History hasn’t ended (yet)

30 years after this third wave of democratisation began, it has not only run out of steam, but its tide has receded.

I wrote recently about the tangled web of history, and suggested that the cultural dichotomy between East and West Pakistan, which was symbolised by the language movement in the East, is often asserted to be the basis for the bloody war between the two units of pre-1971 Pakistan. But a review of the East Pakistan press in the years leading up to the 1971 war shows very clearly the cause that incited serious Bengali discontent — lack of political and economic rights. Thus, the immediate issue that brought many Bengalis together in their nationalist struggle was political and economic, not cultural.

This does not mean that cultural differences played no role, but they clearly were not foremost in the minds of the Bengali public intellectuals of the time. It seems certain to me that cultural differences lay fallow underneath the more immediate political/economic grievances, but became more important as the war progressed and the Bengali victims of the violence multiplied. Ironically, cultural differences might have made more of a difference in West Pakistan. Brigadier (retd.) A R Siddiqui, the spokesperson for the Pakistani military government in 1971, published a diary in 2006 in which he recounts how Pakistan’s military leaders derided Bengalis for having ‘Hindu’ characteristics, and a language written with a Sanskrit script, their love of poetry and song, and their alleged ‘non-martial’ qualities. It seems reasonable to assume that one of the factors that led Yahya Khan and his entourage to think they could easily suppress the Bengalis of East Pakistan, and that it was okay to do so, was their perceived cultural differences from West Pakistanis.

History is replete with such ironies. The recent 25^th anniversary of Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated and controversial essay, with the pretentious title The End of History brings another, probably more cosmic, irony to mind. In the heady days of 1989, democracy (at least electoral democracy) seemed on the march — the Philippines in 1985, Pakistan in 1988, Eastern Europe in 1989, Bangladesh in 1990, the Soviet Union in 1991, South Africa and other African states threw off authoritarian regimes and embraced democracy and liberal, market-oriented economies. It was easy to conclude that democracy would continue pushing authoritarian regimes aside.

But a funny thing happened on the way to that dream. Thirty years after this third wave of democratisation began, it has not only run out of steam, but its tide has receded. The electoral democracies that emerged in the early 1990s are, for the most part now, electoral authoritarian regimes. They have some of the trappings of democracy without its essence — the full and complete accountability of government and its servants to the governed.

Those of us who celebrated the march of democracy in the 1990s forgot that sustainable democracy requires more than hope. It requires a history of strong and inclusive institutions, and a culture of openness and tolerance that promotes democratic give and take. There must be, among many other things, a judiciary and a police that defend vigorously the rule of law, a political culture that is not zero-sum, inclusive market-based economic and social institutions able to channel the weight of civil society on government, and an apolitical military.

But history has not ended yet. Electoral autocracies are not likely to stand the test of time and the democratic aspirations of billions. As Fukuyama points out, if there were better models than liberal democracy, the flood of migration to liberal democratic countries would not be so overwhelming. The only competitive model is China, which has combined rapid economic growth with authoritarian governance. But that model will be severely tested in the next few decades by the transition it must make to a consumer-oriented economy.

As I mentioned above, what brought the great majority of Bengalis to take on a powerful army from the West in 1971 was their hunger for equal political rights. Yet, that is precisely what they have lost again in the one-party government that emerged from the January election, and could lose permanently if the one-party government becomes a one-party state. Of the many countries that have regressed on the democracy/authoritarianism scale, few have regressed back to their beginning.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 8^th, 2014.

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