle classes are nice or decent places to live. In places that don’t have middle classes, even if they’ve had five elections, tomorrow is unpredictable. So the real question is, how do you enlarge the middle class? Well, most often in history, I’d be willing to argue, middle classes are created by authoritarian regimes. And once those middle classes are enlarged enough so that they have self-confidence—and are [powerful] enough—they throw out the very authoritarians who created them. And that’s how you get real, meaningful democracy. Authoritarianism creates middle classes, and the middle classes throw out the authoritarians. The problem, though, in our world, is that ninety to ninety-five percent of all human births are occurring among the poorest sectors of society or in the poorest countries. So increasing the middle class, in relative terms, is very problematic. India is not an exception to this. India may have 80, 120, 200 million members of the middle class, depending upon how you may want to define middle class, but there are nine hundred million Indians or so. India is not a middle class country.

So, what is the future? I don’t see military regimes succeeding. I think they have been discredited. What I see coming about are hybrid regimes, what Thucydides and Polybius wrote about and what classical and modern philosophers often considered under different words: mixed regimes that combine various elements of democracy and authoritarianism in a sort of social compromise.

Let me give you a few examples. I go to Turkey about once, twice a year. Turkey is a fascinating example of an official democracy but an unofficially mixed regime, whereby the really important governing unit is the National Security Council. Turkish friends of mine say, "The generals come with thick dossiers with which to lecture, and the politicians or parliamentarians come as tourists in order to listen." Turkey has had a succession of weak, minority, parliamentary governments, which has necessitated the military to move into the vacuum. I am very troubled and worried about the increasing militarization of Turkish politics. I like the balance the way it is—or the way it was a few years ago. If the military gets a bit too much more power than it has now, I’ll be very worried. And if the next election produces another weak, minority government, there could even be another coup in Turkey. But at present, the Turkish hybrid regime, where the parliament circles the military and the military circles the parliament, will probably be more long lasting than the suffocating dictatorships in the Arab world next door or what I call the "paper democracies" in Russia and much of the developing world.

Peru is another mixed regime. Fujimori was elected twice democratically but basically runs the country through the security services. Jordan, in the news now tragically, has been a very well functioning mixed regime with a very feisty, active parliament where the King moves in every once in a while on a major issue and totally abrogates what the parliament has done. The Jordanian parliament wanted to overturn the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, to abrogate it totally—the King did not allow it. That’s the positive benefit of a mixed regime. Bulgaria is a bad kind of mixed regime. It’s officially a democracy, holds elections, and the IMF loves it a lot, but half the power is really in the hands of a few criminal groupings that have links to Russian mafias. In terms of what actually goes on in the daily lives of Bulgarians, these criminal groupings have as much power as the parliament. So there is kind of a standoff between the official, democratically elected government and the unofficial, criminal government, and they each circle each other. It’s unclear which is going to win. Pakistan is officially a democracy, but order is really kept by the Inter-services Intelligence Agency, which is like the CIA with five divisions behind it.

What I’m saying is, don’t go by the label, because every place will call itself a democracy. Go by how the system actually works behind the scenes. How do power relationships really work in various countries?

I guess the most troubling prospect is the Middle East. Because the Middle East is economically stagnant, in most countries half the population is fourteen years old or younger. I think the future Middle East is going to see a lot of messy, Mexico-style scenarios that will be much worse than Mexico because you have a bunch of leaders—old, one man rulers; "thugocracies," I call them. And that’s going to change. We like to think that a lot has happened in the Middle East in the last forty years because we happened to have been alive during that period. But, in fact, very little has happened in the Middle East. Although you’ve had enormous cultural and economic change, you’ve had tremendous movement from countryside to cities. Countries like Iran, Algeria, and Egypt are all now big, urbanized societies, and the political systems in most countries are totally unchanged compared to the 1950s. Egypt is still run under the same military emergency laws as 1952. And history shows that, when you have tremendous cultural and economic change, political change often catches up, and it catches up very rudely. Right now we’re in a very nice situation—we promulgate democracy, but we rely on autocrats in order to keep stability and order in civil society. [If] we have a problem with Egypt, we deal with one man, Hosni Mubarak—the same with other countries. But, in the future, because you can’t hold back social and economic change, there will be democratization, and we may have forty or fifty corrupt generals and politicians with which to deal in each of these countries. The simple bipolar Arab-Israeli era may actually look like a romantic, sepia-tone period compared to the real complexities of a Middle East where you’re going to have many places in which the populations are far, far too sophisticated for one-man, centralized control but are still not developed to the point where the institutions are there for stable democracies. So you are going to have many, messy, in-between, hybrid scenarios where it is going to be very hard to affect real dialogue and change.

Now, on the issue of technology, this is important for populist politics because the industrial revolution is not like the post-industrial revolution. Hitler’s death camps and Stalin’s terror famine could not have occurred except against the backdrop of the industrial revolution. They required telegraphy, railway lines, big armies, things like that. In other words, the industrial revolution was about bigness—and it brought big evils—but the post-industrial revolution is about smallness, miniaturization, the defeat of geography—and I think it’s going to lead to a lot more subtle evils. We like to think that the computer is helping populist politics by letting people communicate with each other. If I gave all of you a microphone and said, "Speak at the same time," would we be communicating better? That’s what the Internet is like in many ways. People had the same optimistic assumptions after the Gutenberg Bible, and that led to the religious wars a hundred years later. The reason is because, when knowledge becomes easier and cheaper to spread out, to divulge, knowledge becomes vulgarized. [That is not] because it comes into the hands of uneducated people who are not dangerous or well-educated people who are not dangerous but [because it comes] to badly educated people who are always dangerous. If you look at the worst tyrants of history, they’ve always been badly or half-educated people—Hitler, Stalin, etc.

So, let’s put all this together as I sum up. You’ve got knowledge spreading everywhere, you’ve got countries where half the population is under fourteen, you have increasing water shortages and environmental shortages in many place, but yet democratization is unstoppable because of social and economic change. Groups want to be empowered; they won’t put up with these one-man, 1950s-style military regimes anymore. So a lot of these places, the Chinese regime for example, are sitting on top of a volcano, and I’m not sure that this volcano is going to spew out good things.

Everyone talks about the twenty-first century being a century of human rights, personal freedoms. I think the real preeminent philosopher of the twenty-first century is going to be Thomas Hobbes. In Chapter 15 of Leviathan, he made a very stirring statement when he said, "Before just and unjust can have their place, there must be some coercive power." What he addressed was the whole struggle for order. As Ken Minogue said this morning, "As more and more people become free, become empowered, their interests conflict with each other." We’re going to see more and more conflict because more and more people are going to have the means to express themselves politically, and systems will break down. Therefore, I think the first part of the next century will be about how to arrange new systems of order because, if there is no order, then there is no justice for anyone.

Thank you very much.

© 1999 by Robert Kaplan