This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education

(http://chronicle.com)

From the issue dated September 26, 2003

Lessons From Lost Democracies

By DAVID GLENN

Despite the chaos and conflict of the past eight months in

Iraq, many ordinary Iraqis share the Bush administration's

publicly stated goal: Build an authentic democracy amid the

clamorous ruin of their nation.

In doing so, the natural impulse might be to turn to the

millions of words written during the past decade by political

scientists who have analyzed the newborn democracies in South

Korea, South Africa, and the former Soviet bloc. But perhaps

the most important lessons for Iraq and other nation-building

projects may be found not in the birth of nascent democracies,

but in their collapse.

A new study of the 20th century's most disastrous "democratic

breakdowns" probes questions that seem vital to the endeavor

to build a democratic Iraq: Under what circumstances can small

bands of violent extremists destroy popular faith in

democratic institutions? When and how do militaries seize

control of the state apparatus? How do political leaders'

unwarranted fears, wishful thinking, and other perceptual

errors lead to the downfall of democracy?

In Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and

the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton University Press, this

month), Nancy Bermeo, a professor of politics at Princeton,

argues that previous scholars of democratic breakdown have

tended to place too much blame on ordinary citizens and not

enough on the mistakes and machinations of political elites.

"I really think she's hit the nail on the head," says Valerie

Bunce, a professor of government at Cornell University who

studies Eastern European regimes. "There has been a consistent

tendency to blame polarized, angry mass publics for this

stuff. But when you look at the actual process -- who's

suspending the rules of the game, and for what reasons? -- it

boils down to elites."

Ms. Bermeo's work harks back to a previous era of scholarship.

In the late 1970s, collapsed democracies were a central

preoccupation of comparative political science. Scholars were

grimly fascinated by the wave of contagion that had killed off

European democracies between the world wars. (In 1920, all but

two European countries were parliamentary democracies; 18

years later, half of those democracies had become

dictatorships.) More urgently, political scientists wanted to

understand the military coups that had snuffed out fledgling

democracies in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina between

1964 and 1976.

Two roughly harmonious theories dominated that Carter-era

scholarship. The theory of "polarization" described a vicious

circle: An economic crisis drives voters toward parties of the

extreme left or right, and low-level political violence breaks

out. In the next election cycle, still more voters choose

extremist parties, partly out of fear of the "other side's"

extremists. As centrist parties weaken and the ground for

political compromise vanishes, democracy collapses and the

state is seized by one or another extremist faction.

The theory of "bureaucratic authoritarianism" suggested that

in fledgling democracies, especially during times of economic

stress, inexperienced citizens overwhelm the government with

unrealistic demands for material goods. The government

naturally fails to provide these goods, which leads to further

political mobilization. Eventually, the citizenry grows

disenchanted with democracy itself, and state bureaucracies

develop a "coup coalition" to protect themselves from rising

public demands.

Ms. Bermeo finds both theories wanting. She studied 17 cases

of democratic collapse, from both the 1930s in Europe and the

1970s in Latin America. In each case, she carefully retraced

records of party membership, election returns, public-opinion

surveys, and political violence. Her conclusion: In almost all

instances, extremist parties did not actually capture the

loyalty of very many voters. And in almost all cases, the

great majority of the population remained committed to

democracy even during times of severe recession and popular

unrest.

The implications for democracy in the new century, argues Ms.

Bermeo, are serious. "There are a number of scholars writing

pessimistically about our capacity to foster civil society and

democracy abroad," she says. "A lot of scholars who study the

'-stans' of Central Asia are very pessimistic. But their

arguments hang on the inadequacies of current political

elites," she emphasizes. There is no reason, she says, to

conclude that the people of Central Asia are not desirous of

or culturally ready for democracy.

Polity and Patience

Whereas previous theories of democratic collapse blamed the

masses, Ms. Bermeo suggests a different interpretation. Take

the case of Uruguay, where a democratic government was toppled

by a military coup in June 1973. The coup happened after

several years of low-level political violence and the

emergence of a left-wing guerrilla movement known as the

Tupamaros. In the 1971 elections, however, there was very

little sign of mass polarization; 81 percent of the vote went

to the two major parties that had dominated Uruguay for

decades. An opinion poll taken in October 1972 found that

Uruguayans preferred "democracy, even with disorder" (79

percent) to a "military, strong, ordered" society (13

percent).

None of those facts fits neatly with the polarization or

authoritarianism models. So what did lead to the 1973 coup?

The precipitating crisis was the legislature's refusal to

strip legal immunity from a senator who had allegedly aided

and abetted the Tupamaros. Military leaders saw this is as

treasonous, and as a long-term threat to their survival; weeks

later, they seized control of the government. "Ordinary people

did not opt for dictatorship over democracy in Uruguay," Ms.

Bermeo writes. "The military toppled Uruguayan democracy. It

did so largely to protect its own institutional interests."

In Uruguay and elsewhere, Ms. Bermeo argues, the collapse of

democracy was hastened by political leaders' errors of

perception. Conservatives saw strikes and street

demonstrations -- what the author calls "public polarization"

-- as evidence of a popular shift away from the center.

Leftists similarly overestimated the popular strength of their

enemies. In many of her case studies, Ms. Bermeo says, "I

recognized a kind of blindness that panic can sow in the eyes

of politicians -- and how easily that can spread to the people

who follow the politicians."

Wishful thinking also plays a role, notes Ms. Bermeo. In

several cases, citizens did not vigorously protest military

coups because they wrongly believed that democracy would

quickly be restored. Elected officials fell prey to similar

errors. In the months before the Uruguayan coup, the

legislature's leftist faction chose not to criticize the

military in the vain hope that the army's "nationalist" and

"progressive" forces would come to the fore.

In today's Iraq, as American, Iranian, and Islamist forces all

claim to speak on the people's behalf, similar misperceptions

may arise. "That's a situation that could really lend itself

to mistaking the actions of a few for the will of the many,"

says Ms. Bermeo. "Where you really don't have solid

information about people's preferences, that's where you can

get into lethal misperceptions. Political scientists and

journalists and intellectuals really have an obligation to

collect and disseminate as much information as they can about

how ordinary people think."

Ms. Bermeo's analysis touches rarely upon overt international

interference -- say, conscious American efforts to destroy

Chile's democratic government in 1973. A new book, The

Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and

Accountability (New Press), by Peter Kornbluh of George

Washington University's National Security Archive, contains

hundreds of documents revealing American attempts to undermine

the elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende. (The

minutes of a 1970 National Security Council meeting suggest

that Henry Kissinger has a certain grasp of polarization

theory: "Mr. Kissinger, in the role of the devil's advocate,

pointed out that the CIA program was aimed at supporting

moderates. Since Allende is holding himself out as a moderate,

he asked why not support extremists.")

Ms. Bermeo concedes that external actors -- CIA agents renting

mobs or Cuban agents training guerrillas -- did play crucial

roles in certain Latin American cases. "They definitely set

the fires of the kind of elite polarization that existed in

Chile," she says.

Uncivil Society

The two cases Ms. Bermeo found of democratic collapse in which

large numbers of ordinary people did embrace extremist

politics were interwar Germany and Austria. She observes that

part of the reason lay in German voters' deep-rooted doubts

about the Weimar government's ability to contain political

violence by left- and right-wing paramilitaries. (She also

notes that dense networks of churches, unions, and fraternal

organizations in Germany and Austria allowed Nazi

anti-Semitism to spread very quickly -- a cautionary tale, she

says, for scholars who claim that "civil society" is the

guardian of democracy.)

In addition, public disorder in Germany and Austria during the

Weimar years paralyzed moderate political organizations, whose

members in some cases were frightened even to walk the

streets. "The assumption had always been that disorder is a

mobilizing force," says Ms. Bunce, of Cornell. "But that isn't

the way the story always plays out, to put it mildly."

Here, too, lies a potential lesson for Iraqi democracy, Ms.

Bermeo continues. "This is the funny thing about how badly

planned the war was," she says. "The assumption was that we'd

get rid of Saddam, and there would be this automatic

reconstitution of a functioning order." A lack of such order

not only creates a populace that is too frightened to

participate in building the structures necessary for civil

society, but leaves the field open to extremists who will

impose their own political agenda.

Among Ms. Bermeo's conclusions is that political parties need

what she calls "distancing capacity," or "the strength to

distance a party and its members from acts of violence and

lawlessness," even when the perpetrators advertise themselves

as the party's friends. When parties appear to tolerate

guerrilla violence or illegal military interference in

civilian affairs, they delegitimize the notions of order and

the rule of law. The resulting public fear, Ms. Bermeo says,

can generate "pendular mobilization" of the kind described by

polarization theorists.

"If elites in power have a means of assuring the population

and even other nonpolarized elites that the situation is under

control, that things won't get worse, that order will be

maintained, and that this threat, whether it's from the left

or the right, is not going to snowball, then a democratic

system is more likely to be sustainable," she says. "I think

people will only give up their autonomy if they fear that

other people are going to abuse their own autonomy."

"People are more democratic than they're often given credit

for," says Larry J. Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover

Institution and the co-editor of the Journal of Democracy. In

his 1988 study of the breakdown of democracy in the Nigerian

republic of the early 1960s, Mr. Diamond drew conclusions

similar to Ms. Bermeo's. "Elite manipulation and calculation

was at the root of the series of conflicts that led to the

military coup and the overthrow of democracy in Nigeria," he

says.

Mr. Diamond has been dismayed by naysayers such as the

syndicated columnist George F. Will, who cast doubt on the

feasibility of building a democracy in Iraq. "Not every

society has the prerequisites -- of institutions (political

parties, media) and manners (civility, acceptance of

pluralism) -- of a free society," Mr. Will wrote in an August

column.

Ms. Bermeo's refusal to blame the primary victims of collapsed

democracies -- the people themselves -- makes her book a

valuable addition to a now crucial debate, adds Mr. Diamond.

"At a moment when you have a very prominent new book, The

Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria," he says, "which takes a

very elitist tone in thinking about democracy, and warns quite

explicitly about the dangers of populism and the unbridled

political mobilization of the masses ... the timing of Nancy

Bermeo's book is very interesting."

Ms. Bermeo does not expect to see many new full-fledged

democratic collapses of the sort studied in her book. "What

we're getting now, more and more, are seriously flawed

democracies. There are a lot of states that are simply

partially free. So when there's trouble, when there's a

threat, they suspend some freedoms. They fix some elections.

But, in part because militaries no longer want full control,

you no longer see massive Pinochet-style coups."

Iraq's most realistic prospect may be to muddle toward a

feeble, half-free democracy. But if Iraqi democrats want to

maximize their odds of doing better, they might do well to

ponder carefully the history of democracies that failed in the

20th century.

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