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March 17, 2005
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| The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace |
Introduction
JOANNE MYERS: In November 2003, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary
of the National Endowment for
Democracy, President Bush delivered a carefully worded speech celebrating
the values of democracy. Although the subtext was to provide an acceptable
rationale for the invasion of Iraq, the overriding message of this speech was
that democracy and development go hand in hand, and that the prosperity,
vitality, and technological progress of a people are directly related to the
degree of liberty which they enjoy in their everyday lives.
In looking
back over the past two years, I am sure there are many of you in the audience
who may take issue with the manner in which our President has promoted his
vision for democracy. Nonetheless, recent research, including that of our
speakers this afternoon, has shown that the predominant theme of that November
2003 address has proven to be a good idea. That is to say, democratic
governments have shown themselves capable of doing a far better job of
generating improved standards of living and fostering social and economic
development as compared with their authoritarian counterparts.
In
reviewing forty years of hard empirical data from such divergent locales as
China and India, to Bulgaria and Belarus, our panelists will make the case that
the argument "development first/democracy later" is not only wrong, but it has
led to policies that have undermined international efforts to improve the lives
of hundreds of millions of people in the developing world. In the end, they tell
us, democracy is not the enemy of development, but rather its essential
ally.
At a time when our national leaders are extolling the virtues of
democracy abroad and foreign policy debates are invariably linked to development
issues, it is with great pleasure that I welcome our panelists, all of whom have
thought about these issues in both theoretical and practical terms, and are
prepared to present to us a new vision for our foreign policy that combines the
best of America's democratic and economic values.
Please join me in
welcoming our guests, Mort Halperin, Joseph Siegle, and Michael Weinstein. You
will find their bios attached to your guest list today.
Remarks
MORT HALPERIN: Michael, Joe, and I have developed a
vaudeville routine in which I explain why we wrote the book, Joe tells you what
we found, and then Michael offers our policy recommendations.
We worked
hard to make this very current, and so we have arranged for the President to
announce this morning that he is sending Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank. The
Washington Post ran a strange interview in which the reporter accuses of
Wolfowitz of going to the Bank with the intention of promoting democracy, and
Wolfowitz assures him that that is not true.
I was actually for him until
I read that interview. But perhaps we can persuade him that he really ought to
go to the World Bank and promote democracy, because, as you will see that is one
of the conclusions we draw.
We were driven to write this study by
noticing what seemed to be a paradox, which predates the Bush Administration,
and which has continued, notwithstanding the change in rhetoric of the Bush
Administration. That is, successive American presidents have said, particularly
since the end of the Cold War, that a major goal of American foreign policy was
to spread or enlarge or enhance democracy, and that our foreign policy was
geared to supporting those who were struggling to establish and maintain
democratic regimes.
Yet if you look at development assistance from the
United States, from the international financial institutions, and even from the
Europeans and the European Community, you find that there is no democracy
advantage. That is, democratic countries, in fact, receive less development
assistance than do non-democratic countries. You also find in the rhetoric, and
even the charters, of development agencies a belief that democracy is not their
business. They increasingly talk about good governance as one aspect of
development, but not about democracy. The people who run USAID believe that their job is
to promote development, and not democracy. That permits them to consider
good-governance issues, but not to ask the fundamental question: Is this a
democratic society that we want to support?
Indeed, the international
financial institutions have, with one exception, charters which require them not
to take account of whether a country is a democracy, or as it is referred to in
the charters, its political criteria.
Underlying this policy of
governments and international financial institutions is a belief about how
democracy relates to development. There is a widely held view that poor
countries need to delay democracy until they develop. Back when I was in
college, this was the Scandinavian view of democracy, that only Scandinavian
countries were capable of being democratic, and that you needed to have a solid
middle class before you could contemplate democracy. The argument went—as
presented in the writings of Samuel
Huntington and Seymour Martin Lipset—that if a poor country became
democratic, because of the pressures in a democracy to respond to the interests
of the people, they would borrow too much, they would spend the money in ways
that did not advance development—arguments that the current president of Mexico
is making about his possible successor. These poor decisions would mean that
development would not occur; and because people would then be disappointed, they
would return to a dictatorship.
Therefore, the prescription was, get
yourself a benign dictator—it was never quite explained how you would make sure
you had a dictator that spent the money to develop the country rather than ship
it off to a Swiss bank account—wait until that produces development, which
produces a middle class, and then, inevitably, the middle class will demand
freedom, and you will have a democratic government.
That proposition was
wrong. We discovered two views on this. One is that nobody believes that anymore
and therefore we didn't have to write the book. But this seemed to be
contradicted by the fact that policy reflected this proposition. The other view
was that the proposition was true, and therefore it was a waste of time to write
this book because if we did it honestly, we would discover that people should
wait; the arguments for it were irrefutable, and therefore this exercise was a
waste of time.
We had a hunch that it was not true. We also believed
that, for the first time, the data was available to look at this question
empirically and ask the question: Is there a democracy advantage or disadvantage
for poor countries that want to both develop and solidify their
democracy?
From our examination of the data, we came to some policy
conclusions.
JOSEPH SIEGLE: Three underlying assumptions have driven
this thesis about an authoritarian advantage and remain very prevalent today:
1) Poor countries do better under authoritarian governments in terms of
economic development, because authoritarian systems are better able to manage
and marshal the limited resources in those countries.
2) Once these countries reach some middle-income level of development, they
are in a better position to make a transition to democracy, and do so
successfully.
3) Efforts at premature democratization are highly likely to result not only
in underdevelopment, but in civil conflict. They will expose the various
fractious differences that you have in these often ethnically diverse societies
and result in political instability. I will organize my comments around
those three assumptions, and clarify a couple of our own assumptions as we went
into this.
One, our analysis focused on poor countries with per capita
incomes below $2,000 a year. We did this because there isn't any debate that
wealthier countries are better off as democracies, and that wealthy democracies
have the most sterling track record at accumulating assets and wealth over time.
The debate is, how do you get there? Should economic growth come
first?
We also tried to be as comprehensive as possible. We looked at all
poor countries, as far back as we could get data, from 1960 until the present.
We did this to avoid the anecdote focus of the debate that has largely driven
how we have been thinking about these issues for the last fifty years, where
individual cases were being held up as the model for how development should
occur.
Third, we used a very robust definition of democracy. We wanted to
go beyond the traditional litmus test of elections as being the defining
characteristic and look at what we often assume in our understanding of
democracy to be other important qualifying criteria—namely, that there are
institutions of shared power, checks on the chief executive, and institutions of
popular participation, including protections for civil liberties. We have
operationalized our definition using a couple of independent indices: one, the
Polity Index,
created by Ted Gurr at the University of Maryland; and second, Freedom House's annual
index on freedom.
With that background, let me turn to the three
assumptions and how we analyzed them empirically.
First, the notion that
authoritarian countries do better in their development. In the last forty-five
years of actual performance, there is no evidence that poor authoritarian
countries have grown any more rapidly than poor democracies. If you leave out
East Asia, you see that poor democracies have grown 50 percent more rapidly, on
average, during this period. The Baltic countries, Botswana, Costa Rica, Ghana,
and Senegal have grown more rapidly than the Angolas, the Syrias, the
Uzbekistans, and the Zimbabwes of the world. This is the case even though fully
25 percent of authoritarian countries don't report their economic information.
One of the defining characteristics of this regime type very much factors into
how we can even analyze this information. Presumably, if those countries were
included, the autocratic growth track record would be even lower.
The
records when we look at social dimensions of development—access to drinking
water, girls' literacy, health care—are even more starkly divergent. For
example, in terms of life expectancy, poor democracies typically enjoy life
expectancies that are nine years longer than poor autocracies. Opportunities of
finishing secondary school are 40 percent higher. Infant mortality rates are 25
percent lower. Agricultural yields are about 25 percent higher, on average, in
poor democracies than in poor autocracies—an important fact, given that 70
percent of the population in poor countries is often rural-based.
There
are many reasons for this, which we can talk about in the question-and-answer
period. One characteristic that seems particularly prominent is that democracies
do a far better job at avoiding catastrophes of all types. If we look at
financial catastrophes for each of the last four decades and look at the twenty
worst performers over each of those decades, we find that of eighty cases, only
five are democracies. Similarly, if you look at a 10 percent contraction in GDP
per capita on an annual basis, you find that poor democracies are half as likely
to experience this sort of acute recession as are autocracies.
We see
similar patterns with regard to humanitarian issues. Refugee crises are almost
invariably a result of the politics in authoritarian systems. If you look at the
volume of refugee flows for the last twenty years, you have to go up to the
eighty-eighth case to find a situation that wasn't an autocracy. This was Sierra
Leone in the late 1990s.
Amartya
Sen, the Nobel laureate economist, famously noted that no democracy with a
free press has experienced a major famine.
One of the immediate
assumptions made is that this is because of the populist pressures that
democracies face; therefore, they are investing much more in their health and
education sectors, leading to other macroeconomic problems. In fact, that is not
true. To our surprise, poor democracies don't spend any more on their health and
education sectors as a percentage of GDP than do poor autocracies, nor do they
get higher levels of foreign assistance. They don't run up higher levels of
budget deficits. They simply manage the resources that they have more
effectively.
So the secret of democracies' success, in many ways, is
their consistency over time. Perhaps there is no better example of this than the
United States, which, throughout its history, has rarely been the
fastest-growing country or had the fastest-growing economy in the world, but, by
averaging just over 2 percent of GDP growth a year, it has systematically
accumulated the most massive wealth base of any country in history.
Let
me move on to the second assumption, the notion that once autocratic countries
reach a middle-income range, they will make the transition to democracy. Given
the limited growth that we have seen under authoritarian systems, relatively few
authoritarian countries actually reach this middle-income range. In fact, since
1960, only sixteen autocratic countries have reached a per capita base above
$2,000 a year.
Fareed Zakaria's book argues, in a repostulation of the Lipset
and Huntington theses, that we shouldn't be pushing democracy until these
countries reach per capita incomes of $6,000 a year. If we were to do that, of
today's eighty-seven democratizers, only four would qualify as being ready. That
would exclude the Baltics, Costa Rica, Poland, South Africa, and many
others.
We are not saying that all poor democracies perform better than
all poor autocracies. Clearly, there are some exceptions. However, even among
those poor autocracies that have grown, they are no more likely to make the
transition to democracy once they have grown or once they have reached a
middle-income status than they were when they were poorer. As we look at the
exceptionality of these growers, most of which are in East Asia, we need to ask
why they are so different from other authoritarian systems and what is
distinctive about them. We should then compare them against the sixty-five to
seventy authoritarian countries that have had abysmal development track records
to keep their performance in perspective—to learn from it, but to recognize that
it represents a poor basis for a development model.
The third and final
assumption is the notion that premature democratization is a recipe for
instability. We find empirically no strong basis for this reasonable hypothesis.
What we do see, borne out in much of the conflict literature of the last fifteen
years, is that the prevailing factor that influences conflict—and today most
conflict is civil conflict—is poverty. Poor countries are more likely to be in
conflict than wealthier countries. Countries of per capita incomes below $2,000
have been in conflict, on average, one year out of five since 1980. Above $4,000
a year, it is one year in thirty-three.
When you control for that and you
look at countries that are going through political transition, you find that
democratizers are no more likely to be vulnerable to conflict than are other
poor countries. Since the end of the Cold War, they are somewhat less likely to
be conflict-prone. In sub-Saharan Africa, where most of the civil conflict has
taken place in recent years, democratizers have been half as likely to
experience civil conflict as have other poor countries in that
region.
All of this has important ramifications for international
security issues. Thirty percent of civil conflicts spill over across their
borders. Civil conflict in one country tends to reduce the per capita growth
levels among neighbors by, on average, a rate of 0.5 percent a year. This
increases the likelihood of political instability and economic turmoil. Poor
countries with weak governance structures are inherently better locations for
international terrorist organizations to set up shop and conduct their
operations.
In sum, the three core assumptions that have underpinned the
authoritarian advantage thesis over the years aren't borne out through our
empirical analysis. What we find is that the form of government that is in place
in the developing world has a huge difference on the development performance
realized, and that by holding onto these notions that we should defer democracy
until some later point, we are, in effect, perpetuating underdevelopment and
higher levels of political and sectarian conflict, as well as deferring the
point at which people can govern themselves.
MICHAEL WEINSTEIN: Our book offers seven major policy
recommendations. I would like to focus on the three most important suggestions.
1) Whether aid is bilateral, multilateral, quadrilateral, let's give it to
the democracies and democratizers, and not to poor autocracies.
Some
people will object, "How could you not help poor people who live in
Zimbabwe?"
Our answer would be the following: A poor person is a poor
person. I don't have any particular reason to want to favor one set of poor
people over another. Since the amount of aid we give to help the poor,
particularly in the United States, will not reach all the poor people in the
world, why not give money to the countries in which there is a chance that the
aid will help poor people, rather than wasting it on countries and governments
that don't have a prayer of helping their poor? I have no problem refusing aid
money to Zimbabwe, when we know the money will be wasted on a corrupt and inept
government, when we could give it to an "ept" and non-corrupt government—or at
least a democracy—and have a much higher probability that that assistance will
actually do what we want, which is help the poor. Why not favor democracy when
you have a choice?
When we get to the point where we cure all poverty in
poor democracies, then we can have a conversation about what the best policy is
toward aid for non-democracies.
2) There is a powerful argument to be
made for not having the U.S. Treasury dominating where aid policies go. So we
recommend that aid flow out of a coordination panel, where you have the
Secretary of State, the head of USAID, and the Treasury join together to make
important aid decisions. The point is to have the State Department's political
and democracy issues on a level playing field with green-eyeshade economists
counting up dollars and cents.
3) The third policy implication is
somewhat more novel. We argue that development policies have been
anti-democratic. They have trampled on the incipient groups, such as civil
groups inside poor countries, anmd run roughshod over them to force countries to
follow policies drawn up by Washington D.C., and not by the countries involved.
Democracy can be a victim in lots of silent ways. The analogy is the
environment. As anybody who walks into Economics 101 learns early on, if you
have a silent victim, it will be victimized. In this country, when we wanted to
take the environment into account, we passed a law that said that when Congress
does anything interesting, they had better do an environmental impact statement;
they had better tell the builders that they are about to trample on the
environment and by how much. Environmental impact statements became deeply
embedded into federal policymaking, and in many state and local
policies.
We advocate the same for democracy. It is so clearly connected
to growth and prosperity that we say, highlight it, so that whenever a
government like the United States, an agency like USAID, a bilateral or
multilateral organization begins to contemplate aid policy, it would issue a
democracy impact statement. Give us a good prediction of how the policy as
proposed and implemented will trample on democratic forces within the poor
countries to receive the aid.
JOANNE MYERS: Thank you very much. I
would like to open the floor to questions.
Questions and Answers
QUESTION: Would you address the question of why democracy helps
development more than authoritarian governments?
JOSEPH SIEGLE: We
synthesize our response into three major categories. The first is the notion of
shared power. In democracies, you have mechanisms of both vertical and
horizontal accountability. Horizontal accountability reins in a chief executive
who may want to pursue a radical course of policy much more than would take
place in an authoritarian system. Vertical accountability gives incentives for
any political leader to try to appeal to the median voter. You have moderating
effects through those checks and balances.
The second is the idea of
openness that is a key defining criterion of democracy as opposed to
autocracies. With more openness, you get better information that is directed
into policy decisions than you do in authoritarian systems. You must consider
unwanted information in a democratic system, where it can be more easily
excluded in authoritarian structures.
When things go wrong after a
decision is made in democracies, an alarm bell sounds more quickly than in
authoritarian structures. Political leaders are pressured to reverse or adjust
course, so that the negative effects of decisions are reined in, whereas in an
authoritarian system, these problems tend to continue for much longer, leading
to crises.
The other dimension of openness gets into a discussion about
efficiency of markets. When there is more symmetry on all sides of a market,
buyers and sellers, you usually get more efficiency, more willingness for people
to participate. That doesn't happen if people are unsure if they have all of the
facts on the table.
Openness also contributes to higher levels of
transparency and lower levels of corruption. Data show that corruption cuts
heavily into GDP growth on an annual basis.
The third point is
adaptability. Democracies not only have a self-correcting mechanism, but also
mechanisms for a systematic means of changing ineffective leadership. This
allows for a stable transition to a new policy framework that might allow for a
more effective process of addressing the problems that a country is facing, one
that is appropriate for its particular circumstances. Because of this process of
succession, you don't have the same instability in democracies that heavily cuts
into growth in other systems, either because of the political uncertainty or the
civil conflict that results.
MICHAEL WEINSTEIN: We see powerful
differences between the economic circumstances of a democracy versus a
non-democracy in that democracies don't suffer famines. This is related to the
means of shared power and the forces of resistance that can bubble up in a
democracy, but not in an autocracy. Democracies don't fall off the edge of the
cliff and hit bottom in the way autocracies do.
QUESTION: The
administration has been working with the Millennium Challenge Corporation now for several years.
How do you judge it, and where is it going?
MORTON HALPERIN: We
are big fans of the Millennium Challenge Account. In my day job, I work for the Open Society Institute running
their lobbying program in Washington. We have been lobbying hard for the
creation of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, for funding it, and are
working with the corporation to have it fulfill its intended
purposes.
Because we lobbied based on the results of this book for
changes in what the President originally sent up, the Millennium Challenge
Corporation, as it is structured, very closely follows our recommendations. It
has objective criteria for countries which are eligible, based on indices
produced outside the U.S. Government. They relate to good governance, including
democracy, to addressing the basic needs of the people, such as education and
health. These policies are all consistent with what we found to be
important.
The word in Washington is that it is getting off to a slow
start. It hasn't yet disbursed any money. If you look at the history of new
institutions and you consider all the institutionalized opposition, it is
remarkable that it is up and running at all. It has identified some countries
and begun negotiations with them. In the end, it will be a very important
institution.
We would like it to be multilateralized, for the United
States to encourage the G8 countries, the European
Union, and the World Bank to adopt similar criteria. I would like to see us
reach the point where countries qualify for all of these entities with one
single agreement, so they don't have to negotiate twelve different times. The
money would flow in, consistent with a plan that the country owns; the money
would go, as in the Millennium Challenge Corporation, to private groups and
local governments, as well as to the national government. We would also give
money, as the MCC can, to countries that almost meet the criteria, to help them
figure out how to get there.
One of the reasons why this is the right way
to go is that we want to use development assistance, even though it is very
small, to create an incentive towards democracy of the kind that the European
Union has created in Europe. The countries of Central Europe have had a powerful
incentive to democratize, because they want to get into the EU to protect
democracy or to improve their standard of living. By making democracy an
essential criterion for membership, the EU has encouraged countries, whether it
is Ukraine or now Belarus, to become democratic.
We need to offer the
same incentive to countries in the rest of the world. The way to do that is to
channel development assistance through a process like the Millennium Challenge
Account, but to channel not just the U.S. development assistance, but the
development assistance from the rest of the world, in a single, unified
way.
QUESTION: The perception remains that some democratic
countries, by their foreign policy and their geopolitical outtake of the world,
are not providing for prosperity, democracy, and stability.
My second
question is related to Latin America. A number of countries that went down the
democratic path ten years ago are today facing huge challenges of democratic
rollback because of corruption, instability, and lack of institutional strength.
Because of corruption, these democracies are not able to deliver. If you look at
the last Latinobarometer poll, where most of those polled say that,
yes, they support democracy as a form of government, the moment you ask the
question, "Are you willing to give up some of the virtues of democracy to get
food, the services you need, public security," a sizable portion of the
population is saying, "I'd rather give up that to get some
deliverables."
Did you tackle either one of these issues in the
book?
MORTON HALPERIN: I think that is a false choice. The book
demonstrates that you are much less likely to get the desired amount of
prosperity if you turn away from democracy. Yes, many democracies have not
delivered as much as people had hoped for, but the way to get what you want is
to strengthen the democracy to deal with the issues of corruption and
inequality, and not to think that if you turn away from democracy, you will do
better. The evidence is overwhelming that you will do worse.
JOSEPH
SIEGLE: We don't argue that all democracies have performed better. Some have
struggled. We do talk about Latin America because it is a fascinating, evolving
process that is at the epicenter of many of these questions. Despite all of the
rancor regarding the region, only three countries in Latin America have lower
per capita incomes today than they did in 1990. Incomes are 25 percent greater
today than they were in 1990, on average, in Latin America.
With more
open societies, people talk more often about problems, about corruption, and
about their disgust with the failings of their political leaders. It is not that
the corruption and abuses are new. There is an inverse relationship in these
early stages of transition, where you have a period of worsening perceptions,
even though the actual processes are improving. Transparency is a necessary
prerequisite.
MICHAEL WEINSTEIN: There is certainly an analogy
between Latin America and Eastern Europe, say, after 1990. Economics invariably
bites and produces less success than was promised. The result is a backlash, as
we have seen in Eastern Europe, where there has been an ebb and flow of
political orientations and expectations. Latin America is a classic case in
point.
MORTON HALPERIN: What I found most surprising is how
infrequently poor economic performance leads to the end of a democratic regime.
That occurs much less frequently than I had feared and assumed.
We have
an obligation to help countries that have taken that path to succeed in
democracy. Part of that is more assistance. Part of that is backing off the
Washington consensus of the advice we give these countries about how to develop,
which turns out to be a model that no country has ever succeeded in
following.
QUESTION: Democracy does work, mostly because people
who couldn't do their thing before can suddenly do their thing. The statistics
suggest that large amounts of aid from the World Bank and USAID go from our
government to theirs, and that somehow this creates more democracy. In fact, it
does not. It merely leaves in power or puts back in power the very people who
were running the government ten years ago, but now are called Republicans or
Democrats, or whatever the Eastern European equivalent is, instead of
Communists. The growth of these countries will not come from those
people.
Where democracy can be helpful, though, is at very low levels of
the economy. In Armenia, we were giving tiny bits of working capital to people
who were living in hovels. With that working capital, they were able to expand
very small businesses. You get a welling up of economic activity from the
depths, which can be significant, both for democracy and economic
growth.
A young man brings in television sets from the West and repairs
them in Romania and then turns around and sells them again locally, creating
hundreds of jobs. That under the Communist Party you couldn't have done that,
but under a more democratic system you can, is where the promise lies.
We
need to change the direction of aid, from giving money government to
government—to the very people who caused the problem fifteen or twenty years
ago—to giving to people at the very low level, who will be the wave of the
economic future. I would like to see a shift of aid away from the traditional
paradigm thave we have used to something which is much more related to very poor
people, who can really benefit from having a little extra money in their
pockets.
MICHAEL WEINSTEIN: There is always a danger in flopping
from one generality to another in search of systematic evidence. The literature
on development is pretty weak, about whether microenterprise or any other such
tactic can leave a deep footprint on the economy of a country. It doesn't mean
it is not true, but we certainly don't have a literature to that
effect.
A substantial part of the book talks about aid, what it should
and shouldn't go for. We provide a lot of aid that isn't really aid at all. It
is a payoff to Pakistan in the terrorism battle, for example. Let's not call
that money economic aid. Let's have it given by the Defense Department; have it
be temporary, have an exit strategy. But let's not call "aid" something that
doesn't have anything to do with economic development.
Part of the
problem that we run into in measuring the impact of aid is that we use the same
label for flows of money that have completely different goals and intentions,
and we expect completely different outcomes.
JOSEPH SIEGLE: One of
the problems and barriers to growth is when you have both the political and
economic monopolization of power in a single set of hands. This is often one of
the characteristic traits of authoritarian systems. To the extent that you can
separate economic opportunity from political authority, you will be in a better
position to develop. By channeling all of our assistance through central
governments, we tend to perpetuate the consolidation. That undercuts the
opportunities for development.
QUESTION: Faced with various shades
of democracies today, where would one draw the line in extending aid and
financial support? You mentioned some criteria that you developed as to what
connotes democracy. Would three out of five be sufficient? Would just one be
sufficient? What criteria would we develop to extend support?
JOSEPH
SIEGLE: Of the criteria we mentioned, all three of the three would be
required. We try to use a relatively robust standard. At the back of the book,
we have listings of the indices, to give you a sampling of the types of
countries that would qualify.
There are no perfect democracies. Even
among industrialized democracies, there are deficiencies. It is an ongoing
process. Countries that have established these checks and balances on power,
that have rules that protect civil society and give opportunities for popular
participation more successfully use the resources. They have demonstrated
superior economic and social development, and thus are the best bets for our
assistance.
QUESTION: Can you say a bit more about the East Asian
exception which seems to come up in almost every development/democracy debate?
Looking forward at China versus India, which one will do better? Lastly, please
don't channel aid to Pakistan through the Defense Department. That way, none of
it will go to development.
MORTON HALPERIN: The Defense Department
already has enough money. We want to get our hands on some of that money, rather
than give it more money for this purpose.
We used to be taught that the
China and India comparison shows that you need to be an autocratic government in
order to develop. What I think it actually showed is that you need sensible
policies in order to develop. India is now growing very quickly because it has
changed its economic and governance policies.
One of my favorite stories
about the impact of enhanced democracy on how development works is a story about
the Freedom of Information Act in India. An advocate for the Act came out to a
local village. He had obtained a report on how much money had been given by the
government to this village for development and what it had been spent on. A huge
crowd came out and squeezed into a structure with four walls and no roof. He
told them, first, how much money had been given. They were all astonished,
because they couldn't figure out how it had been spent. Then he said, "Let's
look at what it's been spent for. The first item was building a roof for the
school." Everybody started laughing. He looked up and asked, "Why are you all
laughing?" They said, "We're in the school right now." The money had not been
spent on the roof, but had gone into somebody's pocket.
JOSEPH
SIEGLE: It is fascinating to compare the authoritarian East Asian Tigers,
which have grown, to other authoritarians, because the distinctions are quite
stark. To list a few, the East Asian Tigers created space early on for the
private sector and free markets. This was, for the most part, distinct from
political considerations, which is typically not the case in most authoritarian
systems.
Similarly, there were relatively more checks and balances on the
chief executives in these Tigers than there are in the often neo-patrimonial
systems that you have in Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America, which has also
helped contribute to their more moderate, encompassing policies. That they
started with relatively more equitable populations also created a greater sense
of responsibility and compact between rulers and the general
populations.
Many of the Tigers had democratic origins and extensive
democratic influences. Through the British colonial structures, the institutions
of democracy were set up in Indonesia which provided mechanisms for them to
maximize governance structures for growth. Taiwan and South Korea had heavy U.S.
influences—political, military, financial—which steered their direction, both
economically and politically. Their access to U.S. markets certainly contributed
to their growth as well.
MICHAEL WEINSTEIN: What we learned in
sifting through scores of cases is that they are the exception. If you can clone
the East Asian miracle, go right ahead and do it. But when many countries have
tried, they have failed miserably. We don't need to explain every instance. We
don't have that kind of deterministic notion of predicting success or lack
thereof. We would merely note that if you go down that road, the overwhelming
probability is that you will be worse off.
QUESTION: Is it
possible for overwhelmingly Muslim societies to develop effective
democracies?
MORTON HALPERIN: Some years ago when I was in the
government, I participated in a panel discussion in preparation for the first Community of Democracies meeting
in Warsaw. Paul Wolfowitz was an NGO representative from the board of Freedom
House. Being a good government official, I read what I was given to say. In
response to this question, I said that data indicate that a majority of the
world's Muslims live in democratizing countries or in democracies.
Paul
Wolfowitz passed me a note saying, "Where did you get this from? It's clearly
wrong." I said I didn't know, that I was a government official, and I read what
I was told, but I would go back and find out. So I went back to my office, and I
said, "Paul Wolfowitz says this is wrong. Where did it come from?" They said,
"It comes from Freedom House."
I sent Paul a note saying, "It turns out
that we got this from you, so you need to check your facts, not
me."
Indonesia is doing remarkably well in its democratic tradition.
Nigeria is not doing quite so well, but compared to many African countries, it
remains more or less on the path of democracy. The Muslims in India support
democracy in no way different from the Hindus in India.
I see nothing to
suggest that Muslim culture or religion stands in the way of
democracy.
The current debate is over whether the people in the streets
of Lebanon are the same as those in the streets of Ukraine. We know, from many
anecdotes, that the people in Lebanon watched the people in Ukraine on their
television. Free Arab television was much more important in exposing them to
Ukraine than it was to events in the Middle East. The Lebanese believe that they
are doing what the people of Ukraine did, and out of the same passions and
convictions.
JOANNE MYERS: Thank you all for advancing the
argument that democracy furthers development.
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