Developing Cultures: Case Studies

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Developing Cultures

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Also Available: Developing Cultures: Essays on Cultural Change edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Jerome Kagan

Culture Matters Research Project Advisory Board Morris Altman

Tamar Jacoby

University of Saskatchewan

Manhattan Institute

Stephen Bosworth

Timur Kuran

The Fletcher School, Tufts University

University of Southern California

Harold Caballeros

Roderick MacFarquhar

El Shaddai Church, Guatemala

Harvard University

Houchang Chehabi

Harvey Nelsen

Boston University

University of South Florida

Kent R. Hill

Lucian Pye

U.S. Agency for International Development Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Robert Hodam

Robert Rotberg

International Center for Economic Growth Harvard University

Ronald Inglehart

John Sanbrailo

University of Michigan

Pan-American Development Foundation

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Developing Cultures Case Studies

E d i t e d

b y

Lawrence E. Harrison and Peter L. Berger

New York London

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RT52808_RT52794_Discl.fm Page 1 Tuesday, November 15, 2005 2:33 PM

Published in 2006 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Published in Great Britain by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2006 by Lawrence E. Harrison and Peter Berger Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-95279-4 (Hardcover) 0-415-95280-8 (Softcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-95279-8 (Hardcover) 978-0-415-95280-4 (Softcover) Library of Congress Card Number 2005014232 No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Developing cultures : case studies / edited by Lawrence Harrison and Peter Berger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-95279-4 (hb : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-415-95280-8 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Progress--Case studies. 2. Social change--Case studies. 3. Acculturation--Case studies. 4. Cultural lag--Case studies. 5. Economic development--Case studies. 6. Social values--Case studies. 7. Developing countries--Case studies. I. Harrison, Lawrence E. II. Berger, Peter L. HM891.D47 2005 306'.09172'4--dc22

2005014232

Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com Taylor & Francis Group is the Academic Division of Informa plc.

and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge-ny.com

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Lawrence E. Harrison

xi

Some Reflections on Culture and Development Peter L. Berger

xvii

Part I Africa 1

Explaining Botswana’s Success Stephen R. Lewis, Jr.

3

2

Culture and Development: Questions from South Africa Ann Bernstein

23

3

The Culture of Development in a Southwestern Nigerian Town Elisha P. Renne

43

Part II Confucian Countries 4

China’s Cultural Renaissance Tu Weiming

65

5

Japanese Culture and Postwar Economic Growth Yoshihara Kunio

83

6

Values and Development in Singapore Chua Beng-Huat

101

v

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7

Contents

Market Development, Political Change, and Taiwanese Cultures Robert P. Weller

119

Part III India 8

India: How a Rich Nation Became Poor and Will Be Rich Again Gurcharan Das

141

Part IV Islam 9

Egypt as a Model of Development for the World of Islam Bassam Tibi

163

10

Cultural Matters and Developmental Dilemmas in Indonesia Robert W. Hefner

181

11

Two Halves Did Not Make a Whole: Pakistan Before and After Bangladesh F. S. Aijazuddin, with a response by Adil Najam

199

12

Turkey: Torn Between Two Civilizations Yilmaz Esmer

217

Part V Latin America 13

The Political Values of Development: The Case of Argentina Mariano Grondona

235

14

The Importance of Culture: The Brazilian Case Maria Lucia Victor Barbosa

253

15

Economic Development and the Evolution of National Culture: The Case of Chile David E. Hojman

267

16

Mexico: The Camel and the Needle Miguel Basáñez

287

17

Productive Values and Poverty in Venezuela Luis Ugalde

305

Part VI Orthodox/Eastern Europe 18

Which Past Matters? Culture and Economic Development in Eastern Europe After 1989 Janos Matyas Kovacs

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Contents

vii

19

Timeless Identity versus Another Final Modernity: Identity Master Myth and Social Change in Georgia Irakli Chkonia

349

20

A Tale of Two Regions: Novgorod and Pskov as Models of Symbolic Development Nicolai N. Petro

369

21

Cultural Change and Continuity in the Transition from Communism: The Russian Case Archie Brown

387

Part VII The West 22

Scene from a Fast-Food Restaurant: Signs of the Times in Black America and the Path Beyond John McWhorter

409

23

Ireland as the Celtic Tiger: How Did It Happen? Dick Spring

419

24

The Long and Winding Road: The Italian Path to Modernization Matteo B. Marini

425

25

Culture and the Pursuit of Success: The Case of Québec in the Twentieth Century Daniel Latouche

445

26

The Spanish Transition: 1975–82 Carlos Alberto Montaner

465

27

Strong Governance and Civic Participation: Some Notes on the Cultural Dimension of the Swedish Model Dag Blanck and Thorleif Pettersson

483

Contributors

499

Index

505

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Acknowledgments

We wish to express our profound gratitude to the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and particularly to its dean, Stephen Bosworth, for providing the Culture Matters Research Project (CMRP), on which this book is based, with an ideal home. The CMRP was made possible by the generous financial support of the Smith Richard Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Donner Foundation, and the Sidney A. Swensrud Foundation. We are especially indebted to Lupita Ervin, who managed the administration of the CMRP, including two major conferences, with skill and diligence, also to Fran Parisi for her help with financial administration. The book has been the beneficiary of the skillful and sure hands of editors George Scialabba and Helen Snively in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lynn Goeller at EvS Communications. Finally, our thanks to Rob Tempio at Routledge for his unflagging interest and support.

ix

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Introduction LAWRENCE E. HARRISON

In April 1999 a group of scholars, journalists, politicians, and development practitioners met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss the relationship between cultural values and human progress. What motivated the organizing of the symposium, and what has motivated my work on culture over the past quarter century, was the notion that values, beliefs, and attitudes are a key but neglected component of development and that the neglect of cultural factors may go a long way toward explaining the agonizingly slow progress toward democratic governance, prosperity, and social justice in a great many countries of Africa, Latin America, the Islamic world, and elsewhere. Understanding how culture influences the behavior of individuals and societies, and what forces shape cultural change, can, I believe, accelerate the pace of progress.1 In the 1999 symposium, sponsored by the Academy for International and Area Studies of Harvard University, a wide range of views was presented. Many thought that cultural values were influential in the political, economic, and social evolution of societies; but others disagreed. Economist Jeffrey Sachs argued that cultural values played an insignificant role and that other factors, particularly geography, mattered far more. Anthropologist Richard Shweder argued that the symposium was based on a false premise because the idea of “progress,” and indeed the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which offers a widely accepted definition of progress, is a Western imposition on the rest of the world. xi

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A year later, in the spring of 2000, the papers prepared for the symposium were published in the book Culture Matters,2 along with commentary by its coeditors, Samuel Huntington, then Chairman of the Harvard Academy, and me. The book received favorable critical attention in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Foreign Affairs, and Time, among other newspapers and magazines. Eight foreign language editions have been published: two in Chinese (Beijing and Taipei), and one each in Estonian, German, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. A ninth, in Arabic, was contracted in 2005. Culture Matters was also I’m glad to report, for several years a best-seller at the World Bank bookstore. During the final session of the symposium, we proposed to consider what might be done to strengthen the values and attitudes that nurture progress. None of us believed that culture is genetically determined. Everyone believed that culture is acquired—transmitted from generation to generation through the family, the church, the school, and other socializing instruments. Nonetheless, it was clear in that final session that we were not prepared to address cultural change and what promotes or impedes it. We could not satisfactorily disaggregate “culture” into components that would lend themselves to understanding how culture influences the behaviors that promote progress. We all agreed that culture changes, but many were uncomfortable discussing measures to encourage or facilitate cultural change. Hence, my introduction to Culture Matters called for a comprehensive research program aimed at better understanding cultural transmission and cultural change, and particularly the factors that drive change. By the spring of 2002, two years after the publication of Culture Matters, we had raised the money necessary to make that research program possible. Since then, more than sixty professionals, mostly scholars but also journalists, development practitioners, politicians, and businesspeople, have participated in the Culture Matters Research Project (CMRP), administered by the Fletcher School at Tufts University. The goal of the CMRP is to produce guidelines for strengthening the values and attitudes that nurture human progress as defined by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights: • The right to life, liberty, and security of person

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• Equality before the law • Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion • The right to take part in . . . government . . . directly or through chosen representatives • [The right to assure that] the will of the people [is] the basis of the authority of government • The right to an [adequate] standard of living • [The right to] adequate medical care and necessary social services • The right to education. As I mentioned, anthropologist Richard Shweder views the UN Declaration as an imposition of Western values, as did the American Anthropological Association when it opposed the Declaration. Allegations of Western bias notwithstanding, I believe that the vast majority of the world’s people would today agree with the following affirmations, which are essentially a restatement of the UN Declaration: Life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Liberty is better than slavery. Prosperity is better than poverty. Education is better than ignorance. Justice is better than injustice. I want to stress as forcefully as I can that the CMRP guidelines will only prove useful when political, intellectual, and other leaders within a society conclude that some traditional values and attitudes are obstacles to bringing about the kind of society to which they aspire. Any efforts to impose the guidelines from outside, whether by governments or development assistance institutions, are almost certain to fail. To produce the guidelines, the CMRP sought to address three tasks: Task 1. What are the values and attitudes that influence the political, economic, and social evolution of societies? Task 2. What are the instruments and institutions that transmit cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes, and how amenable are

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they to application or modification for the purpose of promoting progressive values? Task 3. What can we learn about the role of culture and cultural change from case studies, including studies of societies that have experienced political, economic, and social transformations? With respect to the values and attitudes that matter (Task 1), the CMRP has produced a typology of cultural values that derives principally from the work of the Argentine journalist and scholar Mariano Grondona, who is a professor of political science at the National University of Buenos Aires and has been a visiting professor at Harvard. The typology consists of twenty-five factors that are viewed very differently in cultures conducive to progress and cultures that resist progress. By disaggregating “culture,” the typology offers specific value, belief, and attitude targets for change. The typology is presented in the CMRP overview book The Central Liberal Truth by Lawrence Harrison, published by Oxford University Press. The title of that book derives from Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s aphorism: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” The instruments and institutions of cultural transmission and change studies of Task 2 include child-rearing practices, several aspects of education, religion, the media, political leadership, and development projects. The Task 2 essays make up the companion volume, Developing Cultures: Essays on Cultural Change. To develop a better understanding of the complicated cause-andeffect interplay of cultural and other factors in the evolution of societies (Task 3), we commissioned twenty-seven case studies, most of them of countries but also a region (Eastern Europe), a province (Quebec), a city (Novgorod, Russia), a Yoruba town in Nigeria, and an ethnoracial minority (African Americans). They break down by regional or civilizational grouping, or ungrouped (India), as follows: Africa Botswana South Africa Yoruba community in Nigeria

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Latin America Argentina Brazil Chile Mexico Venezuela

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Introduction

Confucian Countries China Japan Singapore Taiwan India Islamic Countries Egypt Indonesia Pakistan Turkey

xv

Orthodox/Eastern Europe Eastern Europe Georgia Novgorod Russia The West African Americans Ireland Italy Quebec Spain Sweden

The guidelines to the case study writers were very broad. We were looking for the answers to four questions: 1. How have cultural values and attitudes influenced the evolution of the society? 2. What other factors have influenced the evolution of the society? 3. How have other factors influenced cultural values and attitudes? 4. Is there evidence of cultural change? If so, to what can it be attributed? Many of the societies studied are success stories—striking political, social, or economic transformations. Others show some degree of transformation but also continuities with a lagging past. Still others have experienced little change. My hope at the outset was that patterns would emerge from the case studies that would translate into useful lessons as we worked to develop the guidelines for cultural change that are the goal of the Culture Matters Research Project. Notes 1. I appreciate that the word progress implies a value judgment with which some people may be uncomfortable. I use it in this book as shorthand for the goals of democratic governance, an end to poverty, and social justice articulated in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 2. Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, eds., Culture Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

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Some Reflections on Culture and Development PETER L. BERGER

The present volume is one of the products of Lawrence Harrison’s Culture Matters Project, which in turn is the outcome of many years of work by Harrison on the relation of culture and development. Harrison has been a key figure in what could be called a neo-Weberian renascence in recent years—a widening recognition by social scientists that one cannot understand a long list of economic and political changes without taking account of their relation to culture. I am not sure whether Harrison feels comfortable with the epithet “neo-Weberian” (I have not asked him), but I am sure that, if there is a section of the hereafter reserved for important social scientists, Max Weber must be happily chuckling over Harrison’s enterprise. This volume, as it happens, comes out a little more than a century after the publication of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which has become an enduring point of reference for those convinced that “culture matters.” The volume contains a collection of highly competent and interesting case studies. Harrison has taken upon himself the formidable task of integrating the insights coming out of these studies. I will not try to compete with him in this. Rather, what follows are some general observations on the problematique of the Culture Matters Project. Inevitably my approach has been greatly influenced by the research on what we have been calling “economic culture,” going back to xvii

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1985, of the center I have been directing since then—the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University (CURA). It pleases me greatly that a number of the authors of the present volume are scholars associated with CURA. I have subsumed my observations under nine headings. Questions of Definition I have some difficulty with the term progressive values as it has been used in Harrison’s formulation of the Project’s agenda, for two reasons. First, the term suggests a liberal political position, which I have no particular quarrel with, but which (as an orthodox Weberian) I consider to be a moral judgment that should not be used in socialscientific discourse. And second, it also suggests a philosophical idea of progress with which I disagree: I don’t think that there is “progress” tout court in history, although there are certain “progresses” if one looks at history in a moral perspective (such as, for example, the “progress” from acceptance of slavery to the conviction that it is intrinsically unacceptable). One advantage of thinking of multiple progresses instead of unilinear progress is that this implies the possibility that this or that moral achievement could be reversed. However, I understand and agree with Harrison’s intention in his formulation. I will interpret it as the quest for values that are congenial to the development of a market economy and of democracy. Since the work of CURA has dealt primarily with the former, I will make this my principal focus here. Capitalist and Democratic Values There is a widespread view that capitalism and democracy are obverse sides of the same coin, and consequently that values conducive to the one will also be conducive to the other. This view has been prominent in American political rhetoric for quite a long time, and by no means only on the right of the political spectrum. It is not altogether erroneous, but I think that the relation between the two institutional phenomena, and between the values legitimating them, must be understood in a more nuanced way. I have argued for this in my book The Capitalist Revolution (1986), and my understanding

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has been sharpened by the multicountry study of business and democracy which CURA undertook with the South African Centre for Development and Enterprise (see the book coedited by Ann Bernstein and myself, Business and Democracy, 1998). Proposition: A market economy is a necessary but not sufficient condition of democracy. Historically, capitalism and democracy did not originate simultaneously; with great regularity, the former preceded the latter. The same sequence can be observed repeatedly in more recent times (as in southern Europe, Latin America, and eastern Asia). This does not mean that this sequence is inevitable; there may be exceptions (India may be one). But the trend is clear. It is not difficult to explain: A market economy creates the social space in which institutions of civil society can develop, and these institutions in turn facilitate the emergence of a democratic polity. But the values congenial with these two institutions are not identical. Thus, for example, so-called post-Confucian values have almost certainly been conducive to the economic success stories of eastern Asia, but they are not intrinsically favorable to democracy (take, for instance, the sublime indifference to democracy of the Hong Kong business elite). Conversely, values congenial with democracy—notions of equality and solidarity—may be inimical to the development of a market economy (as in Latin American populism). A Weberian insight here: The consequences of particular value constellations are typically indirect and unintended. Proposition: While the development of a market economy does not inexorably lead to democracy, it releases democratizing pressures which, under favorable conditions, may lead to full-blown democracy. It seems to me that this is the best way to look at the current situation in China. Once again, though, the aforementioned sequence is the likely course of events. (If you will, one should bet on perestroika preceding glasnost, which describes the Chinese case, rather than the two happening simultaneously, which may be an explanation of the difficulties in post-Communist Russia.) Internal Pluralism The discussion of these issues frequently suffers from what may be called the “Westphalian fallacy”; that is, the notion that cultural boundaries coincide with political ones, so that entire societies can

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be analyzed and compared in terms of their values systems (in a sort of paraphrase of the formula of the Peace of Westphalia, cuius regio eius religio). In actual fact, though, the values operative within any society deemed “national” are rarely monolithic. There are, typically, numerous regional, ethnic, and religious variations, entire subcultures with divergent values, and even “culture wars” within societies. This pluralism, of course, is even more evident if one thinks in terms of “civilizations.” Thus the current discussion of the values of “Islamic civilization” has made increasingly clear the diversity of values in the Muslim world. This does not mean that the notion of Islam per se generating certain values is altogether mistaken: There are indeed Islamic values—such as those pertaining to the status of Islamic law, the relation of religion and the state, the status of women and of nonMuslim minorities. And these values do impinge on the development of both capitalism and democracy. But at the same time one must be cognizant of the vast differences existing within the Muslim world (for example, between southeast Asia and the Middle East). One look at American society, with its sharp internal value conflicts (such as over abortion, homosexuality, and the meaning of the separation between church and state), should make one wary of any monolithic view of culture within a given society. What is more, these intrasocietal value conflicts can be exported. This is manifestly the case with the globalization of “Western values.” Thus people in postCommunist Europe are inundated with quite contradictory values emanating from “the West”—cowboy machismo versus feminism, technocracy versus environmentalism, “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism versus a European “social market economy,” and so on. Put simply, we do not only export “American culture,” we also export all the American “culture wars,” by way of different institutional carriers. Cultural Elements Conducive to Modern Economic Development The long shadow of Max Weber still falls over the current discussion of this issue. This is not the place to expand over where Weber was wrong in his view of the matter (he was wrong, for instance, about Chinese culture). But Weber was not only right in the way he formulated the question, but at least in some of the elements of what he called the “Protestant ethic” as a factor in the genesis of modern capitalism. These elements are subsumed under his concepts of “ratio-

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nalization” and “life-discipline”; that is, modern capitalism requires values that approach life, or at least economic life, in a calculating manner emancipated from magical thinking, and values of self-denial leading to saving and thus to the primitive accumulation of capital (the latter set of values Weber also described as “inner-worldly asceticism”). Whatever may have been the role of Protestantism in the genesis of European capitalism (something that historians have argued now for over a hundred years), I think that something analogous to the “Protestant ethic” continues to be very important for any population taking the first steps in modern economic development. This can be empirically demonstrated by looking at the values of overseas Chinese as these relate to their phenomenal economic success throughout eastern and southeastern Asia, or by comparing Catholics and “new Protestants” in Latin America, or for that matter looking at the role of Opus Dei in the modernization of the Spanish economy (here actually a Catholic case of “inner-worldly asceticism”). Put simply, if one wants to take the first steps into modern economic success, it is very helpful if one holds to values that favor hard work and thrift over the gratifications of immediate consumption. To these should be added a value not emphasized by Weber—holding in high esteem the education of one’s children. But none of these values operate autonomously or inexorably. They are always in interaction with noncultural factors, notably with macroeconomic and political forces. Thus even the most fervent “Protestant” values lead to social mobility in a macroeconomic disaster area (say, in northeastern Brazil), or in a situation where the state suppresses all entrepreneurial activity (as in Communist China before the recent economic reforms). Under such unfavorable conditions the “Protestant” values are, as it were, latent: They continue to be present subliminally, waiting to be activated if and when conditions change. Vanguards Different groups within a society have different values, which are relevant to the groups’ role in economic development. Extending the previous point about internal value pluralism, one can then say that some groups serve as vanguards of modern economic development. This has been true in earlier periods of history—for example, in the economic role of Jews in various European countries, or of Huguenot

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refugees in Germany and the Netherlands. More recently, there is the role played in India by so-called “trading castes” (such as the Marwaris). Often these vanguard groups are ethnic or religious minorities. Examples of the former are, again, the overseas Chinese, but also Lebanese in Africa or Japanese in Brazil. Examples of the latter are Parsis in India and, curiously, Old Believers in Russia. Frequently, of course, the economic success of such vanguard groups leads to resentment and hostility on the part of what in southeast Asia are called “sons of the soil” (a globalization, if you will, of classical European anti-Semitism). If, as a result of this, the vanguard group is suppressed, this can be a powerful factor inimical to economic development. Timing Let me put it this way: So far as their economic functionality is concerned, values should come with an expiration date. There is not only the aforementioned latency, when certain values lie dormant until the time arrives when, suddenly, they become economically functional. This is presumably also the case with values that are politically functional as being favorable to democracy. An example of this might be the congregational polity of the Puritans, with theological roots that had nothing to do with politics, but which became politically functional later on both in England and in the American colonies. There is also the obsolescence of certain values, which are economically functional at one time but lose that functionality, and may even become counterproductive, at a later time. I think that this is eminently the case with the values of the “Protestant ethic.” As I indicated previously, Weber was almost certainly right in his view that some form of “inner-worldly asceticism” is crucially important in the early stages of modern economic development. Conversely, a hedonistic ethic is uncongenial to such development. But in a later stage of economic development this may no longer be the case. Put simply, a highly developed economy of the postindustrial type may no longer need masses of hard-working, self-denying people. It can afford a lot of hedonistic self-indulgence. Take the case of so-called Japanese “groupism.” It has been argued, correctly in my opinion, that following the Meiji Restoration the samurai values of discipline, obedience, and group solidarity were

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successfully demilitarized and effectively mobilized in the industrialization of Japan. The same values continued to be functional in the “economic miracle” in the wake of World War II. It has been also argued that these same values are now downright dysfunctional in the postindustrial, knowledge-driven economy of contemporary Japan. In other words, these values have probably passed their expiration date. Contrast India: There is a dreamy, “other-worldly” quality to much of Indian culture, which arguably was uncongenial to modern economic development. But these same values may now, suddenly, have become very functional as a knowledge-driven economy has come to be established in certain (still limited) sectors of Indian society. The enormous success of the computer industry centered in Bangalore (and beyond that the singular mathematical and scientific aptitude of many Indians) may well be related to this emergence from latency of widely diffused values in Indian society. Needless to say, entire cultures change over time. Thus the Puritan cultural heritage of America has mutated into a vastly more hedonistic culture today, though I suspect that elements of the earlier culture survive (as, for example, in the American propensity to engage in moral crusades, or in the fanaticism of various lifestyle ideologies). Thus cultures that used to be permeated by a specific religious ethos sometimes secularize with amazing rapidity (e.g., southern Europe, Ireland, Quebec). Conversely, cultures or groups deemed to be highly secularized suddenly generate passionate religious revivals (e.g., the Orthodox revival in Russia, or the eruption of a resurgent Islam among the children of secularized elites in the Middle East, or the phenomenon of the haredim among secularized Jews in Israel and elsewhere). Alternate Modernities These considerations relate in an important way to the concept of “alternate modernities” (as expounded, among others, by Shmuel Eisenstadt and Tu Weiming). This concept is directed against what I have called the electric-toothbrush theory of modernity: Drop an electric toothbrush into the Amazon jungle, and after a generation the place will look like Cleveland. That is not the way in which modernization happens. Different societies react differently to the modernizing forces of science and technology (which constitute the key

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engines of modernity), and different versions of modernity are therefore possible. This is even so within Western civilization: American modernity is different from European modernity (not least by the crucial fact that the latter is highly secularized while the former continues to be robustly religious). And within Europe, modern England is not like modern France or modern Germany (not least with regard to the institutions of democracy). But the concept of alternate modernities is even more important in non-Western societies, where there has been a recurrent, often vehement call for accepting the fruits of modernity without thereby accepting an entire package of Western values. The clearest case of such an alternate modernity is that of Japan, the first non-Western society to modernize successfully. It was the genius of the Meiji oligarchs to rapidly acquire modern science and technology, along with a number of Western political and social institutions (such as civil law and compulsory mass education, not to mention a modern military), while at the same time retaining and to some extent reinventing traditional elements of Japanese culture (such as state Shinto and the emperor cult). There are some indications that this synthesis of foreign and Japanese cultural elements has now come under considerable stress (as in an increasing individuation in tension with “groupism”), yet Japan continues to be a thoroughly modern society with a distinctly non-Western culture. Sometimes the notion of an alternate modernity has been deployed as a political ideology by nativist movements and authoritarian governments (militant Islamists are an example of the former, the “Singapore School” rhetoric about “Asian values” of the latter). However, there are examples of alternate adaptations to modernity that have nothing to do with any political agenda. Thus there is an alternate Chinese form of capitalism, both among overseas Chinese and increasingly now in mainland China, which combines thoroughly modern economic behavior with traditional Chinese personalism (guangxi). The aforementioned computer industry in India affords another interesting case—people who are thoroughly cosmopolitan and in command of the most up-to-date technology, but many of whom are pious Hindus (often Brahmins) who celebrate traditional rituals, take caste very seriously, and have arranged marriages. There are at least aspirations toward alternate modernities in other parts of the world, such as Latin America (a modernized “integral Catholicism”), Russia (a modernized version of the old Slavophile ideal), and of course in the Muslim world (an

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“Islamic modernity”). The success or failure of these aspirations will depend on economic and political factors that have little to do with culture. These considerations in turn lead back to an issue discussed some decades ago in the context of modernization theory—whether there is a “core modernity” which transcends the differences between societies. I cannot possibly expand on this issue here, but a few observations are in order: I’m sure that there is such a thing as a “core modernity”—that is, an agglomeration of ideas, values, and habits without which modernity is not possible—but it is not clear just what this core must consist of. I distinguished a long time ago between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” elements of modernity—the former being necessary to modernity, the latter subject to considerable modification or even rejection (see my book, with Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness, 1973). I will take the liberty of repeating an illustration that I have frequently used in teaching: If you are, say, an African country intent on creating a national airline you must train or import pilots who, while they are in the cockpit of the plane, must behave exactly like pilots of a Western airline. If they do not, your planes will crash. The cognitive and behavioral requirements for these pilots can be listed, and they are all “intrinsic.” What you do in the cabin, however, is largely “extrinsic”; that is, you have a lot of leeway. You can put your flight attendants in traditional garb, you can pipe African music through the PA system, you can serve African food, and so on. Indeed, you might find that these exotica prove attractive to tourists and thus make your airline more competitive, which will also tempt you to invent some African traditions never heard of before. But that is another story. The current debate over cultural globalization has resurrected the same problematic. The CURA study of globalization and culture (see the book coedited by me and Samuel Huntington, Many Globalizations, 2002) points, I think, in the same direction. There is indeed an emerging global culture of Western, mainly American provenance, which is very powerful both on the elite and popular levels. But it is not an inexorable juggernaut running over indigenous cultures worldwide. Rather, it is subject to innumerable modifications and localizations, not to mention resistances. What is more, there are what Tulasi Srinivas, a CURA researcher who directed the India portion of the aforementioned study of cultural globalization, has called “counteremissions,” cultural influences originating outside the West,

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now impinging on Western societies and modifying the modernity of the latter (for an important example, the cultural impact of so-called “New Age” spirituality). In sum: Modernity is not a seamless garment. Reverse Causation The main focus of this Project has been on the way in which culture impinges, positively or negatively, on modern economic and political developments. But Harrison also asks whether and how these developments, if successful, act back upon culture. Undoubtedly they do. I would hypothesize that the major effect is by way of individuation, which I think is due to the weakening of taken-for-granted institutions that is the well-nigh unavoidable consequence of modernization. Thus the successful economic development of southern Europe has greatly affected traditional social patterns. Who could have imagined some decades ago that Italy, the traditional home of a fervent familism, including the cult of la mamma, would today have one of the lowest birth rates in the world? Democracy too impinges on culture. As the new democracy became firmly embedded in Western Germany, old patterns of hierarchy and deference have given way to a much greater civility in everyday life (and not only in relations between the state and the public). Democracy creates citizens, as capitalism creates consumers, and both human types assert themselves against traditional hierarchies. Consumers demand customer service, citizens insist on civil rights. These aspirations have cultural consequences which go beyond their original location in the economic and political institutions of society. In sum: There is an ongoing reciprocal relation between culture on the one hand, and economic and political development on the other. Policies An important question raised by this Project is the capacity of policies to change culture. Generally speaking, I tend toward skepticism, if one is thinking of policies deliberately geared to change culture. Even totalitarian societies have a hard time in transforming culture, as in the failure of Communism to produce the “new Soviet man.”

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But economic and social policies certainly affect culture in an indirect way, as they do when they seek to promote capitalism and/or democracy. Certain policies also affect culture negatively, a prime example being the generation of a culture of dependency by the modern welfare state. The most direct impact of policy upon culture comes by way of the educational system. There are many cases of educational institutions, typically administered or fostered by the state, which are antagonistic to the market economy or democracy. The effect of radical Islamic schools has been much discussed recently. There are less extreme examples, as in the disparagement of economic and technical skills in the educational systems of many Latin American countries. Thus educational policy is probably the most important area to look at in this connection. I have earlier mentioned the role of vanguard groups for modern economic development. Their efficacy can be either hampered or encouraged by specific policies. Radical affirmative action and xenophobic immigration laws can greatly hamper such efficacy. On the other hand, policies can encourage such vanguards to contribute to the economic development of a society. There are historical precedents to this, as when Poland invited Jews and Prussia invited Huguenots with the express intention of acquiring economically useful populations. One might explore the way in which the economic potential of so-called “popular Protestantism” could be encouraged in Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa. Needless to say, such policies will often have to confront deep-seated antagonisms. But to follow up these questions would go beyond the limits of these observations.

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Part I Africa

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1 Explaining Botswana’s Success STEPHEN R. LEWIS, JR.

Botswana has come to be known as the “African Exception.” Its record of economic growth and political democracy stands in stark contrast to virtually all other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). I will argue that Botswana’s success is closely related to how its founders built the new nation on those parts of traditional culture which were compatible with or essential to democratic development. Beginnings In the 1950s the Bechuanaland Protectorate was an economic and political backwater. In 1885 Britain had unilaterally declared its “protection” for Bechuanaland in order to forestall any expansion by the Germans in Southwest Africa and Paul Kruger’s Transvaal Republic. Then in 1895, three chiefs (Khama III, Bathoen I, and Sebele I) traveled to Britain to ask Queen Victoria’s government for further assistance, on a mission arranged through the London Missionary Society (LMS). This was an early example of what became a longstanding practice. Botswana used some foreigners, the LMS, to help the country deal with other foreigners: the Boers, Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, and the British government. For decades, many people expected Bechuanaland to be absorbed into South Africa—an eventuality provided for in the Union Agreements that 3

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Stephen R. Lewis, Jr.

ended the Anglo-Boer War. Botswana’s chiefs, aided by allies in Britain, waged a long and successful campaign against incorporation. Eventually the policies of South Africa’s National Party government, culminating in the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and South Africa’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth, ensured that the British would not hand over Bechuanaland to South Africa, though South Africa continued to press for it. In the early 1960s, as constitutional development emerged in the protectorate, the general situation was grim. By 1965, the thinly populated, landlocked country was surrounded by white minority regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia, and Southwest Africa. A multiyear drought eventually destroyed more than one-third of the national cattle herd (the country’s only asset), and an outbreak of foot-andmouth disease prevented farmers from moving cattle to market before they starved. Grants-in-aid from the British covered half of the operating budget and the entire development budget. There were only a handful of university graduates, and the first government secondary school was not established until the eve of independence. There were five kilometers of paved road in a country the size of France. Perhaps ten times as many Botswanan citizens held wage jobs in South Africa as were in modern cash employment in Botswana itself. Its per capita income was about 10 percent of the world average, placing it among the world’s poorest countries. To add insult to injury, the capital was in Mafeking, in the Cape Province of South Africa. As a prohibited immigrant in South Africa, Botswana’s most important political figure, Seretse Khama, could not even travel to the capital of his own country. As Sir Seretse and his successor, Quett (later Sir Ketumile) Masire, Botswana’s first and second presidents, often said, “When we asked for independence, people thought we were either very brave or very foolish.” The Record World Bank data show that from 1965 to 1999, Botswana achieved the world’s highest rate of growth of per capita income: over 7 percent per annum. By comparison, GDP in SSA was growing 2.6 percent annually, so average real income fell over thirty-five years. Botswana’s GDP grew 10.6 percent and exports 10.5 percent annually. Manufacturing exports, starting from essentially a zero base in 1965, grew


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over 16 percent per year from 1975 to 1999. Growth in modern sector jobs was about 7.5 percent per year at least since around 1980, two to three times the rate of population and labor force growth; employment of Batswana, as the citizens of Botswana are known, in South Africa declined to a small fraction of the labor force. External debt is negligible, and for several years foreign exchange reserves have exceeded two years’ imports. In 1965 Botswana’s income per capita was about 60 percent of SSA and about 10 percent of the world average. By 1999, Botswana’s income per head was six times that of the rest of SSA, and 60 percent of the world average. Diamonds accounted for much of the growth of Botswana’s GDP. De Beers announced a discovery at Orapa in 1967. By 1982 Botswana had two major mines at Orapa and Jwaneng, and by 1990 it was the world’s largest producer of diamonds. But any observer of development knows that the presence of mineral wealth does not guarantee broader economic success. Indeed, the political and economic difficulties of managing mineral wealth often lead mineral-rich countries—Nigeria and Venezuela are contemporary examples—into severe economic, political, and social trouble. Botswana’s nonmining economy has grown more than 10 percent annually—a growth rate that would also have led the world. Further, while Botswana is De Beers’s largest supplier of rough diamonds, Debswana, Botswana’s diamond mining partnership with De Beers, transfers more than 75 percent of its profits to the Botswana government and now owns about 15 percent of De Beers. Cattle ownership continues to be a major source of rural wealth and rural aspirations, but agricultural development has been a serious disappointment, despite massive government investments in agriculture and rural development. By the late 1990s, annual expenditures by the Ministry of Agriculture amounted to over 60 percent of value added in agriculture. Other factors also cause concern: economic disparities, unemployment among school-leavers, the very high rate of HIV/AIDS infection, and high defense costs. Botswana held its first multiparty elections in 1965, eighteen months before independence, under a constitution unanimously agreed upon by a multiparty conference and later endorsed unanimously by the Legislative Council, which had been established in 1961. Since independence, Botswana has held elections every five years, from 1969 to 2004. The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) won 81 percent of the vote in 1965, and its majority shrank over the succeeding thirty-


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four years. Twice (1969 and 1984) a sitting vice president lost his seat in the elections. Opposition parties are particularly strong in the urban areas. There have been two constitutional successions in the Presidency: from Seretse Khama to Quett Masire in 1980, following Khama’s death, and from Masire to Festus Mogae in 1998, following Masire’s decision to retire. Transparency International has ranked Botswana as having the lowest perceived corruption in Africa. Botswana also was ranked second best (behind Chile) among all developing countries, and less corrupt than a number of OECD countries, including Japan, Spain, Belgium, Greece, and Italy. Since the 1980s, several independent weekly newspapers have provided lively (sometimes sensational) coverage of political news, with sixty to eighty thousand copies sold each week, mainly in cities and larger villages. Botswana has played an important role regionally. It was a respected member of the Front Line States during the struggles for liberation in Southern Africa. In 1980 it was a key advocate and architect of the Southern African Development Coordinating Conference (now Development Community, or SADC). Botswana was selected to chair SADC for fifteen consecutive years, reflecting its standing with both peers in the region and with donors. Botswana has sent troops on UN peacekeeping missions, and its leaders have taken an active, if quiet, role in dealing with difficult domestic problems in several other countries. On the negative side of the political ledger, both BDP and opposition politicians, as well as many other observers, have expressed concerns about inequities in distributing the fruits of economic development and the political consequences. Controversy continues around government development policies for the Basarwa (or San, or Bushmen) peoples. A famous court case on gender discrimination, brought by a woman named Unity Dow, garnered Botswana a good deal of adverse attention. The courts ultimately found, as she had charged, that the Citizenship Act (which granted citizenship to the children of male, but not female, citizens if the spouse was a noncitizen) was unconstitutional. Unity Dow herself is now a judge. With the huge exception of HIV/AIDS, an epidemic that has exploded since the mid-1990s, Botswana’s progress has been impressive both socially and economically. Government revenues were heavily reinvested in health care, and in primary, secondary, and tertiary education; education rates for females are generally higher than for males.


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Water supply projects, first in major villages and then in smaller ones, gave virtually everyone access to potable water. Botswana now has one of the best systems of paved roads on the continent (over 5,000 km, compared to 5 km at independence). Monthly grants were introduced for all citizens over the age of sixty-five, and they have made a major impact in reducing poverty among the aged. A large network of NGOs operates in all fields, from education and health to women’s issues, social services, services for the disabled, and youth services. Roots of Success: Traditional Society and Deft Choices In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as impulses for political independence were stirring in Bechuanaland, most people in the protectorate were still living in a traditional society. Their lives were regulated by the seasons, since agriculture—crop farming or animal husbandry— was the dominant economic activity. However, a substantial portion of adult males (one-third of those aged twenty to forty) as well as many women, worked in South African mines, farms, and factories. The British ruled Bechuanaland through classic indirect rule: the ordinary person was governed by his or her chief, or by a subchief or a headman in the area. The colonial district commissioner worked with the chief. Europeans (perhaps 1 percent of the population) and the very small Asian and mixed-race communities had more direct contact with the colonial authorities. The chief presided at kgotla, the traditional gathering place in the village which served as a judicial chamber, administrative body, or advisor to the chief, as the occasion demanded. The kgotla was and continues to be a central institution in Tswana culture and governance. The chief adjudicated disputes and dispensed justice, allocated land—for arable farming, grazing, home sites, and commercial ventures—and distributed stray cattle at his discretion. He made decisions on educational policy and public works projects, told people when it was time to plow or harvest, and was, in general, responsible for managing the lives of his subjects. A Setswana saying conveys an important attribute of traditional culture: “Kgosi ke Kgosi ka batho”: a chief is a chief by the will of the people. Chiefs generally consulted people before making a decision on matters of any importance. While they did not necessarily abide by the consensus in the kgotla, the tradition of consultation and seeking consensus is deeply important in Tswana society. A chief


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would seldom venture an opinion in the kgotla until all who wished to opine had done so. The churches were a presence through most of the country, and chiefs were the first converts to Christianity. Initiation rites continued, but now circumcision and ritual sacrifices were barred. Prayers for rain replaced (or were performed alongside) rainmakers. Liquor was banned. The churches were a major source of the education and health care available to Batswana, and they were seen to be bringing useful skills to the country and its people. The first speaker of the National Assembly was the Reverend Dr. Alfred Merriweather, the missionary doctor who headed the Scottish Livingston Hospital in Molepolole. His successor as speaker was the Reverend Albert Lock, also of the United Congregational Church, successor to the LMS. Many of the chiefs were progressive in their attitudes toward modernization, often encouraged by missionaries. The Bakgatla National School, opened in 1923 in Mochudi, was a self-help project pushed by the Bakgatla Regent, Isang Pilane, who respected modern ideas and wanted his people to learn the skills the whites possessed. Chief Linchwe I sent Bakgatla to South Africa so they could bring back education to develop his people. Tshekdi Khama fought for more rights for Africans within the protectorate, established a secondary school, and promoted modern agriculture. So while many factors in traditional society, including the power of witch doctors and sorcery, inhibited change or progressive ideas, powerful countervailing forces came from some of the chiefs. There was relatively little formal education beyond primary school; modern farming methods for crops and livestock had not penetrated very deeply into traditional life. Farming in drought-prone Bechuanaland was highly risky, but those risks were simply part of what life had to offer. Traditional society also produced skepticism about new ideas and jealousy of those who moved ahead by their own efforts, inhibiting change and discouraging progressive activities. In the 1950s Quett Masire became the first master farmer and the largest African producer of grain in the protectorate. His high yields and large harvests were widely attributed to witchcraft rather than the elaborate system of dryland farming he had developed through reading, observation, and experimentation. Aspirations for men included working in the mines long enough to accumulate savings for some cattle, a wife, a home and family; some had the ambition to be a clerk in the colonial government.


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Among ethnic groups in Southern Africa, the Tswana have one of the weakest military traditions, and more bellicose tribes pushed them to the periphery of the arable land. A Setswana proverb holds that “the big battle should be fought with words,” and their skill at diplomacy has deep historical and cultural roots. Their survival in a relatively harsh and risky physical environment and climate depended on a good deal of cooperation, especially in times of extreme drought. And a strong tradition held that those who had resources should assist those who lacked them. Respect for others, integrity, modesty, lack of personal pride, and honesty were important virtues. Eschewing showiness helped avoid “prestige” projects and unnecessary expenditures after independence. For many years only the president flew first class to international meetings, or had the use of an official car with a driver. Until the late 1970s or 1980s, ministers and permanent secretaries drove pickup trucks in the capital. In the 1970s, when the minister of agriculture discovered a delegation from the Botswana Meat Commission staying in a five-star hotel in Europe, he made them move immediately to a cheaper one. Colonial Authorities and Constitutional Change The British colonial authorities provided honest administration but very little development of physical or human resources. A colleague in Botswana once observed, with some anger, “The British left us with nothing!” He then paused, thoughtfully, and added, “On the other hand, the British left us with nothing.” There was no large settler community claiming political power, no bureaucracy of privileged civil servants, no large houses of colonial rulers, no inheritance of inferiority that plagued many other former colonies. Nor did Botswana endure the rapacious rule of the Belgian Congo or other exploited colonies in Africa. A blank slate was in many ways a blessing, Successive resident commissioners and those who reported to them had occasionally had stormy relationships with some chiefs, notably Tshekedi Khama, a nephew of Khama III, who was particularly independent and self-confident. These disputes generally arose when commissioners tried to exercise greater control over areas that were the chiefs’ prerogative. The colonial authorities established a Native (later African) Advisory Council in 1919 and a European Advisory


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Council in 1920 (though very few whites then lived in the territory). A Joint Advisory Council (JAC), established in 1951, had eight members from each of the other advisory councils and four government members. In 1956 the government asked the JAC to begin debating and commenting on proposed legislation for the protectorate, though laws were still promulgated by the colonial government in London. A major conflict erupted in 1948, and its eventual resolution heavily influenced Botswana’s political history. Seretse Khama, grandson of Khama the Great, was heir to the chieftainship of the Bangwato at his birth in 1921. Khama and his successors ruled several other tribes as paramount chiefs, and presided over a larger population than any of the other seven paramount chiefs acknowledged by the British. While Seretse was in his minority, the tribe was ruled by his uncle, Tshekedi Khama, as regent. Tshekedi was a powerful force in the protectorate. In 1948, while in London studying law, Seretse fell in love with and married an English woman, Ruth Williams. South African elections had just been won by the racist National Party, which made strong representations to the British about this mixed marriage. An enormous controversy, reported in the world press, surrounded Seretse’s marriage. Tshekedi was outraged, since Seretse had married without his permission, outside the tribe, and to a white woman. At a confrontation in the kgotla in Serowe, Seretse argued the case for his marriage, and the overwhelming majority sided with him. Tshekedi and Seretse became estranged, and the British banned Seretse from the protectorate. By 1956, Seretse and Tshekedi reached an accommodation: both would renounce claims to the chieftainship, and Seretse and his family were permitted to return. Later reforms provided for elected tribal councils to advise chiefs, and by 1959 such arrangements had been finalized throughout the territory. First Tshekedi and then Seretse served as secretary to the Ngwato Tribal Council. One exceptionally positive aspect of colonial rule in its final decade was the role of Peter Fawcus, who arrived in 1954 and became Resident Commissioner in 1959. He and his legal advisor, Alan Tilbury, worked closely with Khama and Masire on virtually every aspect of the legal and constitutional changes in Bechuanaland from 1961 to 1965. Fawcus and a few other dedicated officers identified with the democratic, nonracial aspirations of the BDP leadership and were powerful allies of the African leadership. Fawcus’s well-documented history of encounters with the whites, the chiefs and, sotto voce, the


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British government, show his deft hand in moving the process along. Fawcus also fought for more financial resources for Bechuanaland, increasing annual expenditures in the protectorate by twentyfold between 1954 and 1965. Working with (some would say directed by) Peter Fawcus, the JAC developed a new constitutional arrangement that went into effect in 1961, following approval in London. It established an African Council (elected from the local ward level up through each tribal kgotla), a European Council, and a Legislative Council (LEGCO) of ten Africans (eight selected by the African Council, and two appointed), ten Europeans (also eight elected and two appointed), one Asian, and ten government officials, with the resident commissioner presiding. This was the first body in the territory with the power to pass legislation. LEGCO established its own rules of procedure, based on those at Westminster. Debate was lively, and the record of voting on contentious issues showed no systematic pattern of division along lines of race or tribe, or among royals, commoners, or government officials. Traditional patterns of consultation were extended to national legislative and administrative institutions. For example, LEGCO published any proposed legislation in the government Gazette two weeks before it was debated. Between 1961 and 1964, LEGCO dealt with a wide range of legislation aimed at providing the territory with the basic laws an independent nation would need. Racial discrimination was a contentious issue in the protectorate. A LEGCO Committee on Race Relations held hearings and took evidence throughout the country. The exercise showed the white members how much racism existed and how deeply the African majority felt about it. Some people, including members of the Botswana Peoples Party (BPP), pressed for legislation that would make racial discrimination a crime subject to punishment. LEGCO passed a bill that established machinery for determining whether discrimination had occurred and provided for penalties. However, the law was never implemented, and it lapsed on schedule at the end of 1967. In addition to LEGCO, an Executive Council had been established with four members of LEGCO (two black, two white) effectively acting as political ministers. Civil servants gained practice in dealing with politicians, rather than simply with more senior colonial authorities, and four politicians gained experience as political heads of administrative departments. Simultaneously, the African Council undertook several major committee studies and reports and began


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to reform institutions of local government. They soon substituted democratic processes for the autocratic rule of local chiefs. In 1963 Peter Fawcus invited the three political parties, the chiefs, and the whites to select three representatives each (the Asian community selected one) to a Constitutional Conference. The conference produced a draft constitution for self-rule; given Britain’s budgetary support, they left foreign affairs and finance to colonial authorities. The conference, and then LEGCO, unanimously adopted the draft, which was then accepted by the authorities in London. The Role of the Botswana Democratic Party and its Leadership In November 1961, Seretse Khama, clearly the leading figure in the protectorate, convened the African members of LEGCO and proposed that they form a new political party to compete with the BPP, also founded that year. A committee was appointed to draft a party constitution, and the party was formally launched in 1962. Seretse Khama was elected president with Quett Masire as secretary general. Masire served as chief organizer until 1980, when he succeeded Khama as president of Botswana. Most of the party’s founding members were active in LEGCO, and they came from all parts of the country. The BDP was explicitly a national, nontribal and nonracial party. Over the succeeding months, the BDP leadership traveled throughout the country talking with teachers, farmers, civil servants, and locally prominent individuals. They recruited members, solicited ideas, and discussed popular aspirations for an independent Botswana. A party newspaper, Therisanyo (“Consultation”), was edited by Masire. Once the national constitution had been approved, the leadership took the message to every village in the country. By the time elections were held in March 1965, the BDP had organized in every constituency; it won 81 percent of the vote and twenty-eight of thirty-one constituencies. Most BDP leaders had attended secondary school and were therefore among the relatively well-educated Batswana. Virtually all had studied in South Africa and experienced the racism there. Only Seretse Khama had traveled outside Africa for a university education. The party’s fortieth anniversary brochure profiles sixteen people who provided “Shoulders of Giants.” Twelve were teachers or heads of schools at one time or another; over half had attended Tiger Kloof,


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the LMS school in South Africa. They were committed to education for themselves and for the electorate, and they brought both intellectual curiosity and academic rigor to their lives in politics. They set high standards and held younger people to them. Both Khama and Masire traveled abroad to learn how electoral politics and policy making were done in other countries. They sent other politicians and civil servants to other countries to learn as well. They encouraged people to bring back their observations about both successes and failures. Masire noted in a speech to the first parliament in 1966, “our progress has been so rapid because we have benefited from the experience and the mistakes of others.” [My emphasis] The BDP had studied other constitutions before drafting their own proposals for the constitutional conference. They brought in specialists from other countries to run seminars for cabinet members and for the entire parliament, to ensure that politicians and civil servants understood the basis for the decisions they would be asked to make. The practices established in the 1960s were maintained for many years, even as the government became more complex and the bureaucracy grew. When they were campaigning for the first election in 1965, leaders of the BDP found that ordinary Batswana were realists. Having scratched for a living on the land, they knew one couldn’t demand more in payment than the harvest yielded. Frugality and saving were not just virtues; they were necessities of life. The BDP leaders searched for a “golden mean” on the role of chiefs and of customary laws and practices. They wanted to remove the arbitrary power of the chief over an individual, but with a minimum of disruption in traditional customs. Between 1961 and 1966 the chieftainship was completely redefined. The elected district councils governed all citizens within the district boundaries regardless of race or tribe. Land boards assumed the power to allocate land, and since their members came from the area, local custom and history would be respected. The constitution provided for a House of Chiefs to advise the National Assembly on customary affairs. No one could be a member of both the House of Chiefs and Parliament, so a chief who wished to enter elective politics would have to resign the chieftainship—as Seretse Khama had done in 1956. Chiefs retained their roles as adjudicators of disputes and dispensers of justice according to customary law. Thus, for the average citizen, the legal system would not change after independence.


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An appeals court ensured congruence among customary, statute and common law, and also provided uniformity in the application of the law and a forum for appeal. Customary courts were established in urban areas and the new mining towns, so that both urban and rural Batswana could bring cases for adjudication without a lawyer. Today, 75 to 80 percent of all civil and minor criminal cases are still settled in customary courts. The reform of chieftainship was doubtless eased by the fact that Seretse Khama was of royal heritage. He and the other BDP leaders believed that the chieftainship was a divisive force, since tribesmen were taught to feel a loyalty to their chief above country. Khama, Masire, and the other leaders were anxious to avoid the divisions on tribal and ethnic lines that had plagued other African countries. They asked that the 1964 census not record racial or tribal affiliation, in order to forestall any attempt to rate tribes or races by electoral size. The BDP leadership preached unity and non-racialism (not multi-racialism, which they associated with South Africa’s approach) as key elements of the party’s election manifesto. Characteristically, Khama and Masire felt the objectives were to achieve real democracy at both local and national level and to move allegiances from the tribe to the nation. It was not necessary to denigrate the chiefs in order to accomplish those goals. The strong Tswana tradition of consultation was embraced by the BDP leaders. It influenced how they recruited party members, how they approached the electorate, and how they formulated policy and made decisions. The kgotla tradition of people speaking their minds candidly was easily transferable to a system of democratic elections with a bill of rights that protects freedom of speech and encourages widespread consultation. Consultation could also help educate people about the choices they faced and the consequences of their choices, and the leadership frequently cited their belief that “the essence of democracy is an informed electorate.” In the run-up to the 1965 preindependence elections, much of their electioneering was devoted to explaining, in meeting after meeting, the nature of the new constitution, the nature of political parties, and the way an independent government would work. Candid feedback to the leadership was seen as important in formulating policies that would respond to people’s needs. The first priorities the districts listed were access to good water, primary education, health care, better roads and communication, and better access to markets for livestock


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and crops. The BDP government listened, responded in its budgetary allocations, and was richly rewarded by its electoral support in most rural areas. Seretse Khama’s role as BDP leader was critical. He carried the large Bangwato vote because of his royal heritage, and was popular in other parts of the country for the same reason. Further, he was a charismatic man, eloquent and witty in both Setswana and English, and at ease with people of any station in life, race, or background. While Seretse’s leadership gave the BDP a substantial advantage, Masire’s organizational efforts made the BDP election victory broad and enduring. The BDP became much more than the reflected charisma of one person. Living next to South Africa also was important. At independence, most political leaders, regardless of their party affiliation, had lived, worked, gone to school, or traveled in South Africa. They had seen the results of a political, economic, and social system based on race. All were determined to avoid any such thing in Botswana, though different political parties approached the matter in different ways. Motsamai Mpho, one of the founders of the Botswana Peoples Party (BPP), was an African National Congress (ANC) man, while another of its founders, Philip Matante (later the first leader of the opposition after independence) was a Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) protégé. The PAC was antiwhite and confrontational in its approach, while the ANC was ideologically inclined to socialism but was nonracial in its membership. As Mpho and Matante split in 1963, they led two different parties to the constitutional conference, where neither contributed much. The BDP was proud that it did not proclaim any “isms,” that its approach was based only on whether something would work in Botswana. In his opening speech to the first Parliament, Khama noted: “The foreign policy of my government will be dictated by reason and commonsense. . . . Our first duty will be toward the people of this country rather than to any world political ideologies.” Masire added, “We do not care whether we are called capitalist or socialist . . . what interests us is to see Botswana developed.” The “Four National Principles” were adopted in the 1960s: Democracy, Development, Unity, and Self-Reliance. The leaders noted that these principles represented the opposite of what the country experienced before independence: there was no democracy at either local or national level; there had been no development; people thought


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of themselves as tribesmen first, not as Batswana; and they relied on the British for both financial support and international security. Those conditions would change at independence. Moreover, they knew that any progress on these key issues was potentially reversible: the principles would have to be constantly reiterated and used as a guide to policy choices. The Policy-Making Process The principles of both consulting with and educating the electorate lie at the heart of the policy-making process in Botswana. During the republic’s formation, the leadership recognized that selecting a policy involved a choice and a process for making a decision, that one should know something of the costs and benefits of the alternatives, and that all choices involved calculated risks. From 1961 to 1964, working with LEGCO and the Executive Council, they developed a practice of involving civil service technical experts in direct discussion with cabinet ministers and other politicians. Politicians should understand the technical aspects of constraints on their choices, and experts should know directly of political leaders’ concerns. In 1975, for example, Botswana decided to establish its own currency, the pula (“rain”), and to stop using the South African rand. The pula was issued in August 1976, after a year of widespread publicity about the new currency and its effects on everyday lives. Planning for the pula meant new legislation (establishing a central bank, regulating commercial banks in Botswana, etc.), but an independent currency would also require decisions for the first time on monetary and interest rate policies, exchange controls, levels of foreign exchange reserves, and the currency’s par value. Therefore, a macroeconomic planning unit was established in the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning (MFDP) as was a working group between the Bank of Botswana and MFDP. Before “Pula Day,” seminars were held for the Economic Committee of the Cabinet—the cabinet plus senior civil servants—and for allparty parliamentary caucuses covering the balance of payments, why foreign exchange reserves rise and fall, the effects of changes in the exchange rate between the pula and other currencies, and so forth. By the mid-1980s, it was normal to discuss exchange rate policy in parliament and even among the public.


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Anticipation of future developments has been an important part of Botswana’s approach. In planning for drought, animal diseases, and possible disruptions of energy supplies or possible South African sanctions, the government mobilized foreign or local experts to analyze the issues. It then planned, educated, and executed accordingly. For many years Botswana enjoyed the highest flow of foreign aid per capita of any country in Africa. In contrast to many countries where donors or donor consortia effectively dictated terms or priorities to the host government, Botswana actively managed its relationships with donor agencies to make their priorities fit those of the government. The long tradition of relying on some foreigners to help deal with other more troublesome ones was used productively in Botswana. Technical assistance personnel were often seamlessly adopted as part of the civil service, and consultants were used in negotiations with mining companies, banks, and even donor agencies. The self-confidence long shown by many traditional leaders like Khama III and Tshekedi carried over to the independent government. The leaders did not mind acknowledging that they lacked some skill or knowledge; nor were they unwilling to make a decision when needed. The Challenge of HIV/AIDS Since the mid-1990s and before, the country’s biggest challenge has been the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Available data show Botswana as having one of the world’s highest infection rates. Botswana shares with the rest of Southern Africa a history of migrant labor that made the spread of HIV/AIDS especially likely. With a system of open communication, free press, widespread consultation, careful planning, good budgeting, and a well-developed health care system, how could this tragedy have taken place? There is, of course, no easy answer to this question, but based on personal observation and conversations in Botswana over many years, I offer some hypotheses. Botswana acted early to address the spread of the disease. By the mid-1980s, well ahead of most countries, there were posters in ministries, factories, and mines promoting condom use, for example. However, several factors inhibited education, accelerated the spread, and slowed an assault on the problem. A cultural reluctance to discuss sex explicitly, especially in public, hampered effective education. The


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great shame associated with the disease has also inhibited preventive and educational campaigns. Further, traditional attitudes made sexual relationships outside marriage acceptable. Traditional Tswana attitudes toward gender relationships put older men in a position to exploit younger women. The effect can be seen in the gender-specific infection rates, though the differentials are not much different from the rest of SSA. Aspects of policy formation also may have had an impact. Over time, as government and its bureaucracy grew, some of the constructive practices of earlier years atrophied. The culture of open analysis has to some extent deteriorated. It is less common for junior officers, however talented, to meet with either senior civil servants or ministers. As a result, those with decision-making responsibility are not exposed to the full range of options. Ideas, observations, and proposals, good or bad, do not bubble up in the process, and those farther down in the organization are often not attuned to the concerns of the decision makers. This would have a deleterious effect on all policy and planning, and it may be particularly important in understanding the HIV/AIDS crisis. The policy response may also reflect the unique nature of the health professions. Clearly, any effective approach to containing the epidemic must involve a multidisciplinary effort in both public and private sectors involving people in health, education, NGOs, churches, labor unions and businesses, traditional leaders, and local and national elected officials in every part of the country as well as international expertise and resources. But for many years, Botswana’s Ministry of Health maintained an effective monopoly, based on professional expertise, on policies and procedures to deal with the epidemic. This was directly contrary to the extraordinary involvement of many different people in interministerial approaches, residential commissions, and task forces used in everything from mining negotiations to contingency planning for drought or for sanctions by South Africa. The failure to address HIV/AIDS in a timely and effective way may represent the obverse of the many successes of the policy process in dealing with other complex issues in Botswana. Changing a Culture and Sustaining the Change The leadership in Botswana accomplished a massive transformation of the system of governance and developed an effective process for


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making economic policy in a very short period. These changes laid the basis for a record of economic and political success unmatched in Africa or most of the developing world. It did so by fully understanding the culture and traditions and making only those changes necessary to achieve larger objectives: creating a unified, self-reliant, democratic country in which people could develop economically. The leadership borrowed good lessons from elsewhere and tried to understand failings in other countries so they could avoid similar problems. None of Botswana’s three presidents, Khama, Masire, or Mogae, has followed the path of many other heads of state in monopolizing expertise in order to maintain power, or using their powers to eliminate rivals by consigning them to insignificant tasks or worse. There were risks to leading in an open and accountable way, but Khama and his successors took those risks knowingly. The tradition of openness and consultation was used in developing virtually every major policy initiative. And, they did not pick fights that were not essential to their long-term objectives. BDP leaders would occasionally remark that while they hoped not to lose any elections, they wanted to establish a tradition of treating opposition parties and leaders fairly and even-handedly, just in case they found themselves in the opposition someday. They knew their society expected rulers to behave in a seemly fashion and to serve the interests of their people. Since they were subject to regular referendums on their success by the electorate, they listened to what people were demanding. But even when it cost them votes, they were not afraid to say that they would not do some things, like providing large subsidies for urban services such as water and power. While sensitivity to the existing culture is critical for making changes in it, it is also important to attend to how the culture is evolving over time. Despite the massive reforms of the mid-1960s, interest in the chieftainship and the potential for interethnic rivalries continues to be high. A proposed expansion of the House of Chiefs will reemphasize the country’s ethnic fragmentation. In a more sinister vein, witch doctors continue to be a force in society. The HIV/AIDS epidemic and the despair it has occasioned seem to have reinforced the appeal to “traditional medicine” in some extremely pernicious ways (e.g., the advice that having sex with a virgin will cure HIV/AIDS). Some ritual murders still occur. The downsides of traditional culture and of ethnic conflicts have endured side by side with other features more conducive to democracy and economic


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development. Nonracialism and nontribalism must be fought for every day. Final Observations Botswana’s successes in political and economic development reflect the extension of some important aspects of traditional culture together with modifications pushed by the leadership that emerged in the years before independence. The practice of having the chief consult and listen in kgotla before making decisions was a critically important element of traditional culture that carried over into modern democratic institutions. The cut and thrust of political debate in Parliament or in political campaigns was nothing new to those who had debated serious matters in kgotla, such as whether Seretse Khama should bring his white bride home to Serowe. Culture can be expressed as a collection of habits of both mind and practice; these habits were critical to the evolving culture of a new democracy. Traditional society was composed of modest and frugal people, who knew the meaning of uncertainty and risk from farming. Even chiefs were not given to pomp or conspicuous consumption. The BDP appealed to these sentiments, and they took seriously the wisdom of rural people in framing legislation and government programs and setting the government’s own priorities. Traditional frugality paid benefits in shaping the government’s approach to fiscal policy after independence. Modesty and a concern for those less fortunate made it easier to develop an incomes policy that attempted to keep wage and salary differentials within reason. The history of natural disasters made planning ahead for drought and other contingencies, including development of reserves of grain, oil, and foreign exchange, seem a logical course of action. Chiefs may have been quite autocratic in traditional society, but they were also held to the law, both by their own people and by the colonial authorities. This tradition, as well as a general respect for the law in rural areas, and the honesty of the colonial government gave Botswana a tradition of honesty and avoidance of corruption that served it well. The tradition of extensive consultation throughout government also helped ensure that no one person or small group


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within government could appropriate resources illegally or pervert a major project. The leadership that took Botswana into independence knew South Africa and the problems of a society organized on the basis of race, and this affected their view of racial and tribal issues. A unified country was their objective, and they molded legislation, the constitution, and their practices within the BDP to achieve that result. Three sets of problems now face Botswana. First, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, even if fully contained immediately, will present the country with major economic, social, and perhaps political problems in the coming decades. Already fifty thousand children are orphans in a population of 1.6 million. Given the high infection rates, the number will grow substantially. Second, Botswana is unlikely to see major increases in diamond or other mineral output in the next decade. There is nothing on the horizon to replace this principal engine of economic growth. It has never been easy to diversify the economy. A much slower rate of economic growth may be in the offing. Third, expectations have become very unrealistic following nearly forty years (two generations) of exceptionally rapid economic growth. Per capita incomes have increased by a factor of ten to fifteen times; the great majority of citizens have participated either directly through new jobs or indirectly in improved water, health, housing, and education. Older people have recently begun to refer to the younger generation as “diamond children”; their expectations for material well-being are vastly beyond the dreams of their parents or grandparents. Against this background, the fact that democratic politics in Botswana are lively and active represents perhaps the best hope for the future. A group of experienced newcomers has successfully entered the political arena. Forty years is not a long time to establish new traditions and to complete a change in culture from one based on a rural subsistence economy to one that is urban and modern. But Botswana’s consistent ability to sustain some important elements of traditional culture—particularly the tradition of consultation and respect for the law—makes one optimistic about its future as well. Bibliography Bechuanaland Protectorate. African Council Procedures and Minutes, Mafeking, 1961–64.


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———. Legislative Council. Hansard, Mafeking, 1961–64. ———. Legislative Assembly, Hansard, Gaborone, 1965–66. Botswana Democratic Party. Raising a Nation: Botswana Democratic Party, 1962– 2002. Gaborone: Front Page Publications, 2002 Colclough, C., and S. McCarthy. The Political Economy of Botswana: A Study of Growth and Distribution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Dutfield, M. A Marriage of Inconvenience: The Persecution of Ruth and Seretse Khama. London: Unwin Hyman, 1980. Edge, W. A., and M. H. Lekorwe, eds. Botswana: Politics and Society. Johannesburg: J. L. van Schaik, 1998. Fawcus, P. Botswana: The Road to Independence. Gaborone: Pula Press and The Botswana Society, 2000. Harvey, C., ed. Papers on the Economy of Botswana. London: Heinemann, 1981. ———. and S. R. Lewis, Jr. Policy Choice and Development Performance in Botswana. London: Macmillan, 1997. Head, Bessie When Rain Clouds Gather. London: Heinemann. Holm, J., and P. Molutsi, eds. Democracy in Botswana. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989. Government of Botswana, National Assembly. Hansard, Gaborone, 1966–67. Ministry of Overseas Development.The Development of the Bechuanaland Economy. London: HMSO, 1965. Morton, F., and J. Ramsay, eds. The Birth of Botswana: A History of the Bechuanaland Protectorate from 1910 to 1966. Gaborone: Longman Botswana, 1987. Morton, B., and J. Ramsay. The Making of a President: Sir Ketumile Masire’s Early Years. Gaborone: Pula Press, 1994. Parson, J. Botswana, Liberal Democracy and the Labor Reserve in Southern Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984. Parson, N., W. Henderson, and T. Tlou. Seretse Khama, 1921–80. Gaborone: Botswana Society, 1995. Ramsey, J., B. Morton, and T. Mgadla. Building a Nation: A History of Botswana from 1800 to 1910. Longman Botswana, 1995. Schapere, I. Tribal Innovators: Tswana Chiefs and Social Change, 1795–1940. Cape Town, South Africa: Athlone Press, 1970. Sillery, A. Botswana: A Short Political History. London: Methuen, 1974. Tlou, Thomas, and Alec Campbell. History of Botswana. London: Macmillan, 1997.


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2 Culture and Development Questions from South Africa1 ANN BERNSTEIN

What are the relationships between culture and political and economic development in South Africa? This paper is not an attempt to answer that enormously complex question. Rather, it is itself a series of questions. We consider four facets of South African culture, sketch their outlines, and build up more detailed questions on the relationship between each particular cultural element and development. The overall form of the questions is this: What is the net effect on development of cultural attitudes and practices? Some cultural themes will clearly be negative for growth, some clearly positive, many (if not most) mixed or neutral. Wherever possible, questions will aim at suggesting a research agenda designed to “net out” cultural effects on development. We believe these are interesting questions not for South Africa alone, but more widely, considering this country’s distinctive cultural makeup. South African culture is very different from that of developed world cultures, but also exceptionally permeable and available to global culture because it lacks a high culture of its own. It is also strongly influenced by the continued presence of substantial settler minorities, subgroups of which act as “fragments” of metropolitan cultures in the sense suggested by Louis Hartz.2

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The four types of South African culture we discuss here are politicized culture, consumer culture, popular culture, and “deep” culture. Politicized Culture Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson argue that all traditions are, if not invented, at least quite regularly and self-consciously revived in order to fulfill specific social or political purposes. This idea has been given considerable empirical support in South Africa in the last decade.3 We describe three striking examples of tradition being invented to create politicized culture. This discussion is guided by two questions: Is this politicized culture purely instrumental—a weapon to be used in battles with, among other people, the settler middle class? And even if politicized culture is only very tenuously rooted in older and deeper cultural forms, what are the likely consequences for development? Politicized Ubuntu Ubuntu—roughly translatable as “humanness,” the decency that all owe to one another—has in recent decades gained prominence as a term defining the cultural characteristics of black South Africans as economic and political actors. Its central ideas, usually expressed in one of the indigenous languages, are that “people become people through one another” and “the king is king through the people.” First brought to prominence by antiapartheid clerics, ubuntu was used to define antiapartheid politics as against the inhumanity of apartheid and equally against the inhumanity into which the antiapartheid struggle had sometimes degenerated. More recently it has been adopted by the African National Congress (ANC) government as one goal of the state bureaucracy and been held up by the government and progovernment ideologues (or “African intellectuals”) as a model to guide postapartheid behavior. However, the extent to which ubuntu has specific content or widespread cultural reach beyond these vague and uncontroversial slogans is brought seriously into question by both qualitative and quantitative evidence. A prominent black businessman and member of the ANC national executive reflected on a problem with ubuntu: that


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it “has been packaged for consultants to peddle to companies that are at a loss” about how to proceed. Much of what he sees defined as ubuntu “is a very reductionist use of the concept as it has existed historically.” Instead, the ANC is “trying to develop the concept” because, “denuded of our historical base . . . we are trying to find something common out there, which is largely mythological—and there is nothing wrong with that—society flourishes on mythology.”4 Several questions relevant to this topic were attached to a broad nationwide survey of 2,250 people conducted in South Africa in March 1999.5 The findings are revealing. Respondents were asked: “What do African people in southern Africa have in common with one another which might help them catch up in development?” Under 3 percent of people mentioned ubuntu or traditionalism or ancestor worship or anything essentially “African.” Nor did they mention the extended family system, or racial or ethnic pride and solidarity as a basis for development. These results do not mean that Africans have no sense of cultural origin or respect for traditional beliefs, simply that they generally do not see them as relevant to current problems and their solutions. But whether politicized ubuntu is authentic or inauthentic, a mere slogan or a widely held belief, the question remains: What goals does it set and what limits does it place on state, corporate and individual action? This question could be the basis of a very interesting research project. For the moment, what seems clear is that the top socioeconomic status groups among blacks certainly exploit African identity in jobs and career strategies. But this strategy gains its force precisely because it operates against a background of almost totally Eurocentric political and business ideologies. African identity is played as a card in struggles for votes, senior government jobs, and lucrative positions in corporate hierarchies. Afrocentric Management Theory Some South Africans are serious advocates of the argument that the relatively slow assimilation of black South Africans into the higher echelons of multinational corporations is due to their distinctively African culture. This culture allegedly differs in its basic assumptions from the allegedly Western assumptions that inform the corporate


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cultures of the MNCs. One Afrocentric management writer, for example, opines that South Africans have to make their own economic and corporate management solutions based upon indigenous challenges and circumstances. We would be running at an inconceivable speed into an economic swamp if we were to assume Western management practices for our challenges and circumstances. . . . The community concept is inherent in the Afro-centric culture, which is about Africans putting Africa at the centre of their existence. It is about Africans anchoring themselves in their own continent, its history, traditions, cultures, mythology, creative motif, ethos and value systems exemplifying the African will.6

This type of African perspective has recently become quite significant in South Africa and has resulted in the publication of several books. Advocates of this concept suggest that imported corporate culture is alien to indigenous African assumptions and that business success in Africa can therefore best be achieved by facilitating the emergence of an indigenous management style. In South Africa, this argument is sometimes reduced to a simple racial proposal: the white corporation has a culture that frustrates black managers. Interestingly, however, empirical research on South African managers disputes this. It shows that, with the exception of a greater valuation of masculinity (over femininity) by black managers compared to their white counterparts, black South African managers are in fact closer in their value systems to white South African managers than they are, for example, to mixed race (formerly known as Coloured) or Indian South African managers. Equally, as one interviewee noted, ubuntu provides no value system to guide how one functions in a company situation. For example, ubuntu might imply that one cannot fire an employee under any circumstances. The interviewee went on to note that the “lack of parameters about where ubuntu begins and ends is problematic,” underlining the point that ubuntu has not translated well into the radically different setting of a modern company.7 It would seem, then, that Afrocentric management theory is, even more than politicized ubuntu, essentially a recently manufactured weapon designed to be used by black South Africans on the battlefield of middle-class rivalry. Even so, it is important to know more about its consequences. For instance, how successfully have proponents of Afrocentric management theory influenced the actions of firms?


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The African Renaissance The most important, most influential, and most purely invented element of South African politicized culture is the “African Renaissance.” This concept owes its prominence almost entirely to President Thabo Mbeki and a small group of cheerleaders, most with close personal links to the president, though it has been taken up more widely. This “renaissance” aims to: • attack the notion that Africa is different and inferior; • argue that Africa can change and reclaim African dignity; • demonstrate Africans taking responsibility, acknowledging mistakes and acting to correct them; • banish the shame of Africa (e.g., the Rwanda horror); • recapture the African soul; • make the link between Africa and human rights a reality; • and show pride in Africa's heritage but also in its capacity to modernize. The first comment to be made about this notion is that it is a brilliant marketing concept. It performs many functions for South Africa and its political leadership at a critical juncture in the country’s history. It builds on old sentiments (pan-Africanism, African unity, African solutions to African problems) and thus provides a link with an earlier and older set of leaders who are revered for their contribution to colonial liberation, while communicating a very different set of messages from those of the past. The concept provides a way to reintegrate a democratic South Africa with the rest of the continent after its long isolation as “the white south.” It can also provide some legitimacy for Africa’s most powerful country as it assumes an increasingly important leadership position both within the continent and in representing the continent to others. The “renaissance” concept enables its proponents to advocate economic reform and democratic governance (the U.S. and European Union agenda for Africa as well as that of many critics in Africa) as aspects of an African renaissance and prerequisites for the continent to claim its rightful place in the world. Essentially it saves face while promoting intrinsically Western ideas about change for the continent. It also provides a useful vehicle for the views of Mbeki (and many black South Africans) about the state of the continent. Run-


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ning through Mbeki’s statements about the renaissance are hints at deep anger and shame about the horrors inflicted on Africa’s peoples through its leaders’ corruption, greed, and bad governance and the resulting perception of Africa and Africans in the rest of the world. The continent’s perceived weakness substantially affects the impact of economic globalization. Africa can no longer afford to be judged by a lower set of standards than the rest of the developing world if its people are to lift themselves out of last place in every global ranking. The African renaissance, then, is both a political tool and a deeply held set of beliefs for President Mbeki and members of his circle. However, survey evidence suggests that it has had much less impact on South African people in general. Popular Culture South African popular culture presents three facets: urban popular culture, rural popular culture, and the popular culture of the supernatural. Each form contains tendencies that can be positive or negative for development. In this section, we suggest research questions designed to explore and deepen our understanding of these tendencies. Urban Popular Culture This seems to be characterized by a great deal of family disintegration, status and role confusion, and organizational incoherence, as well as violence and the glamorizing of violence using styles derived from perceptions of African-American “gangsta” culture. But it also demonstrates immense creative vibrancy in music and clothing styles, a sense of freedom and possibility, and many signs of pent-up entrepreneurial energy and consumer desire. During the 1900s, South Africa’s cities became dynamic zones of interaction between individuals from a wide range of backgrounds, but they were also arenas where African families struggled to establish themselves on a stable footing. Urban families had to contend with harsh socioeconomic conditions, the countervailing pull of rural responsibilities, the absence of properly constituted political authority, and the erosion of the buttressing role of lineage and clan. The capacity of these insecure families to inculcate a strong sense of tradition into new generations was also undermined by the fact that youth


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socialization in rural communities had largely relied on age-based structures: clearly defined and organized age cohorts had played a central role in educating and disciplining young people. In most African societies these processes culminated in formal initiation, in which youths were prepared for their roles as adults by a group of elders. But in many urban families, ethnic diversity, fragile family structures, and the absence of processes of initiation militated against effective intergeneration cultural transmission. Urban youths still cluster in age-based groups ranging from loose forms of street-corner society to more organized and menacing gang structures. But this is a world whose primary cultural references are Western or based in a simple inversion of Western values. American film and television, for example, has been the single strongest source of models for modes of dress and of gang names and styles from the 1950s to the present. Names and styles intended to be anti-Western, antiwhite, antiestablishment, or just generally aggressive have tended to be drawn from groups or cultures seen as hostile to the United States rather than from specifically African imagery. On this evidence, urban black South African popular culture is likely to contain strong negative elements for market-led development and stable democracy. But much more research is needed on tendencies that could work against this strongly developed historical trajectory. Rural Popular Culture What of rural popular culture? Rurally oriented migrant culture represents the most widespread and tenacious attempt to sustain indigenous African cultural forms in twentieth-century South Africa. From the late 1950s several factors conspired to undermine this form of cultural resistance. Perhaps the most important was the ballooning rural population which overwhelmed a residual rural economy based on land and cattle. Attempts by the apartheid state to incorporate chiefs into structures of government diminished their legitimacy in the eyes of many followers. The expansion of state schools in rural areas from the 1970s on and the growing interconnections between youth in rural and urban contexts—especially in the 1980s—helped shape new forms of youth culture which were far less amenable to the authority of chiefs and elders and focused on imagined futures remote from the limited possibilities in most rural areas.


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This is not to suggest, however, that a rurally focused culture has been extinguished. One obvious example of cultural continuity is the payment of bride wealth, or lobola. Though mainstream churches initially frowned on it, this practice has continued and even evolved to take account of new realities. We remain ignorant of the relationships between these rural forms of popular culture and development. But once again, we can identify the questions needed to begin the process of balancing positives and negatives. To what extent do rural cultural forms create marketfriendly stability? To what extent do they create market-unfriendly stultification? Is traditional leadership a barrier to democracy and growth? On balance, probably yes, but what are its positive features? To what extent are rural/traditional revivals, such as “virgin testing,” an irrational atavism, and to what extent a potentially useful response to HIV/AIDS? The Popular Culture of the Supernatural A feature of precolonial society which has proved tenacious and dynamic in both the cities and the countryside has been a worldview that assumes an interpenetration of secular and spiritual worlds. Research in both rural and urban settings has shown that the activities of ancestors’ spirits and witches continue to be seen as causes of health and disease, success and failure. In particular, misfortune is rarely believed to be simply a matter of chance; the anger of ancestors or the nefarious activities of witches are usually to account for setbacks. Rather than being eroded by urbanization, these beliefs have survived and even prospered during relocation to the city. Since a considerable majority of black South Africans profess some form of Christianity, these beliefs also span the various permutations of faith which lie along the continuum between Christian and precolonial religious forms. Studies in both urban and rural contexts suggest that Western education is no simple antidote to these beliefs. In 1999 a CDE researcher witnessed a protracted witchcraft duel between two academic leaders of the University of the Transkei, both of whom had received PhDs from prestigious universities in the United States. Anecdotes aside, the extent to which these supernaturalist perceptions endure among the growing black upper middle class remains to be researched.


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It is also possible that the ending of apartheid has in some ways enhanced the significance of these beliefs. Under the old order the malevolent power of the state provided an overarching explanation for individual failure. The dismantling of the system poses new problems of explanation for why some succeed while many fail, and suspicions about the activities of witches may have played a part in filling this explanatory void. But one must be wary of turning these cultural elements into a cohesive or closed system. One observer has pointed out the tremendous variation in the practices, customs, and beliefs of people in Soweto regarding such matters as witchcraft, healing, and the powers of ancestors, spirits, or deities, although there is a core consensus about the capacity of enemies to inflict harm through supernatural means.8 Nor do these ideas stand alone. It may be that witchcraft is invoked to explain, for example, unemployment but this does not mean that other forms of explanation—such as a plummeting price for gold—are discounted. Just as spirits and witchcraft have proved the most resilient cultural residue from the precolonial period, so have forms of Christianity proved to be among the most important cultural legacies of colonialism to modern South Africa. About 73 percent of South Africans now claim to be Christian, up from about 46 percent in 1911. The most dramatic growth in Christian adherence has been among Africans— up from 26 percent of Africans in 1911 to 76 percent in 1990.9 Africans themselves were the key agents of Christianization in the 1900s, especially through the African Initiated Churches (AICs), which went from being almost nonexistent in 1890 to embracing from a third to half of all black South Africans by the 1990s.10 The name “African Initiated Churches” focuses on their distinctive African origin, selfreliance, and independence of foreign funding. A significant factor in their success may be their ability to incorporate traditional African religious concepts into their worship, and particularly ancestral spirits. By 1991 the diverse family of AICs are claimed to embrace “ at least 9.2 million people and 47% of all black Christians, up from 40% in 1980, a dramatic increase compared to other religious groups.”11 The disenfranchised black majority responded to the very rapid urbanization of the 1970s and 1980s by aggressively erecting churches in the cities, and new forms of African Christianity emerged offering physical healing, supportive communities, and spiritual solace in the urban areas. Women, it should be noted, are heavily influential in these churches.12


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The Zion Christian Church (ZCC), which is typical of the AICs and is also the largest of them, urges its followers to be good citizens, self-controlled, thrifty, and industrious. “These churches have wholly cut the umbilical cord with the churches of Western origin. They are the largest and potentially the single most important religious group in South Africa, and, in spite of weakness and divisions, their vitality, their rootedness in African traditions, and their capacity for innovation will most likely have a decisive influence on the history of the church and society in the changing South Africa.”13 A particularly interesting part of the message of these church groups in South Africa is that wealth is a blessing to be enjoyed by the living. Maria Frahm-Arp, a theologian, describes how the Pentecostal movement, which started in the United States in 1906, “empowers people to have a belief in their own ability.” In South Africa “the biggest Pentecostal movement, the ZCC,” with approximately three million members, “is teaching an almost Protestant work ethic.” She describes research showing “that the positive results can already be felt. . . . that teachings were very specifically aimed at financial independence. In fact, 80% of those interviewed said they were saving to start their own businesses. I believe we will start to see the power of three million people who are being told not to smoke or drink and that diligent work is a blessing.”14 Given such findings, it is often hypothesized that the African Independent Churches encourage attitudes that are conducive to wealth creation. But religion and spirituality operate in other ways too. The AICs are often highly millenarian and miracle-focused, an attitude which does not encourage self-help behavior. And the mainstream traditional South African churches (Catholic, Anglican, etc.) are explicitly and sometimes even crudely socialist in their economic doctrines. Again, what is necessary, and what has not been done, is to delve far more deeply into the different kinds of “pentecostal” churches at work in order to move toward a net assessment of what impact the supernatural has on popular culture and in turn the prospects for enhanced economic growth and democratic consolidation. Consumer Culture South Africa is to a significant extent a cultural protégé of the United States, partly because of the impact of American programming on


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television and partly because of the growing dominance of the English language in the country. The material aspirations of the American middle class are admired, and the multiracial character of both societies allows for mutual identification. South Africa is also strongly culturally influenced by Europe, as an alternative or adjunct to the stronger American influence; and to a lesser extent by Africa, as a counterpoint to both America and Europe. At this stage, however, the rest of Africa is more influenced by South Africa than an influence on it. CDE’s research in this area has taken the form of focus groups held with marketing and advertising professionals and a small survey of hairdressers and their customers. This research is worth citing in some detail in order to add complexity to the rather bald analysis offered in the preceding paragraphs. A measure of the extent to which American influence has pervaded consumer identities is provided by the hairdressing survey. When the (mostly black, mostly female) respondents were asked whether they thought African or American hairstyles were more influential in South Africa, 68 percent said that American styles were more influential. This result is particularly interesting because the interviews were conducted mainly at informal or black-operated hairdressing enterprises. Focus group members explained the relatively limited role of Africa in South African consumer culture: Africa doesn’t appeal here in the context of internationalisation. Maybe their music, but really that’s all. . . . Look at one of South Africa’s most monumental advertising mistakes—Sales House and their “Man of Africa” campaign, bringing Naomi Campbell in at a cost of millions. It didn’t work . . . . The consumers were just too bright for this. Their response was: “You say that black is beautiful but why are you telling me this?” People in South Africa in the five- to twenty-year-old age groups find nothing to aspire to in Africa. They want to improve themselves, but there are no role models for this in Africa . . . their role models are American, and Americans are rich and Africa is a place of deep poverty. Are there any exceptions to this? Perhaps in music, and to a lesser extent food.

Despite the leading roles played by American and European cultural symbols in the South African market, it also has a significant indigenous flavor. This process of indigenization—perhaps a better


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term would be creolization—sometimes draws upon recent, culturally unifying local symbols of prestige and aspiration in order to naturalize attractive global trends. This process is also well illustrated by one of the leading role models mentioned by both hairdressers and their customers: Felicia Mabuza-Suttle, a South African TV talk-show host, whose program resembles the Oprah Winfrey show (which is also shown in South Africa). Felicia is a black South African who emigrated to the United States and married an American before returning in the 1990s. Except for a slight South African accent, she presents as an American. Though obviously affluent, she evinces a level of local social concern that makes her audiences feel she is “one of us.” What, then, is the relationship between socioeconomic development and South African consumer culture? The latter is clearly characterized by a strong American influence, considerably modified—creolized—by local nuance and by the effects of much lower average incomes. But, it seems fair to say that South Africa offers no specifically cultural barriers to the spread of developed-country patterns of consumption. Deep Culture Because it is taken so much for granted, the deep culture that shapes everyday life is the most difficult form of culture to analyze. It is also the most controversial. As Lawrence Harrison writes, “The conclusion that culture matters goes down hard.”15 But that deep culture matters, even more than other cultural forms, seems very likely indeed. It is arguable that much politicized culture in South Africa is mere froth that will change rapidly and that most South African popular culture is a fairly direct expression of poverty and lack of opportunity. Consumer culture has wider social importance but is already part of a relatively free market. Deep culture—ingrained attitudes toward wealth creation, wealth sharing, kin, age, gender, sex, friendship, religion, work and time—is where the relationship between culture and development is likely to be most complex and most important. We can illustrate this by raising questions concerning several features of South African deep culture. Unfortunately, what we cannot do with the research at our disposal is offer answers.


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Entrepreneurial Attitudes How and to what extent are entrepreneurial attitudes present in South African deep culture? Precolonial societies are usually presented as highly conservative, risk-averse, and fairly communalist and redistributive. Part of the very definition of chieftaincy was the authority to redistribute the primary form of wealth (cattle) from richer to poorer households. And a wealthy man who did not to some extent share his wealth with those around him ran the risk of being denounced as a witch—an accusation that often led to death or forced redistribution. On the other hand, several of the pre-colonial kingdoms elsewhere in Africa were organized around trade. Examples are the trading/slaving kingdoms of West Africa and, closer to home, the major trading culture of Great Zimbabwe. In the early and middle colonial periods, some South African kingdoms (notably the Zulu and the Basotho) also had considerable success in trade; in fact, by 1880 the Basotho kingdom was southern Africa’s largest exporter of grain, which allowed the Basotho to build up a formidable military. The modern state of Lesotho, surrounded by South Africa but never incorporated into it, is a lasting testament to this early and rapid adoption of an entrepreneurial spirit. In modern South Africa, questions have been raised about whether the deep cultural features of Africans cause them to adopt an unhelpful orientation towards the modern sources of wealth—the private sector and the state. People imbued with traditional ideas about wealth are said to adopt an “immature individualism” when given access to modern sources of wealth creation. Certainly the prevalence of corruption (which has become as pervasive as it is public and inept) suggests that rent-seeking attitudes are at least as influential for members of the African middle class as are profit-seeking ones. But developmentally healthier entrepreneurial attitudes are certainly also part of deep culture. CDE interviews with successful black businesspeople reveal an interesting mixture of these attitudes. On the one hand, people who have recently made the transition from political activism to business appear to be reaping a liberation dividend or rent—not so much crudely for themselves (though they have generally become very rich indeed) but, as they see it, for black South Africans in general. On the other hand, black businesspeople who were able to grow their businesses in the gaps left by the apartheid system tend to be much more similar in attitude to Western entrepreneurs.


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Anthropological and journalistic evidence from both South Africa and the continent in general suggests that the African extended family system may hinder individuals from saving and investing. Wealthier, better-educated African people are very often surrounded by what seems like a solar system of orbiting relatives, each of whom has a very strong expectation that the rich person should provide them with cash and goods, access to education, or a permanent job. The social and psychological costs of refusal are very high indeed. Little or no research on this topic has been conducted in South Africa. However, anecdotes abound in which kin successfully demand extensive and prolonged material support from more successful individuals, and even destroy the more successful person’s savings or livelihood. And comments made to CDE by an ANC parliamentarian and a Labor Department official suggest that both government and organized labor are increasingly concerned by the number of people each employed person is expected to support.16 It seems likely that this aspect of South African deep culture does act against development by preventing the growth of a secure, investing middle class. But countervailing tendencies have to be considered. Those Africans who have become skilled and educated often owe this to strong family support, a pattern familiar from the family histories of successful people worldwide. CDE conducted in-depth interviews with twenty successful African businesspeople.17 A consistent theme was that success was explained by a combination of education and family background—particularly when the family had pushed the child (both psychologically and materially) to achieve at school and university. The family influences that most of these people referred to generally fell into one of two categories. In one, the parents took an unusually strong interest in the child’s discipline and placed much emphasis on hard work and good results at school. In the other, a family of modest means, the parents and siblings placed their hopes for collective class mobility upon the potential success of the most talented child. This pattern raises several questions. First, how did the parents of these successful people come by their “Protestant” values? The most likely answer seems simple enough: from membership in mission churches. Second, what enabled families of this sort to become supportive rather than extractive kin? The modesty of the original backgrounds seems to offer a clue: It is a matter of historical record


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that the first African families to become fully “missionized” tended to be from the lowest-status groups in precolonial society, who moved into Christianity and colonial-style aspirations largely because they had failed to establish a supportive or prestigious kin network in the traditional social world. All this gives rise to the larger question: When do extractive kin become supportive kin, and vice versa? At the moment, no South African research appears to have begun to address these questions. Generation, Age, and the Ancestors As mentioned above, dead ancestors are still very much part of the lives of most black South Africans. Great respect (or at least an outward show of it) is invariably paid to elderly men and women. This, it has been argued, may encourage passivity and fatalism, and what Harrison has characterized as static time orientation. Survey evidence suggests that such attitudes toward seniority may be incompatible with effective modern leadership of corporations or government. The weight of the currently available evidence seems to show these attitudes are not helpful to development. But, as always, countervailing tendencies are worth considering. Since at least the 1950s, in the cultural/political “Youth League” tradition, young people are perceived to offer the boldest and most forward-looking leadership. Gender Despite a very serious political commitment within the ANC to gender equality, evidenced by a 40 percent quota for female MPs and a large female representation in the Cabinet and the senior bureaucracy, the deep culture of gender in South Africa is undoubtedly very sexist by Western standards. The anecdotal evidence certainly suggests that this degree of sexism puts barriers in the way of an efficient modern economy and judicial system. On the other hand, profound systemic gender bias does not seem to have been an obstacle to the growth of, say, the United States economy in the first half of the twentieth century. The development literature suggests that poverty relief and education programs are made less effective by the operation of sexism. To


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put it crudely, grants intended for elderly women, children, and the disabled are arrogated (and, in all likelihood, spent on drink and other drugs) by men in a cultural atmosphere that seems to tolerate, if not encourage, this. The possibly widespread problems of child rape and of high levels of violence against girls and women are certainly symptoms of this sexism and may very well have directly negative consequences for development. Sex Only very recently has serious academic work begun on the culture of sex in South Africa. But it is possible to offer some points about the deep culture of sex on the basis of anecdotes and daily journalism. What seems clear is that the deep culture of sex in South Africa is at least partially responsible for the extremely high rates of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. This, of course, has serious negative consequences for development. We should mention several negative features of the deep culture of sex in South Africa. • A woman’s consent to sexual intercourse is not always required or obtained. No stigma of rape attaches to nonconsensual sex with a wife or girl friend. • Largely because of attitudes and expectations inculcated by the migrant labor system, it is not uncommon or stigmatized for men to have multiple sexual partners in both city and country. Nor is it uncommon for migrant mine workers living in single-sex hostel accommodation to adopt the well-accepted practice of forming a “mine wife” relationship with another man. • Urban youths are quite young when they have their first sexual experiences. Promiscuity is not stigmatized among urban youth of either sex. • African men often prefer “dry sex,” a practice which, if common, would contribute considerably to spreading HIV/AIDS and other STDs because women are much more vulnerable to infection during “dry” intercourse. • Child and even baby rape may well be more common in South Africa than elsewhere, perhaps because of a folk belief that


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intercourse with a child will cure AIDS, perhaps as a form of “imitation rape” by pubescent males influenced by the behavior of adult men in crowded living conditions. The Culture of Friends and Strangers As mentioned earlier, it may be that ubuntu makes it more difficult to fire people and generally to act with the ruthlessness sometimes necessary for profitability or efficiency. Perhaps equally important for development, but much less discussed, is a social fact which some CDE research has begun to explore: that white and black elites, although sharing many “Davos” attitudes and usually perfectly well able to interact amicably at work, are very rarely friends outside the office. In Harrison’s terms, this narrows the radius of trust in South African society, and at a particularly crucial point: within the managerial/governing elite. With the limited exception of CDE’s work, this area is totally unexplored. Whiteness and Blackness Most research on culture and development seems to assume that white and other settler culture is conducive to development: this is unlikely to be true. White South Africans may not be more racist than other people, but they certainly do seem to have deeply held views about race and “standards,” all of which have evolved in response to the fact that settlers live in constant contact with Africans. Much the same may be said about Africans, particularly middle-class and elite Africans. Politicized, consumer, and popular culture are all (in part) responses to deep-cultural perceptions about local and international “white” culture. Analysis of culture arising from observation of and rivalry or cooperation with “the Other” is generally missing from CDE’s research material but is probably important for understanding development in South Africa and worldwide. Time and Work CDE focus group members made the following assertions about South Africans’ time perceptions and work discipline:


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South Africa has been highly susceptible to the export of . . . U.S. consumer culture by comparison with many other places. But if you were to ask what is distinctive about South Africa, and particularly the African component, it’s concepts of time. You know, in the Zulu language, you don’t say “I missed the bus.” You say: “The bus left me behind.” [CDE checked this assertion with a first-language Zulu speaker, who agreed that this is the expression used.] It’s like time is a continuum without discrete segments. When we talk about globalization and South Africa, that’s the part that tends to be resistant to Anglo-American culture. . . . So the debate between the African part of our culture and globalizing influences seems to be less about aspiration to the liberty and freedom aspect of American culture, which is not held in the slightest dispute; it’s more about the American efficiency concept, and its relationship to concepts of time and value.

In short, while we have seen in this chapter that Anglo-American models of consumption are hegemonic in South Africa, it is much less certain that American models of production and time management have the same resonance. The following questions arise: Do South Africans really have a less committed work ethic than people in richer countries? Are South African conceptions of time different and somehow less conducive to efficiency and development? Do we work on ‘African time’ or is it that South African incentive structures and management systems are less effective than those in more productive countries? What is the proper weighting of these factors? In conclusion, two points emerge clearly: (1) Culture matters for development and democracy as much in South Africa as anywhere else. (2) For reasons of academic fashion and because of the sheer difficulty of doing the work in a rigorous way, South Africa has seen very little research on the precise ways in which culture and development interact. It is our hope that the questions raised in this chapter will go some way toward establishing a research agenda in this very important area. Notes 1. This paper is based on A. Bernstein, “Globalisation, Culture and Development. Can South Africa Be More Than an Offshoot of the West?” in Many Globalisations. Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, eds., P. Berger and S. Huntingt on (Oxford: 2002; and on the following papers commissioned by CDE: J. McCarthy, “Culture, Globalisation and Development in South Africa,” 2002; J.


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2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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McCarthy, “Successful Black Business Persons Background, Culture, Aspirations and Values,” 1999; J. McCarthy, “Hairdressers, Hairstyles and Popular Culture: South Africa and Cultural Globalisation,”1999; J. McCarthy, “Globalisation and Business Culture in South Africa,” 2000; J. McCarthy, “Globalisation, Marketing and Advertising in South Africa,” 1999; and P. Delius, “One Hand Clapping? The Interaction of Global and Indigenous Culture in South Africa,” 1999. L. Hartz, The Founding of New Societies (New York: 1964). B. Anderson and E. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). Saki Macozoma in “Africa and Asia: Issues for South Africa,” Development and Democracy 9 (need to keep Urban Foundation inDecember 1994): 67. Two open-ended questions were included in a nationwide sample survey in March 1999. This survey, the MARKDATA OMNIBUS, is a syndicated (multiclient) personal interview-based research instrument based on a multistage stratified sample of 2,250 South Africans eighteen and older. It offers complete coverage of all types of residential areas including deep rural traditional areas, commercial farming areas, areas of informal residence, townships, hostels, suburbs and inner city areas in all sizes of towns from metropolitan complexes to small villages. Interviews are conducted in the home languages of respondents by very experienced interviewers. The sample included 1,525 African respondents. J. McCarthy, “Culture Globalisation and Development in South Africa,” 2002, citing S. Masango, “Black Economic Empowerment, “ Human Resources Management, 10, no. 3 (1994). Gillian Godsell interviewed by Judith Hudson for CDE, March 17, 1999. Ibid. Census of the Union of South Africa, 1911: Report and Annexes (Pretoria: Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1913), 924–25; Patrick Johnstone, Operation World: The Day-to-Day Guide for Praying for the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1993), 493–98. R. Elphick and R. Davenport, eds., Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social and Cultural History (Cape Town: ,1997),7. J. J. Kritzinger, “The Numbers Game,” Africa Insight, 23, no. 4 (1993): at 248, and P. Johnstone, Operation World (Carlisle UK: OM Publishing, 1993), 494, cited in H. Pretorius and L. Jafta, “African Initiated Churches,” in Christianity in South Africa, eds., R. Elphick and R. Davenport, 211. Reliable AIC statistics do not exist and are frequently exaggerated, and the figures quoted here are from more reliable estimates. B. Sundkler, Zulu Zion and some Swazi Zionists (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 79, quoted in Pretorius and Jafta, 220. Pretorius and Jafta, 226. Finance Week, April 14, 2000. L. Harrison, “Culture Matters,” The National Interest ( Summer 2000). CDE In Depth, “Labour-Intensive Public Works: Towards Providing Employment for All South Africans Willing to Work,” April 2003. J. McCarthy, “Successful Black Business Persons Background, Culture, Aspirations and Values,” CDE, 1999.


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3 The Culture of Development in a Southwestern Nigerian Town ELISHA P. RENNE

In this chapter I examine changing cultural practices associated with fertility and local development in the small town of Itapa-Ekiti in southwestern Nigeria. As Ekiti Yoruba, people there have their own distinctive cultural practices and history, which relate the social ideal of raising children to adulthood with the development of their community. Indeed, the word for development, ìdàgbàsókè—literally, “the fact of growing up (sí òkè) to become an elder (di àgbà),” supports this connection. This interpretation of development, conceptualized as a type of growth that conflates economic and human development, has a particular moral cast.1 Those whom others have helped to “raise up” have a moral obligation to help family members (e.g., supporting elderly parents or educating junior siblings) and to contribute to improving their hometown. The reciprocity generated by being a responsible member in extended family groups, and the social networks formed through participation in neighborhood and improvement associations, represent two of the primary ways that townspeople constitute social capital—characterized by obligations and expectations of reciprocity, exchange of information, and social norms and sanctions.2 This interpretation of development also has implications for local understandings of the connection between fertility and progress. In

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order for a town to develop into a prosperous community, it must have many people. Sometimes referred to as a “wealth in people” system,3 this reliance on the labor, social networks, and collective action of many people is seen as necessary for local development. Yet this way of thinking runs counter to Western ideas about development: that having many people (high fertility) impedes (economic) development, while a smaller population promotes it. These two perspectives on population reflect the socioeconomic, political, and historical contexts in which they were formed. In southwestern Nigeria this local linkage between population and development is not resistant to change. Another element of Yoruba thought is the selective acceptance of certain innovations, associated with o . làjú (“civilization” or “enlightenment,” literally opening one’s eyes, often characterized as coming from outside communities or overseas). The widespread acceptance of Western education in southwestern Nigeria during the 1930s, which has since had significant consequences for this community, is an example of this selective innovation. Local men and women have made connections with the wider Nigerian society through Western education, which has linked them with national organizations (occupational, religious, and political), and has given them the skills to access federal development funds. Education has also contributed to a radical shift in intergenerational social relations and local political organization in many Yoruba towns. In Itapa-Ekiti, some younger people have revised their thinking about the need to have many children, in part because they sense themselves becoming “enlightened” by attending secondary school or university. For them, having fewer children in order to raise them well (i.e., providing sufficient education, healthcare, food, and clothing) is an important change that has implications not only for fertility, but also for the extent to which intracommunity ties are formed in the town and social capital is accrued locally. While having fewer children may reduce local social structural networks and support, for example, social capital at the microlevel, young people are also seeking to train their children so that through education and work they will be able to establish connections with state and international institutions, constituting social capital at the macrolevel. Their ability to change these patterns of local support and expanded social networks, however, has been undermined in various ways by contradictory federal policies and inadequate infrastructural


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support. Declining federal support for primary education (i.e., funds to pay teachers’ salaries and maintain school buildings) has reduced the synergy between local development efforts and federal programs. And as townspeople sense the lack of national support for community development, they have less faith in federal programs that encourage smaller families. This examination of the processes of cultural change and political– economic constraints is based on a nine-year case study of Itapa-Ekiti and illustrates the ways that townspeople address these contradictions as they seek to develop their town. First, I describe the town: its cultural and demographic characteristics and some examples of local development projects and the people who led them. Second, I discuss the process by which some younger townspeople are reevaluating cultural ideas and practices concerning childbearing, focusing on the practice of fostering (gbàgbàdo . o . mo . , literally, “raising another’s children as one’s own”), which is common in many West African societies. My analysis of this practice illustrates how social capital is constituted and managed at the local level. Through it, foster parents and foster children expand their social networks and establish relations of trust, reciprocity, and obligation, which they may draw upon in the future. Specifically, young children may live temporarily with a relative or close family friend, in town or outside of it. In return for food, clothing, housing, and sometimes schooling, foster children help with farm and domestic work.4 Some view this relationship as mutually beneficial: children acquire discipline working for foster parents who benefit from their labor and companionship. Some younger townspeople, however, see fostering as exploitative and as detrimental to the educational and moral development of a child. For them, having fewer children in order to raise them well by themselves is an important cultural change. In the third section I focus on primary education and the ways that social capital is or is not constituted at a different level of society—through broader community–state connections. During the 1990s the state was not able to make reciprocal contributions to local development institutions and to create and maintain credible public organizations that would “take up the slack” when townspeople could not rely on intracommunity ties. For many people, this situation reinforces their continued need for fostering and relatively high fertility, even as cultural ideas about kinship relations and family size are changing. I conclude by discussing some themes related


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to culture and development in Itapa, which may have more general applications. The Town of Itapa-Ekiti: Social and Demographic Characteristics The Ekiti Yoruba are an ethnic subgroup of the Yoruba-speaking people of southwestern Nigeria associated with Ekiti State, constituted in 1996. Itapa-Ekiti is located in a rural area about 40 km northeast of Ado-Ekiti, the state capital, with a de facto population of approximately 3,500 in 1992, although a 1991 de jure national census put it at 11,392.5 While located in a rural area, the town has some of the infrastructural amenities of urban life, built mainly through the townspeople’s own initiative. These include a secondary school and three primary schools, a post office, a police station, a maternity clinic, and a hospital, constructed jointly with a neighboring town. Because the town is located on a paved federal highway, townspeople have easy access to cities and markets in other parts of Nigeria. They also listen to radio and watch state television and videos when the intermittent electricity supply allows. Thus, people in Itapa-Ekiti are actively in touch with contemporary Nigerian society. The town has many children and fewer adults, and about twice as many women as men in the age group thirty-five to fifty-four. This pattern—a broad base of people under thirty with roughly even numbers of men and women, in a pyramid topped by a few old people—is common in many African countries,6 reflecting the fact that many adult men live and work outside of town while many older adult women with children remain there. Despite this pattern of out-migration, the ideal persists that prosperous sons and daughters of Itapa should build houses in their hometown, contributing to a situation where a relatively large percentage of houses are headed by women, later repopulated by retired men returning home. However, not all women household heads are heads by default. Some prosperous women—often traders and teachers—have built houses themselves, reflecting a certain income-based gender equality. While wealth can override gender hierarchies, the town does have a clear gender division of labor: generally, men farm and women trade. But two occupations engage both men and women: teaching and going to school. In 1992, 5 percent of men and 3 percent of women surveyed in the town were teachers, while 21 percent of men


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aged twenty to twenty-nine and 32 percent of women aged fifteen to twenty-nine described themselves as students. When I surveyed 305 women in 1997, I found that while only 17 percent were students, 39 percent were traders, 15 percent were seamstresses or hairdressers, 6 percent were farmers, and 3 percent were teachers. Almost 75 percent of the town’s 402 houses were headed by men; these are also the town’s largest households. Thus, households generally conform to the prevailing patrilineal ideology: men head lineages and households, and descent, including access to family property, titles, and names, is claimed through men. Most married women live in their husbands’ houses or compounds rather than those they have built themselves. Indeed, moving to one’s husband’s house constitutes a defining aspect of marriage, since marriage is no longer arranged and is often more informally contracted. At present, many young people see the woman’s move to her husband’s house (as well as bearing a child) as the preliminary step in establishing a long-term marital arrangement. In Itapa both women and men want children, although generational differences affect these preferences. In 1992 people over thirty-five thought six to eight children (or “whatever God gives”) was ideal, while those under thirty-five said they wanted four or five. These differences may reflect the impact of increased educational spending since the mid-1980s. The older men and women saw education as being for only a few; children were usually seen as hands to help on farms. Now men are expected to pay for all their children to attend school. This situation may explain their desire to have slightly fewer children (four rather than five) than their same-age women counterparts in 1992. Indeed by 1997, the number of children that women fifteen to nineteen were saying they wanted had also declined to four. The total fertility rate, calculated on the basis of my two surveys of women in 1992 and 1997, also declined over this period, from 6.3 to 5.2.7 This decline suggests that younger people are beginning to think differently about the connection between population and development. Development in Itapa-Ekiti In the early twentieth century, Itapa-Ekiti consisted of uncleared forest and undergrowth, with rocky escarpments offering the only large


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clearings. The town consisted of small settlements linked by narrow paths. Because of these forested areas, people living in one quarter of the town could not see those living in the others. Three developments have altered this picture. The first was the building of the main road. The initial phase, a colonial undertaking, took place during the early 1920s and involved the entire town in months of unremunerated labor. As they cleared space for the road, residents in neighboring quarters were able to see each other as part of one community, rather than as separate groups. The road also provided access for men to seek wage labor elsewhere in southwestern Nigeria, where they traveled to work on farms and building sites in the 1920s and 1930s. As these men returned home, they changed the town’s appearance in a second way. With the proceeds of their labor, they built new houses, separate from their old family compounds. A third change was the appearance of small churches, associated with the introduction of Christianity to Itapa. Church members then started schools, and Western education has since become a critical element in the town’s beliefs about proper parenting. A Father of Development That ideas about development are often expressed in terms of kinship relations is further exemplified by a founding father of development in Itapa, Chief Samuel Ayoola Dada, one of the town’s first educated sons. Chief Dada first attended the Methodist Primary School in Itapa in 1936, then Ifaki Methodist School, Government Teacher Training College, Ibadan, and University College, Ibadan (an affiliate of the University of London), where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in 1957 and a diploma in education. He became a successful teacher, a math textbook writer, and an education officer with the Western State Ministry of Education, as well as a leader in the national African Church.8 Yet he maintained his ties with his hometown, becoming the first president of the Itapa Progressive Union, a group of educated young men who worked together to develop the town. Through an extensive letter-writing campaign to government officials and through their own local fund-raising efforts, these men were instrumental in formulating and carrying out three major development projects in Itapa: the post office, the maternity clinic, and the ItapaOsin Secondary School. Chief Dada made use of his connections with


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provincial and federal education officials and also contributed substantially from personal funds. Dada may have been unique in contributing to his town’s development by providing funds to educate many of his fellow townspeople, much in the way that responsible older brothers support the education of their younger siblings, in a process referred to as a “sibling chain of assistance.”9 This assistance was not entirely disinterested: educated townspeople become political and economic allies. Yet his actions exemplify the Yoruba ideal of development—the introduction of beneficial innovation, which has both moral and material aspects. This particular innovation, Western education, had other consequences, discussed below, which contributed to a radical shift in intergenerational social relations and cultural practices in ItapaEkiti. Fostering and Cultural Change Fostering is one particular practice affected by this shift in thinking about intergenerational relations in the town. In Itapa, a child may be considered to be fostered if child-rearing responsibilities are met by someone other than the immediate biological mother or father, regardless of whether they are present in the town or even in the same household. In September 1991, I interviewed 115 foster parents, selected from my initial 1991 town census, about their relationships to the 166 foster children (aged one to nineteen) whom they were raising at that time. All but nine of these foster parents were women. The survey included questions about the number of children each parent was fostering, the age and sex of foster children, reasons for fostering, their relationship to their foster children, their own experiences of being fostered and fostering and their expectations of future help from foster children.10 The responses of foster parents indicated a preference for close kinship relationships between foster children and parents. Two thirds of the foster parents were grandmothers, raising the children of their own sons and daughters. Only one child was being fostered by a person who was not kin-related. Furthermore, these foster parents’ responses suggest that fostering was common in the town in the past, although considerably more children were fostered by other family members than by grandmothers, as is currently the case.


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Reasons for Fostering Children To begin with a pair of definitions: the term in-fostering means accepting children to raise; out-fostering is placing children with foster parents. Among those I interviewed in 1991, 33 percent of the girls who were in-fostered were being raised by grandmothers and aunts who needed their help; another 50 percent were taken in because their parents were divorced, deceased, away from home, or financially unable to raise them. These figures indicate that most in-fostering in Itapa occurs because parents need childcare. Help for older relatives was the second most common reason. Another important reason is increased access to educational opportunities through the sponsorship of foster parents. In the 1991 survey, education was given as a principal reason for out-fostering both girls (39 percent) and boys (23 percent). Nearly a third of boys (31 percent) opted to be out-fostered, reflecting their desire to both see the world and acquire further education or better job opportunities. However, some younger parents now feel that they need no longer sacrifice close parent–child ties in order for their children to gain educational advantages; most of the younger townspeople have been to school, many to the town’s secondary school. Barring death or divorce, they say, no one can raise their children better than they can themselves. These young people are recasting the meaning of fostering in interesting ways. In the past nearly everyone saw fostering as good because it provided older or infertile women with foster children and taught children discipline. Now some see it as bad because people “might not know the value of children”; that is, might mistreat them. Young people often believe that fostering leads to children being underfed and overworked and can hinder their access to education. Furthermore, the hope of many older townswomen that they will be rewarded in the future for the care they gave their foster children, is now sometimes reversed: rather than being rewarded, they may be criticized for giving inadequate care. As one younger woman explained: “Well you know these old people the care they give to children—we young people . . . don’t like that.” She gave an example: “as a parent when you wake up early in the morning, you must make sure you cater for your children, starting from taking care of their teeth and other things, but these old people they just give them food, as if their food is the only essential.” For some young people, the meaning of


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fostering—as something helpful to others who in turn help you and as a source of social capital—has changed. Some now see it as something negative, morally bolstering their decisions not to allow others to foster their children. This reevaluation of fostering also involves ideas about closeness and obligations to kin. Fostering to Blood Relations While some people disapproved of fostering, others felt that any mistreatment could be overcome by biological closeness, expressed in terms of blood. Several people who saw advantages in fostering said they would only foster their children out to close blood relations. What also appears to be changing is that some people are taking these kinship restrictions even further, stressing the importance of biological parents to the exclusion of all other blood relations. Previously, discipline was considered a primary reason for fostering. Now some younger people say that foster parents may either be too harsh with their charges or too lax. They also criticize grandmothers for lacking knowledge about personal hygiene. For them, being a “good parent” not only involves providing sufficient food, clothing, schooling, and emotional support, but also requires knowing about modern conventions of health and diet, learned through attendance at local primary and secondary schools. They believe that biological parents can strike the best balance in terms of discipline and affection in child rearing. If the standards for being a good parent are being reconsidered, children are also perceived as changing, requiring higher standards of care. Foster children may be seen as causing family problems or exacerbating family tensions with their accusations of maltreatment. In the past children were fostered to maintain family connections and to strengthen their own (or their parents’) social networks; now they may jeopardize these ties. Paradoxically, in order to maintain the tradition of good extended family relations, it may be better to keep children at home. A few people said that rather than foster a child, they would pay for the child to be raised by someone else. This practice of substituting cash for kinship relations, while it is one way to meet family obligations, may result in diminishing the formation of social capital at the community level. The idea of a shrinking circle of blood relations whom one can trust may reflect an attempt to reduce


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the traditional financial and moral responsibilities to a broad group of extended kin. It also indicates an appreciation of the economic and social constraints of child rearing. Rethinking Fostering, Kin Connections, and Fertility in Uncertain Times Thus Itapa women and men have contradictory opinions about fostering, depending on their age, gender, level of education, and socioeconomic status. Some younger people condemn foster parents for starving foster children; when food is sufficient, however, they may say that food is not the only thing. Or, they may cite their own experiences of mistreatment as foster children and then criticize as hypersensitive those contemporary children who run away from their foster homes. Alternately, older people may criticize the young, saying that o . làjú (“enlightenment,” “civilization”) or education has spoiled them, discouraging them from continuing time-tried practices such as fostering. Rather than overlook these contradictory statements, I suggest we see them as part of a strategy for dealing with the uncertainties of life in present-day Nigeria. From what young Itapa people are saying, it would appear that child fostering is on the decline.11 Yet people are hedging their bets. This is evident from a comparison of the responses of women in 1992 and 1997 to survey questions about their foster children. In 1997, more women aged thirty-five to forty-four were involved in fostering, as were a few aged twenty to twenty-nine. Parents continue to in-foster because of uncertainty, particularly because of family crises such as death or divorce, but also because of the uncertainties of everyday life, reflected in the unpaid salaries of schoolteachers, in food and gasoline shortages, and in the absence of pipe-borne water and, often, electricity in the town. Exactly how this uncertainty will affect future fostering patterns is unclear. Despite distinctions made between the care given by foster and biological parents, between the literate and the illiterate, even educated people who say they will not foster out their own children realize that fostering can be helpful in cases of parental death, divorce, and economic hardship and may be beneficial in the long term. Still, it seems that some people decided to have fewer children partly because they prefer not to foster out their own children. Along with


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the adverse moral connotations that some associate with out-fostering one’s children, some also hinted at an element of shame in doing so, as if it indicated financial inability to raise one’s children. Various comments by townspeople indicate that this ideal of limiting one’s family size to the number of children one can care for oneself is contributing to a lower fertility rate in the town. In practice, of course, people cannot always avoid premature death and serious illness. Nor can they afford to limit their exchanges with and obligations to others, particularly when they may need help from these people in the future. This complex of needs—to reduce obligations to a wide group of others while still maintaining the broadest possible social safety net—is driving these redefinitions of fostering, blood ties, and parenthood in seemingly contradictory but strategic ways.12 Thus the social capital accrued through fostering continues to be a vital component of social life, particularly useful during times of family crisis. As a form of social capital, fostering continues in Itapa-Ekiti, despite some young people’s disapproval, because of the practical, and sometimes unexpected, needs both for child care and child labor. Primary Education, Population, and Cultural Change The fact that many younger people want to bear only the number of children they can care for has been influenced by their own attendance at primary and secondary school. In Itapa, most learned these new standards at school, mainly by being taught how to care for their own bodies and clothing, manage relations with their parents, and keep their environment clean. Health care practices learned in school exemplify “good” and modern childcare and hence o . làjú (being “enlightened”), leading educated people to distinguish themselves from other townspeople without it. Government Policies Toward Primary Education Yet education in Itapa-Ekiti has not developed smoothly. Federal government support, in particular, has fluctuated according to changes in national policy and the economy. The three primary schools in Itapa were founded by church members, using their own and church


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funds, but they have all been licensed by the state and receive some government grants. In 1955, the Western regional government made funds available to build schools and train teachers. In 1976, the federal government introduced the Universal Primary Education (UPE) Act, which provided free primary education throughout Nigeria. But with the political instability of the 1980s and 1990s, the federal government’s role in primary school funding and institutional oversight varied considerably. At the local level, this meant various changes. For example, in 1986, the school calendar was revised to run from January to December; in 1991, it was changed back to the original schedule.13 In 1986, primary school teachers staged a national strike over lack of pay. In response, in 1988, the federal government established the National Primary Education Commission (NPEC) to provide funds for primary schools—and dissolved it in 1991, handing responsibility back to state and local governments.14 In Itapa, this instability has meant that primary school teachers have sometimes gone for months without pay and future programs and building maintenance cannot be planned. While the building and school maintenance represents the collaborative work and financial contributions of many local individuals, and thus contributes to their collective social capital, this collaborative work is not being reciprocated by federal, state, or local government institutions. Francis commented on the “vital role” that “the social capital inhering within communities and in school-community ties continues to play . . . in assuring the provision of educational services,” but sees it being eroded as parents watch the state fail to meet “its side of the social contract of universal primary education.” Furthermore, “changes in the social fabric may . . . be undermining the possibility of ‘social capital’ or ‘coproduction’ filling the growing gap.” As parents become more disillusioned, he says, and the more prosperous and influential move their children into private schools, “the very conditions for meaningful and constructive community participation are being undermined.”15 Not surprisingly, this situation has led primary school personnel in Itapa-Ekiti to draw upon local resources. Among other strategies, they are implementing school fees, collecting payments from parents for special projects, and soliciting funds from graduates. Residents have also built two private primary schools in the town. These private schools charge fees that support the teaching staff and building


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maintenance, but they help limit primary education to those who can afford it and undercut rather than foster the local ideal of development as something that benefits the entire community. Rethinking Population and Development Another set of changing ideas about community development revolves around family planning. In 1988, the federal government introduced a national policy that supported limiting population growth as a way to better develop the nation. In the same year, President Ibrahim Babangida proposed that “four [children]-is-enough” for each woman, lending official legitimacy to those who were thinking of having fewer children. A later Ministry of Health campaign, “Space Your Children,” aimed to ensure the health of mother and child and also limit the number of children. Babangida’s proposal generated considerable debate and also exacerbated national north–south tensions. In Itapa, reactions to this policy ranged from condemnation to enthusiastic acceptance. Those who accepted it saw it as a sensible response to the expense of raising children. A male teacher wished the government had “made it two children and not four,” pointing out the expense of education: “here it is accepted by all that a child must have education and to send a child to school takes much from the parents.” Others argued that since the government had done nothing to help them rear their children, it had no right to make such recommendations. A woman trader held that “there should not be any policy as regards the number of children. Anyone can stop after two children and some can stop after six children. God should allow individuals to bear children according to their resources.” While these two people disagree on the government’s role in deciding family size, they do agree on the need to have smaller families in order to care adequately for children, including providing them with an education. Their disagreement on the “four is enough” proposal reflects their views of the state’s role in population matters and on the connection between population and development. For the woman trader, it is civilization (o . làjú), not the federal government, that has led people to have smaller families. Yet while having smaller families may be a result of o . làjú, it is not part of development (ìdàgbàsókè). It is not an improvement, socially or economically, in people’s lives or community. Alternately, the male teacher views the policy of “four


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is enough” as both o . làjú and ìdàgbàsókè, since limiting family size will lead to better-educated citizens who can best bring development to the town. These different positions also reflect these two people’s distinctive backgrounds, with the teacher, a government worker, supporting the policy and the trader—a self-employed person—rejecting it. They also reflect the weakness in state–society relations and local people’s sense that they must rely on their own initiative and social networks. The weakness of state–society relations also affects the way people reassess the practice of fostering and its potential impact on family size. Caldwell has argued that extended family involvement in child rearing, including fostering, supports high levels of fertility by spreading the economic burdens of raising children.16 This raises the question of what effects, if any, decreased fostering would have on fertility levels, given the perception that fostering children (except in crises) reveals poor parenting. In a preliminary analysis of my 2002 survey, I found that young people in the town are limiting the size of their families and having only those they can care for, without resorting to fostering, although the National Population Commission reported considerably larger-sized families.17 Still, fostering remains an option, as the social capital accrued through these community-based social relations is too valuable to relinquish entirely. Education, Social Capital, and Cultural Change The popular understanding of development in Itapa-Ekiti incorporates ideas about responsibility and reciprocity, emotions and interests. Contributing to their town’s progress is a source of pride as well as a source of future benefits—for themselves and their children. These attitudes constitute a form of social capital, as reflected in a network of local personal ties that revolve around age-related clubs, church affiliations, and school attendance as well as extended family relations—supported by fostering, marriage arrangements, and funeral rituals. This network of ties contributes to the public good of the town as a whole. But creating and maintaining these intracommunity ties of “embeddedness”18 requires substantial time, effort, and funds, including membership in clubs, attendance at funerals, and foster care of extended family members’ children. Thus, network ties can sometimes constrain the energy and cash available for in-


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vestments outside the immediate community and family. Indeed, as young people increasingly emphasize biological parenting over fostering, they are trying to reduce their obligations and expectations of reciprocity to a smaller group of immediate kin. Still, this way of thinking about development does not preclude establishing social ties outside the town, creating a form of social capital through “autonomous” extracommunity ties.19 People who work away from home learn new ideas and bring them back. Townspeople have begun to encourage “hometown days,” annual day-long celebrations to draw back townspeople whose extracommunity ties may be taking precedence over intracommunity ones. Through these efforts, hometown residents seek to support local development projects, through outside funding, knowledge, and social connections. The social capital necessary for local development, constituted through intracommunity and extracommunity social ties, is available in some abundance, as is evident from the many projects accomplished in Itapa and throughout the region.20 What appears to be lacking is another dimension of social capital, which Woolcock described as “state–society relations” or as “synergy—defined as the ‘ties that connect citizens and public officials across the public–private divide,’”21 Because the federal government cannot reciprocate the efforts of local people in building and maintaining local primary schools, by regularly paying teachers’ salaries and predictably managing primary education, it undermines the local reevaluation of cultural practices such as fostering. It has also contributed to the formation of private schools, which in turn diminish the social capital created at the community level.22 While local PTA groups may lobby local government officials to pay teachers’ salaries on time, the federal government is unable to administer and distribute state funds, suggesting that parents’ complaints will not be answered quickly.23 This weakness in state–society relations with respect to primary education has implications for the credibility of other government initiatives as well. Social Capital, the State, and the Culture of Development Itapa’s story suggests several lessons about culture and development in sub-Saharan Africa, and perhaps beyond. We can generalize about the kinds of cultural ideals and practices that support development in its various forms by considering the four different types of social


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capital discussed here: intracommunity ties, extracommunity linkages, state–society relations, and institutional capacity. To begin with intracommunity ties, one might look for cultural practices that encourage people to participate in townwide endeavors rather than simply stressing familial or individual interests. The social ties and trust fostered through intracommunity group cooperation and exchanges can provide individuals with a shared set of development interests to act upon. A community that successfully completes one development project may in turn support others, as people see the benefits of their efforts and take pride in their town’s progress. This unity of purpose is strengthened if cultural mechanisms let people deal with complaints about inequitable distribution of local development funds and the misuse of political authority. Alternately, strong intracommunity ties of trust, obligation, and exchange are not always positive, as Woolcock has noted.24 When community pressures on individuals limit their ability to expand their social networks or when community interests are privileged above national development efforts, local social ties and identities may have a negative effect. For example, ethnic rivalries and a sense of inequitable distribution of development-related funds may lead people to privilege intracommunity ties above larger national interests. Furthermore, pride in the development of one’s own community may lead some political leaders in district or state capitals to hoard federal development funds intended for an entire district or state. Additionally, individuals who benefit from intracommunity cooperation in building primary and secondary schools may obtain the benefits of Western education in local schools and then seek better opportunities in urban centers or overseas, without reciprocating at home. However, many individuals who benefit from intracommunity cooperation and development do repay their obligations. Where cultural ideals support establishing extracommunity linkages as well as maintaining intracommunity ties, an individual may move from a hometown but feel obliged to continue these connections. The social capital associated with these extracommunity connections may be considerable, providing local development initiatives in several ways. Individuals who leave their home communities for education, for trade, or for agricultural work may return with knowledge of new technologies, with economic resources (both cash and items such as new tools), and with new ideas about social and spiritual relations. They may also use social networks established through these


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extracommunity linkages to facilitate connections between state institutions and officials, such as rural development officers, and local people who might not otherwise know about or understand program requirements. The extent to which a culture is receptive to ideas “from outside” and applies these ideas to its own circumstances is another general factor to consider in assessing the relationship between culture and community development. The Itapa study shows that acquiring Western education—developing human capital in the form of individuals’ skills and capacities—is key to taking full advantage of these extracommunity networks. Elsewhere in Nigeria and West Africa other forms of learning through apprenticeships or through Islamic education may help people make these links. However, having some Western education—including literacy in a national language as well as math competence—enables individuals to engage with local, state, and federal government officials, learn more about government programs, participate in government affairs, and question government policies in national newspapers and journals. State–society relations are thus affected by the extent to which citizens have acquired some form of education, particularly Western education. Indeed, the provision of primary education— through building and maintaining schools and paying teachers—is one of the main areas where community and state development interests intersect. Locally generated social capital associated with educational resources is complemented by federal projects that are consistent and reliable; they contribute to a working relationship between citizens and state that supports long-term cooperation and development. Furthermore, when state development projects, whether for education or infrastructure and health, coincide with local cultural development interests and practices, community members are more likely to contribute time and resources. Local people are also more likely to support new government initiatives such as population policies and the registration of births and deaths when they see that their government is equitably and reliably contributing to improvements in their community. The establishment and maintenance of these state–society synergies is also related to state institutions’ capacity to provide realistic and sustainable programs. The cultural ideals that support consistency and accountability in institutional practice sustain the trust and reciprocity of citizens who feel that their governments are working in their best interests. In a comparative study of social capital and


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institutional performance in Uganda and Botswana, Widner notes several factors to consider in evaluating government effectiveness. These include output: the specific programs that a government sponsors, the efficiency with which it administers programs, its responsiveness to citizen concerns, its equitable distribution of development funds, and its policy consistency.25 When these elements of institutional performance are absent or inconsistent, local and national development possibilities are undermined. In Itapa, the inconsistencies of institutional practice regarding education and the apparent inability of political leaders to control the equitable and efficient distribution of federal education funds have diminished the social capital accrued by local people working together to support their local schools. My focus has been on the process by which the residents of a small rural town in southwestern Nigeria are reevaluating their perceptions of social relations and cultural practices relating to fertility and development. My findings suggest that while collaborative local development projects have helped improve the quality of their lives and led to a modest decline in fertility rates, the vital importance of maintaining social ties within the community—in the face of considerable political and economic uncertainty—has supported the continuing practice of fostering and relatively high fertility. Thus, while younger, educated townspeople are reassessing cultural thinking about kinship relations—about fostering, and about who is the best parent and who should be considered “close kin”—the political and economic context are also vital parts of this picture. During the period when I conducted my research, however, the federal political context changed dramatically. At present, a democratically elected government is in place and Nigeria’s new leader, President Olusegun Obasanjo, is supporting renewed efforts by the federal government to fund universal primary education through the Universal Basic Education program. While the economic situation in towns like Itapa-Ekiti has recently begun to improve and free primary health care is again available in the local clinic, electricity continues to be an elusive commodity. Furthermore, in this oil-producing nation, lack of functioning refineries leads to recurring gasoline shortages, affecting the availability of public transportation. The town still has no reliable telephone service. The infrastructural support which might allow townspeople to reduce their reliance on the labor of children—either their own or fostered children—is only marginally present. While the current national leaders may have intended to make


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such improvements, they do not necessarily have the means, making it difficult for Itapa and other towns and cities in Nigeria to repair a devastated infrastructure. As the Yoruba saying goes, Igba wo ni omo naa a le rin (“It takes a period of time for a child to know how to walk”). Similarly, development does not start in a day. Experience in Itapa-Ekiti shows that local people can draw on the social capital they derive from their intra- and extracommunity ties. If, in addition, they sense support from federal officials—even if this simply consists of a period of political and economic stability and bringing some institutional coherence and integrity to federal and state institutions—these joint efforts may go some way toward addressing the development dilemmas of towns like Itapa-Ekiti. Notes 1. J. D. Y. Peel, “Olaju: A Yoruba Concept of Development,” The Journal of Development Studies 14, no. 2 (1978): 139–65, at 141. 2. J. S. Coleman, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): S95–S120, at S199; also see J. Widner with A. Mundt, “Researching Social Capital in Africa,” Africa 68, no. 1 (1998): 1–24. 3. J. Guyer, “Wealth in People, Wealth in Things—Introduction,” Journal of African History 36, no. 1 (1995): 83–90. 4. E. Renne, Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press/Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 5. There is a considerable discrepancy between 1991 national census results and the figures from my own 1991 census. According to the national (essentially de jure) census results, the town’s population is about three times that of my de facto census figures. Depending on how people are counted, as de jure or de facto residents, and when a census is taken, the numbers included in a town’s population may vary considerably. This discussion is based on de facto population figures from my 1991 town census. 6. P. O. Olusanya, “Population with the Context of Family Structure and Function,” in Developments in Introductory Sociology, eds. P. O. Olusanya and ‘Lai Olurode (Ikeja, Nigeria: John West Publications, 1988), 77–100, at 88. 7. The total fertility rate (TFR) is the number of children a woman is expected to bear in her lifetime, based on current age-specific fertility rates. These figures for Itapa-Ekiti are similar to the findings of two Nigerian Demographic Health Surveys, conducted in 1990 (TFR = 6.011) and in 1999 (TFR = 5.15). See National Population Commission of Nigeria, Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey 1999 (Calverton, MD: National Population Commission and ORC/Macro, 2000); and Nigeria, Federal Office of Statistics, and Demographic and Health Surveys/Macro Systems, Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey 1990 (Lagos and Columbia, MD: Federal Office of Statistics and IRD/Macro International, 1992).


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8. S. A. Dada, 2000. The Struggles of My Life: An Autobiography (Akure, Nigeria: Aowa Press, 2000). 9. J. C. Caldwell, “The Economic Rationality of High Fertility: An Investigation Illustrated with Nigerian Survey Data,” Population Studies 31, no. 1 (1977): 5–27, at 20. 10. For details on this study see Renne 2003, appendix I. 11. Comparing research conducted in the state capital, Ado-Ekiti, in 1991, with survey data collected in Ibadan in 1973, Caldwell et al. found “no drop in the proportion of families fostering out at least one child, but a major decline in the proportion of all children fostered, from 29 to 14 per cent,” J. C. Caldwell, I. O. Orubuloye, and P. Caldwell, “Africa’s New Kind of Fertility Transition,” Population and Development Review 18, no. 2 (1992): 211–42, at 227. 12. J. Goody, “Futures of the Family in Rural Africa,” in “Rural Development and Population: Institutions and Policy,” eds. G. McNicoll and M. Cain. Population and Development Review Suppl. 15 (1990): S119–S44, at 123. 13. Ayo Akinkuotu, Ayo, “The Great Decline,” Tell 18 (1992): 12–18, at 17 14. Ibid., 17. 15. P. Francis, Hard Lessons: Primary Schools, Community, and Social Capital in Nigeria, World Bank Technical Paper No. 420 (Washington, D.C.: IBRD/World Bank, 1998), 56. 16. Caldwell, “Economic Rationality,” 91. 17. Nigeria, National Population Commission, Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey 2003: Preliminary Results. Calverton MD: National Population Commission and ORC/Macro, 2003. 18. M. Woolcock, “Social Capital and Economic Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis and Policy Framework,” Theory and Society 27, no. 2 (1998): 151–208, at 162. 19. Ibid., 164. 20. A. Adedeji and O. Otite, eds., Nigeria: Renewal from the Roots? (London: Zed Books, 1997). 21. Woolcock, “Social Capital,”168, 170. 22. Francis, Hard Lessons, 56. 23. Adelani Olaniyi, “Do Something . . . Fast!” Tell 40 (1993): 24–25. 24. Woolcock, “Social Capital,”158. 25. Widner with Mundt, “Researching Social Capital,” 18–20.


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Part II Confucian Countries


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4 China’s Cultural Renaissance TU WEIMING

In the mid-1980s, a small group of Beijing scholars set out to revive the study of traditional Chinese culture. Colleagues throughout China helped identify centers of learning in the Chinese humanities at major universities. Academicians, intellectuals, editors, and publishers offered to help establish an institution that could be independent in its finances, administration, and curriculum. Thus they began the Academy of Chinese Culture, which would facilitate research and teaching in literature, history, and philosophy. Guided by the principle that a tiny but flowing stream is better than a short-lived torrent, the academy began with a lecture series offered by visiting speakers. One inconspicuous ad in a national daily generally devoted to cultural matters attracted hundreds of attendees from Beijing and all over China. Students in their thirties and forties traveled long distances to stay for the entire course. Though many were sponsored by their schools, some spent their own savings, up to two months’ salary. One apparent reason for the academy’s appeal was the willing participation of famous scholars like Liang Shuming and Zhang Dainian, who had been active as public figures before the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949. Liang’s confrontation with Mao Zedong had made him a celebrity, and he was greatly respected for his decision to remain silent, which the public interpreted as a courageous protest. In sharp contrast with those who followed 65


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the party line, either by choice or by coercion, these few masters who reemerged after the Cultural Revolution were admired, if not worshipped. But the single most important factor in the academy’s popularity was its timeliness in addressing a deep yearning among intellectuals. Inspired by its success, other Beijing groups were formed. One, called Toward the Future and Culture, led by young scholars, had ambitious publication plans—and the public responded enthusiastically. Within a few years, their publishing program substantially overshadowed any government efforts to present its ideological position in the print media. A new generation of public intellectuals found an open forum to express their cultural concerns, which had been silenced during the Cultural Revolution. Their ideas resonated powerfully with younger people, especially those entering college from 1977 to 1979. For example, Li Zehou, a “scholarly star,” gave lectures at various campuses to overflowing audiences. Many students had copies of his widely read books on Chinese aesthetics and German philosophy. The message was clear: life without intellectual reflection is not worth living, and tradition has much to offer. Many other scholars, including compatriots from abroad, were welcomed as cultural transmitters. Students were thirsty for information, insight, and wisdom. Everyone who encountered this group of eager learners was impressed, even visitors from abroad. The beginnings of what historians later called a cultural fever (wenhuare) signaled a fundamental change in the ideological discourse, marking a new era in the value-orientation of Chinese intellectuals. Since the “superstructure” profoundly shaped the style of governance, discussions on cultural matters could have profound implications for politics. Those in charge of the correct line of socialism saw the need for socialist reeducation. But the traumatic memories of the Cultural Revolution were still fresh, and Deng’s “reform and opening” policy had just been put in place. They had little room to launch a national campaign. In fact, one abortive attempt to ward off foreign (mainly American) influence failed so miserably that the leftists dared not take much further action. The Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983 was prompted by an ideological struggle within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Reform-minded intellectuals promoted the idea of a neutral forum where sensitive ideological questions could be openly discussed; meanwhile the leftist cadres were determined to keep a


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firm grip on the principles that provided a rationale for party authority. The centenary of Karl Marx’s birth provided the occasion for a direct confrontation. Zhou Yang gave a provocative speech, referring to Marxist humanism and alienation in a socialist society, and thoroughly reassessing the Marxist legacy and the nature of a socialist country. Party ideologues, including Deng Liqun and Hu Qiaomu were incensed. This renaissance had been a long time coming. Intellectuals were regularly thwarted through the 1950s and 1960s, and especially during the Cultural Revolution. So they welcomed Deng’s “opening” policy, only to see their hopes squashed again after the events of Tienanmen Square in 1989. To understand the roots of the Cultural Renaissance, we must review this history. For more than three decades, ideology had played a pivotal role in party discipline, social control, economic policy, and diplomacy in the People’s Republic of China. Debates on the correct socialist line were never mere philosophical exercises. When a critical issue was raised, the agenda, the process, and the conclusion were all taken seriously, often resulting in a restructuring of the party leadership, as well as purges, campaigns, reformulations of developmental priorities, and realignment of foreign relationships. The PRC’s history is marked by these debates and their profound consequences. The Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, and the Reform and Opening Policy are outstanding examples. Of course we can interpret these momentous events primarily in terms of intraparty conflict, as personality clashes atop the political hierarchy. The purges of Gao Gang, Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao, and Liu Shaoqi can all be explained as resulting from power struggles. But we also need to understand the ideology, and how people used it, to thoroughly grasp the power struggles. Certain rituals defined how they exercised power. Mao’s skillful manipulation of his ideological authority is a clear example of how an apparently ritualistic performance could have brutal effects. Mao and the Cultural Revolution Mao deliberately chose the word cultural to characterize the revolution he personally launched. Of course it was a power struggle. He was not satisfied with his diminishing role in determining China’s


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future; perhaps he felt humiliated by his status as the old man behind the scenes. As a cunning military strategist, Mao certainly knew how to manipulate the situation to his advantage, and how to use the “Gang of Four” adroitly. Still, much of his influence came through the idealism he stimulated and the cultural values he advocated. How else could the Chinese youth, together with an army of willing intellectuals, have disrupted the daily lives of millions of ordinary Chinese citizens for years? Unquestionably intellectuals, especially those in the humanities, suffered the most during the Cultural Revolution. They were supposed to provide inspiration for the young and transmit cultural values to future generations. Widely recognized as shaping the intellectual ethos, they influenced all matters of culture: history, philosophy, literature, fine arts, music, theater, entertainment. But Mao feared for the moral idealism and cultural values he had tried hard to instill in the Chinese, which he saw as eroding. He also saw that his image as a revolutionary leader was tarnished and that the Chinese had virtually abandoned the socialist vision he hoped would guide the PRC to become a major player in international politics. Thus Mao felt acutely impotent and resentful. He later confessed, in interviews with Red Guards, that he felt helpless in Beijing and, after much deliberation and planning, launched his revolution in Shanghai. True to his conviction that culture mattered, he began his revolution with the printed word: Yao Wenyuan published an article attacking Wu Han, an eminent historian and the vice mayor of Beijing.1 Wu had written a play based on the story of Hai Rui (1514–87), a loyal and righteous scholar-official of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) who was dismissed by a foolish tyrannical emperor. Ostensibly a historical drama, the play was a thinly veiled critique of Mao’s dictatorship. Its insinuation that Mao had unfairly ousted the patriotic marshal Peng Dehuai was unmistakable and widely appreciated by Beijing audiences. Mao encouraged rebellious students to challenge university authorities by personally writing a large-character poster to support the seething discontent at Peking University. Soon waves of angry antiestablishment youth engulfed university campuses and secondary schools; their actions eventually affected every cultural institution and civic organization, even the party hierarchy. The president, Liu Shaoqi, was publicly humiliated, imprisoned, and eventually died. It is farfetched to assert that Mao single-handedly manufactured the


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Cultural Revolution, but he was certainly instrumental in releasing the destructive forces that demolished the existing order. Those destructive forces were irrational and explosive, a far cry from moral idealism and cultural values. Indeed, the Cultural Revolution has been condemned as the most devastating assault on culture in Chinese history. Under the slogan of eradicating old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits, youth were called upon to eliminate all traces of the past in order to build a brand new socialist country. Mao’s ambition was to create a brave new world from the ashes of the feudal past. He defined his utopian vision in terms of social practice, class struggle, mass line, and continuous revolution. The most blatant destruction developed from his concerted effort to stir young men and women to embrace his “revolutionary romanticism.” Ironically, it was by imposing his idiosyncratic notion of culture on the cumulative tradition of the Chinese people that Mao made his Cultural Revolution so sinister and devastating. Maoism derived much of its strength from the personality cult, a combination of political, ideological, and moral authority unmatched in Chinese history. In a sense, Mao embodied emperor, intellectual, and teacher, and it was no accident that he opted for “teacher” (daoshi) as the proper designation of his legacy. He hoped that the revolution to educate truly committed Marxist-Leninist-Maoists would continue for generations. He insisted that his comrades never forget the necessity of class struggle in social transformation. And he demanded that all members of the CCP, through persistent practice, implement the strategy of the mass line in their daily routines. He advocated, in essence, that his thought, an indigenized Marxist-Leninism, should play a central role in shaping China’s future. Thus the Cultural Revolution was a colossal attempt to realize Mao’s dream. After the Cultural Revolution Many China watchers wonder why Mao’s towering presence disappeared so quickly after his death in 1976, even though his followers made a massive attempt to promote his thought through publications such as the ubiquitous Little Red Book. Today it is hard to imagine a godlike Mao towering over more than a million worshipping Red Guards at Tiananmen Square on August 18, 1966. Though it is simplistic, one explanation is that Maoism was ultimately un-Chinese:


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he failed in his radical attempt to totally alter the Chinese mentality. But when Mao’s thought collapsed as the guiding principle for China’s modernization, it gave the Chinese an opportunity to pursue other cultural directions. Another suggestion is that Mao’s leadership was effective during the revolutionary stage, but became outmoded during the phase of economic development. This observation assumes that ideology reflects the mode of production. But for decades Maoism had largely determined the direction of the economy as well as the polity. Furthermore, when Mao’s ideology was abandoned in practice, if not in rhetoric, during the “reform and opening” period, it was because Deng Xiaoping had carefully crafted a policy change. But no amount of political will or social engineering is powerful enough to defeat the cultural norms ingrained in the habits of the heart. The principle of struggle and its attendant ideas of conflict and contradiction are incompatible with the Chinese predilection for harmony, compromise, and consensus. Through tough-minded socialist education and brainwashing, Mao seemed to have successfully restructured the traditional Chinese value system. Building upon the iconoclastic mentality of the May Fourth (1919) generation, he was particularly effective in marginalizing intellectuals. Worker, farmer, and soldier now overshadowed the once-revered scholar. Deng’s Opening Policy Thus Deng made a crucial decision in his “reform and opening” policy: he rejected the idea and practice of struggle and reestablished the prestige of the intellectual. The policy simply dismissed Maoist radicalism in favor of a moderate, gradual, and sustained program of development. This was a definitive departure from the dominant ideology of the PRC and a significant return to traditional cultural, specifically Confucian, norms. The slogan “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was a deliberate attempt to reintegrate traditional Chinese values into socialist nation-building. It allowed for a wide variety of interpretations. Deng’s policy greatly expanded the public space for a relatively free exchange of ideas, giving the impression that scholarly inquiries were no longer limited. Never in the history of the PRC had college students and professors felt so free to explore alien territories in tra-


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ditional Chinese and modern Western thought. Though the remaining Maoists complained that Deng’s policy allowed traditional and Western influences to corrupt the purity of the socialist line, their protest was short-lived. Preoccupied with managing the market economy, the political leaders, notably Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang, permitted, and sometimes even encouraged, more liberal thought. Their preoccupation explains the abrupt discontinuation of the “Anti-Spiritual Pollution” campaign in 1983, but the changing ethos was the main factor that finally dampened all efforts to rekindle the revolutionary fire. Cultural Renaissance In retrospect, the events of the mid-1980s marked the beginning of a cultural renaissance. Many classical texts were reprinted, often with explanations and commentaries. Works in foreign languages, particularly English and Japanese, were translated. The publishing industry boomed; readers grew in numbers and taste, in a seemingly insatiable demand for new information. The term culture (wenhua) had long been restricted to formal education: “he has culture” was the functional equivalent of “he is educated.” Now, the eminent historian Pang Pu observed, although the term hardly existed during the first three decades of the PRC (1949–79), in the 1980s it became it one of the most frequently used expressions in the print media.2 This was a remarkable change. In earlier decades, ideological correctness had been predicated on behavior, attitude, and belief. Class and social background were major factors determining one’s upbringing and educational and career opportunities. Cultural competence was inconsequential; indeed, cultural sophistication was often condemned as indicating a bourgeois mentality. The revolutionary spirit expressed itself in asceticism, sacrifice, dedication, courage, and selflessness. Cultivated civility was perceived as a sign of weakness. Culture as an independent category was either ignored or criticized. Still, this very assault on culture as civility and fine taste demonstrated a radically different sense of culture defined in terms of struggle, mass line, and continuous revolution. The purpose of the Cultural Revolution was precisely to destroy the values that the cultural renaissance, first emerging in the 1960s, had endeavored to preserve, restore, or re-create. Mao knew full well


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that traditional Chinese thought, especially Confucianism, and Western ideas, especially liberalism, presented grave threats to his version of socialism. In addition to being a ruthless exercise of power, his violent reaction at the expense of the intelligentsia and the party was also a desperate attempt to defend his antitraditional and antiWestern cultural stance. The fight over culture was fierce because it was seen as a life-and-death struggle to control the Chinese mind. In sharp contrast to Mao’s revolutionary romanticism, Deng recognized how necessary the market economy was for China’s modernization. The marketplace of ideas was an unintended consequence of the “reform and opening” policy, but the intellectual community welcomed it like springtime after a long and bitter winter. In the 1950s, the proposal to “let a hundred flowers bloom” had tricked the docile intellectuals into voicing strong criticisms against party authority— with devastating effects for their careers and lives. Now the flowers were blooming by default, if not by design. In contrast to the 1950s, the revival of Confucian humanism in the 1980s was the fruit of a well-coordinated multiyear project supported by the State Education Commission, which later became the Ministry of Education. Led by Fang Keli, a professor at Nankai University, it involved eighteen universities and almost fifty scholars and focused on the ten scholars most instrumental in revitalizing Confucianism in that century. Five of them had been active in mainland China during the Republican era (1919–49); the other five continued the mission of representing Confucian humanism as a modern spiritual resource in Hong Kong and Taiwan during the first three decades of the PRC (1949–79). The original aim was to publish three books on each group, including primary sources, interpretations, and criticism. In time, scores of essays, articles, monographs, and book-length studies helped to develop a vibrant Confucian discourse within the intellectual communities in Cultural China (Wenhua Zhongguo). It took at least two generations of Confucian thinkers to thoroughly reformulate the tradition in response to the challenge of the modern West. They did not defend the tradition by resisting corrosive foreign influences. Nor did they passively submit to the “cultural imperialism” of Western powers. They criticized several aspects of modern Western mentality, including its anthropocentrism, callous rationalism, and possessive individualism, but they wholeheartedly embraced such Enlightenment values as liberty, justice, rationality, due process of law, human rights, and the dignity of the individual. Arguably, all


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the major Confucian thinkers since the Opium War of 1839 considered the challenge of the modern West in terms of much more than military might, economic strength, and institutional supremacy. Some, including Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, felt the ideas and values of Western culture were particularly worth imitating. Thus they were dedicated both to revitalizing Confucian theory and practice, and to Westernizing and modernizing the Confucian tradition— work they saw as necessary if the Confucian tradition was to survive. Confucian scholars in Japan and Korea, and among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia also participated in a project originally titled New Confucianism Abroad. Singapore took the lead in incorporating Confucian ethics into its primary and secondary school curricula, and established the Institute of East Asian Philosophy to facilitate Confucian studies worldwide. Scholars from across East Asia as well as North America and Europe explored topics such as Confucian traditions in East Asian modernity, the modern transformation of Confucian humanism, the contemporary relevance of Confucian ethics, and the possible Confucian responses to liberal and feminist critiques. One key area of discussion was the links between Confucian ethics and the economic performance of Japan and the four minidragons: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Taking a Weberian perspective, some asked whether an “elective affinity” between the Confucian value orientation and work ethic could help explain the rise of the capitalist spirit in East Asia. Seen more broadly, the controversy was over the role of culture in economic development.3 These developments outside, but near, the PRC engaged intellectuals within China. The “reform and opening” policy had aroused their curiosity about the international scene, and experiences abroad fascinated them further. In fact, Deng’s 1978 visit to Japan may have been the single most important event prompting him to alter China’s development strategy. Mainland scholars now reconsidered their iconoclastic attitude toward Chinese tradition in general and the Confucian legacy in particular. It would seem natural for PRC scholars, encouraged by Deng’s policy and inspired by vibrant Confucian studies abroad, to automatically recognize the significance of traditional Chinese culture, especially Confucian humanism, as they engaged in this new exploration. The actual situation was far more intriguing. Though they had personally experienced irrational iconoclasm during the Cultural


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Revolution, they were now less interested in retrieving China’s traditional cultural resources than in learning from the capitalist West. Western liberalism trumped Confucian humanism. But the intellectuals were powerless to critique the official ideology, given the struggles within the party to redefine its direction. The CCP leadership, sensing its legitimacy was at stake, was extremely cautious in denouncing Maoism. Criticism of Mao amounted to a whitewashing of his colossal mistakes, and indicated clearly that no fundamental ideological change was in the wind. Thus, political reform was impossible. The party insisted that China remain a socialist country under the guidance of Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism. Purists took advantage of this dilemma and challenged the liberalminded reformers in the most sensitive ideological arenas. In fact the purists became the key party ideologues, belligerently asserting the supremacy of socialism and condemning the corruptive capitalist culture. Armed with what the influential essayist Lu Xun had referred to as the “soft knife,” they attacked the liberal-minded intellectuals in the print and other media. Deng’s strategy of developing a market economy but resisting the capitalist culture was merely wishful thinking, they said. Unwilling to distance himself from the party ideologues, Deng held to an intellectually feeble but politically strong Maoist rhetoric. In 1987,with Deng’s blessing, the ideologues launched a campaign against bourgeois liberalization (ziyouhua). But it was so much in conflict with the emerging ethos that it alienated and angered both the intellectuals and the students. The Confucian revival was caught in the dispute between socialists and liberals. From the socialist perspective, it promoted patriotism, and was thus a useful weapon against foreign influence, but it could also undermine the party’s ideological authority. From the liberal perspective, it might evoke nationalist sentiments at the expense of Deng’s “reform and opening” policy; but it might also have the power to completely subvert the Maoist philosophy of struggle. However, intellectuals saw the potential for fruitful interaction among socialism, liberalism, and Confucianism. For a while, it seemed that the 1987 campaign would be as short-lived as the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign of 1983. Furthermore, they saw signs of free and open intellectual interchange, which could lead to a more hospitable environment for public reasoning. But the situation took a dramatic turn in the late 1980s, as students became impatient and demanded rapid political reform.


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Several earlier events and forces led to the Tiananmen tragedy of 1989. On April 5, 1976, also at Tiananmen Square, a spectacular outpouring of adoration for the recently deceased Premier Zhou Enlai had signaled the public interest in self-expression. Experiments with campus elections in the early 1980s added to the emerging trend of student activism. Moreover, students had persistently demanded freedom of speech (yanlun ziyou). This was the context in which the liberal-minded intellectuals, encouraged by the students’ enthusiasm, opted for a radical approach to political reform. Offering a vision of the future, they took a strong stand against both present and past, saying China’s feudal past had delayed its modernization and may have helped the socialist regime to consolidate its authoritarian control. Thus they saw that the only way to fundamentally change the current situation was to learn from the West. This pristine liberal vision was powerfully expressed in a six-part television series, The River Elegy. Aired twice nationwide to millions of viewers, the series sensationalized the message that if China was to survive, it must replace the “yellow earth” of its past and present with the “blue ocean” of the future. In 1989, seventy years after the rebellion of May 4, 1919, Deng’s government was paralyzed as students occupied Tiananmen Square and their fervor spread across Beijing and then across China. A sizable group of international reporters had gathered in the capital to cover the ending of thirty years of Sino–Soviet estrangement. Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union and general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, was making a historic state visit—but had to be escorted into the Great Hall of the People through a back door. The slogan, “Where is our Gorbachev?” was visible on largecharacter posters and audible through loud speakers. The Goddess of Democracy, an obvious replica of the Statue of Liberty, was seen on televisions worldwide. The party ideologues who had launched the campaign against “bourgeois liberalization” were mortified. Frustrated, humiliated, and desperate, the Central Committee of the CCP, dominated by Deng, sought to resolve the crisis through military action. June 4, 1989, would be remembered for decades to come. It is simplistic, if not totally mistaken, to assume that June 4 symbolized a head-on collision between liberals and socialists, with Confucians as collateral damage. In reality, all the intellectuals, whatever their ideological persuasion, sympathized with the students, some very enthusiastically. In fact, the intellectual coalition extended far


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beyond the scholarly community, to include the mass media, publishing houses, and most cultural institutions. At the rhetorical level, the students’ vocabulary made it obvious that they were fluent in socialist, liberal, and Confucian persuasions. Their conscious choice of “democracy” rather than “liberty,” especially in naming the statue, was perhaps a thinly veiled ideological preference. Educated as socialists, of course, they could proficiently employ ideas of equality, justice, social responsibility, and the will of the people. Their concern for international as well as national affairs, the well-being of the people, the governance of the state, and the public accountability of officials reflected a familiarity with Confucian ethics, and they often quoted a famous couplet from the Ming dynasty era that embodied the ethic.4 But the overall style of the demonstration was distinctly iconoclastic, antisocialist, and pro-Western. The ideological stance of the liberal-minded intellectuals was an easy target for leftist ideologues. By openly expressing their admiration for the Western, particularly the American, way of life, they lost the support of the party functionaries who remained under the spell of nationalism and patriotism. Their rhetoric, proclaiming that the blue ocean would inevitably overwhelm the yellow earth, failed to resonate with citizens who were otherwise sympathetic to the reformist cause. Nevertheless, influenced by the students, intellectuals of all persuasions expected a fundamental restructuring of the political system. They also believed that they could mobilize enough popular support to force the CCP leaders to come to terms with the democratizing forces, at least to open up a public space to discuss vitally important national issues. They were critically aware that concrete results would come only with sustained effort. But they did not anticipate the momentum of the student movement—or that Deng and the party elders would use brute military force. In the aftermath of the June 4 tragedy, the intellectuals were frustrated and hopeless. China seemed to have lost its sense of direction and the ideological situation was confusing and chaotic. Intellectual Changes After Tienanmen For the next three years, the ship of state was rudderless and the “reform and opening” policy was on hold, as the government desperately


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tried to reestablish its authority. Deng’s 1992 trip to Shanghai and Guangdong significantly improved the situation. Determined to open the Chinese economy to the outside world and to attract foreign direct investment by relaxing import and export restrictions, he helped restore confidence that the CCP could move beyond its self-imposed isolation. Gradually people lost their fear that the party would return to dictatorship. In a bold move, Deng encouraged Shanghai to emulate the developmental vitality of the special zones, such as Shenzhen—and sparked an economic dynamism unprecedented in the PRC. Within a few years, the city’s skyline was rebuilt, along with its overall infrastructure. The new Shanghai has all the paraphernalia of a worldclass metropolis, and the energizing forces of the market economy. No wonder political leaders worry that China is well on its way to becoming capitalist without Chinese characteristics. Deng’s conceptual innovation, “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” now looks like wishful thinking. In retrospect, the intellectual scene has changed fundamentally. Before the Tiananmen tragedy, the liberals took an extreme position against ossified Marxism-Leninism on the one hand and traditional culture, primarily Confucian feudalism, on the other. The underlying logic was deceptively simple. As the intelligentsia acknowledged, China’s backwardness had deep roots in Chinese polity, society, and culture. Thus China would require a total transformation in order to modernize. Strategically, the most painful but effective way to achieve such a transformation would be to invite in the modern West, with all of its fruitful ambiguities, to “decenter” the Chinese mentality. The radicalism required to make such a change would not be sustainable, but the idea provoked a heated nationwide debate on tradition, modernity, change, China, and the West. A salient feature of the emerging intellectual scene in the mid1990s was pluralism. Liberalism, socialism, and Confucianism, the three main currents of thought, continued to flourish. The liberals were primarily concerned with broadening and deepening the “reform and opening” policy, and by emphasizing freedom of speech, human rights, and liberalization of the polity. They fully supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). They applauded Beijing’s hosting of the Olympics in 2008. They welcomed any effort to enable China to walk toward the world and bring the world to China. They may not have noticed the irony of imagining


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China as a country outside the world, but their belief was clear: China must become an integral part of the global community. The socialists, in contrast, worried about the negative consequences of the market economy. They were troubled by continuing poverty in rural areas, rising unemployment as state industries downsized, the rapid growth of inequality between rich and poor, and corruption at all levels of the government. They objected to China’s participation in international trade. They saw the rules of the game in the world economy as dominated by Western, especially American, power. They feared that China, as a developing country, could fall victim to neocolonial exploitation. The socialists were not necessarily isolationists, but they saw globalization as a mixed blessing at best. Today, debates between liberals and socialists cover a wide spectrum of the critical issues confronting China. Intellectual discussions are no longer mere exercises to test the limits of democracy. They are also attempts to influence political decisions. The political leadership considers seriously the academic experts’ recommendations for new policies and objections to old ones. Indeed, provincial and central government officials commonly seek ideas from scholars. Never before in the history of the PRC has the academic community been so prominent in shaping the character and direction of the Chinese political economy. A historical note is in order: During the Republican era (1927–49), intellectual debates on the relative importance of agriculture or industry in economic development, the socialist or capitalist path to modernization, and Westernization or traditional Chinese culture as basis for a new national identity, had a great impact on the struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists. The intelligentsia’s strong support for the Communist cause was key to the very establishment of the PRC. But the situation changed dramatically soon after China was unified. Mao’s ideology of class struggle and mass line was designed to recruit party members from the ranks of workers, farmers, and soldiers. It was also intended to marginalize scholars in the humanities. It worked: they were excluded from actively helping to build socialist China. After the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, intellectuals were often tortured, humiliated, or silenced; their children were barred from entering institutes of higher learning. But Mao never underestimated the power of the pen. He always worried that the subversive intelligentsia would challenge his thought as a guiding principle for China’s


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transformation. Deng began to rectify the situation in the late 1970s. The emergence of Jiang Zemin, a college graduate educated at the famed Jiaotong University, clearly signaled the beginning of a major policy change. During Jiang’s tenure, the salaries of intellectuals were much increased, along with funding for universities. As CCP members became more educated, they substantially changed the party ethos. The party’s hostility toward intellectuals abated, and strong efforts were made to recruit scholars into the party. Instead of insisting on the dogma of socialist rule—“politics in command”—the justification for party rule was broadened to include economic and cultural factors. Through a new formula, “the three represents,” the party would again be legitimized. It would advocate for the development of a well-trained workforce and an advanced culture, and would seek to protect the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. The Situation Today This new ideological situation has, perhaps inadvertently, developed a public space to discuss virtually any sensitive issue—except for the party’s legitimacy. On the intellectual scene, the newly acquired freedom to address any issue is contagious. The plethora of journals and magazines suggests that culture production is no longer the privilege of the state machinery. The Department of Propaganda (now translated as the Publicity Department) still has the formal power to determine political correctness, but has far less negative impact on public thinking. Of course, officials in charge of securing the ideological line can still make life miserable for any intellectual considered a threat. The intellectuals most successful in attracting a wide readership are independent minded, well informed, politically astute, and involved in international networks. They remain aware of the danger of persecution and subtle means of coercion. But the fear is less intense, and the possibility of free expression is much larger. By carefully calculating the risks, intellectuals can challenge the establishment without endangering their own or their families’ well-being. The resourceful can enhance their reputations—and their bank accounts—by criticizing the regime in a thinly disguised way, as long as they do not directly attack the party’s legitimacy and the top leaders’ integrity.


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In fact, the public space for intellectuals has been enlarged to include not only the academic community but the cultural world. Even the mass media, guarded most jealously by the Publicity Department, court scholars and experts who may offer alternative points of view. Under contract with provincial and national stations, young entrepreneurs produce television programs, deliberately steering away from the party line, that attract huge audiences. The regime’s will to control or at least to manage remains strong, but in practice the disciplining structure is so porous that one can always find room to avoid censorship. Sometimes a perfunctory reference to a quote by Deng Xiaoping or Jiang Zemin can do the trick. But this new situation presents new risks. Scholars now risk being co-opted into a system of social engineering at the expense of their critical spirit. Currently, the most conspicuous development in the academic community is professionalism. Led by engineering and the natural sciences, all the academic disciplines are subjected to quantifiable evaluating criteria. The Ministry of Education encourages standardization and uniformity. Caught in a web of performance assessments, young scholars are socialized to behave properly. Rather than absorbing the ethos of a liberal arts education, the new generations of college graduates are conditioned by the market economy and instrumental rationality. A technocratic mentality is pervasive throughout China. Before the Cultural Revolution, a major conflict in the political culture was between “redness” and “expertise.” Under Mao, no one questioned the superiority of redness: the correct ideological disposition defined in terms of a revolutionary spirit. The Maoist dogma marginalized academic expertise while it empowered workers, farmers, and soldiers. The Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution victimized several generations of aspiring intellectuals, especially in the humanities. Scientists and technicians were clearly useful for nation building, but how were historians, literary critics, and philosophers to serve society? Besides, through the influence of the pen, humanists directly threatened the ideological and moral authority of the supreme leader. Not all humanists are scholars in the humanities. Many are scholars in the social and natural sciences, while many scholars in the humanities are academicians with little interest in or commitment to humanistic values outside academia. Those who most challenge and threaten the regime are politically concerned, socially engaged,


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and culturally sensitive and informed. If they can find public spaces to express their ideas freely, they can be enormously influential. As a rule, any totalitarian regime, controlled either by brute force or by political pressure, is wary about such “public intellectuals.” If the regime is stupid, it will awkwardly suppress public intellectuals, inevitably creating disaster for itself and the nation. Smart regimes try to co-opt public intellectuals using both material and nonmaterial inducements. But, when public intellectuals participate actively in the political process, they are inevitably transformed. The new regime in the PRC is dominated by intellectuals. Technocrats feature prominently in the top leadership. Quite a few members of the CCP’s Central Committee are graduates of the most prestigious universities. The party’s self-definition in terms of “the three represents” demands that experts participate actively in the economy, culture, and politics. The phrase “advanced productive forces” refers specifically to the knowledge economy in the information age. The manufacturing industries are crucial to China’s future as a major exporting nation, and one of China’s great economic assets is its huge educated, well-trained, and disciplined work force. “The advanced culture” describes a harmonious blending of traditional/indigenous and modern/foreign cultural resources and ethical values. This requires a huge investment in liberal arts education and cultural institutions. “The interests of the people” are unavoidably linked to democracy, especially when those interests are clearly stated as involving the overwhelming majority of the people. Though the “three represents” are comprehensive, the immediate and urgent task is rapid and sustainable economic growth. With China’s accession to the WTO, pressures are mounting to turn it into a market economy. But fears of instability make the party nervous. The party that has been fundamentally transformed by intellectuals has become particularly sensitive to and apprehensive about critical reflections from the intellectual community. Yet the public intellectuals in academia, government, mass media, and other political and social organizations, including semi-official NGOs, will continue to shape China’s future direction. It is still controversial whether or not China has already developed a viable civil society, but the trend toward pluralism is undeniable. In an increasingly pluralistic ethos, a marketplace of ideas flourishes. Competition for attention, power, influence, and financial rewards is keen and often vicious. Distinctions between the academic,


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intellectual, and cultural domains no longer hold. Border crossing among spheres of interest is common. Cultural goods are commercialized and cultural values are politicized. Corruption is rampant. Motivated by self-interest and private profits, the Chinese are creating a market society. Even in the academic community, civility and decency are pushed into the background. Still, no one doubts that China will reemerge as an economic power with far-reaching implications for the new world order. Mega-cities from Beijing to Guangzhou are glaringly cosmopolitan. Shanghai is already one of the most attractive metropolises in the world. The 2008 Olympics, defined as scientific, green, and humanistic, symbolizes the aspirations of the political and intellectual leadership with broad popular support. A cultural renaissance is clearly in sight. But in the eyes of the international community, China’s cultural message has yet to be articulated. Notes 1. Yao Wenyuan’s article, “Ping xinbian lishiju ‘Hai Rui baguan’” (On the newly compiled historical drama, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office), published in Wenhui bao of Shanghai on November 10, 1965, is considered by historians to mark the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. 2. Pang Pu made this observation at several meetings in the 1980s. 3. For the idea of new Asian capitalism, network capitalism, or Confucian capitalism, see Peter Berger and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, eds., In Search of an East Asian Developmental Model (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988). 4. The couplet, which is attributed to the Tonglin Academy of the Ming dynasty, reads “The sound of the wind, the sound of the rain, and the sound of reciting the classics, each sound enters our ears; the affair of the family, the affair of country, and the affair of all under Heaven, all affairs concern our hearts and minds.”


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5 Japanese Culture and Postwar Economic Growth YOSHIHARA KUNIO

In this chapter, I argue that one reason for Japan’s remarkable postwar economic performance has been that it had an appropriate culture. The Japanese attach importance to (1) materialistic pursuits; (2) hard work; (3) savings for the future; and (4) investment in education. These preferences may be influenced by income, prices, and other economic factors, but they are also influenced by the existing culture. Cultural explanations may not always be primary, or they may be carried too far. The fact that South Korea is more developed today than North Korea, or that China began developing not under Mao but under Deng Xiaoping, is not explained by culture. That institutions are an important determinant of economic development was made amply clear by the neoinstitutionalists.1 Institutions are certainly important in determining incentives, economic freedom, and transaction costs, but it is wrong to attribute economic development solely to them, as many neoinstitutionalists do. Culture affects economic development through its influence on individual choice and on institutions. Institutional development does not take place in a cultural vacuum. One explanation for Japan’s success in economic development has been its ability to create appropriate institutions. Particularly important has been the strength of community values. Government-created,

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or formal institutions2 are more easily established if people believe that they form a nation and share a common destiny. The Japanese had to be taught this belief, but they had no strong reason to resist it, having been a nation of one language and a long common history. The task was certainly easier in Japan than in many of the developing countries, which were multiethnic or had a brief history as a unified country. Economic development also requires the support of private, or informal, institutions, those regulating commerce and custom,3 to complement formal institutions and reduce transaction costs. Culture is more closely related to informal institutions, which cannot be legislated and are formed over long periods. Particularly important in creating growth-promoting informal institutions in Japan has been the Japanese tendency to convert the workplace into a community and business relations into community relations.4 Until roughly the late 1980s, Japanese culture was growth promoting rather than growth hindering. In the 1990s it ceased to be growth promoting, for several reasons. The international environment changed as the information technology (IT) industry became a leading sector of the world economy: China was becoming the “world’s factory,” and production costs were rising in Japan as a result of past development and strict regulations on immigrant labor. A new, more individualistic culture was needed to cope with the new situation, but Japan was slow to shed community values. The problem was further aggravated by the decline of the values which had in the past prompted the Japanese to work hard and save for the future. Self-Discipline as a Growth Factor I consider three factors here: work ethic, frugality, and education. Before World War II it was normal for employees to work twelvehour days, with no more than two days off a month. Only in the early 1960s did the average Japanese worker receive a half day off on Saturday and a full day off on Sunday, with an eight-hour day being the norm. In the early 1970s, big corporations also began making Saturday a day off, while others, including banks, were open a half day on Saturdays even in the late 1980s. In many developing countries, however, Saturday and Sunday were always days off, in addition to several statutory holidays. In total, about a third of the


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year was days off or holidays, and the normal working day was only eight hours long. In the second half of the 1980s Japanese working hours declined somewhat, but in 1990 they were still a little over 2,100 hours annually. This was considerably higher than the 1,950 hours put in by the British and Americans, the 1,700 hours of the French, and the 1,600 hours of the Germans.5 The Japanese work ethic is not just a matter of working long hours but also of how well one performs one’s job. Although it is difficult to measure attitudes toward work performance, on average the Japanese seemed to be more committed than Westerners to quality work performance. Many Japanese—even ordinary or menial workers—feel kiga sumanai (not satisfied), unless they do their work well.6 A noted American scholar of Japan once wrote of being greatly impressed with the care a janitor exercised in mopping a floor and a refuse collector in manning his truck.7 The Japanese saying, ishi no uenimo sannen (“even a cold rock warms up if one sits on it for three years”) was often used to exhort the Japanese to overcome their problems with gaman (patience). Of course patience was not a Japanese monopoly, but they do appear to have gaman for longer periods and under more trying circumstances than members of other nations. To this stoic characteristic, one may perhaps attribute the learning ability and the commitment to work of the Japanese people. The Japanese have also been frugal. In 1960, when their per capita income was still low, they saved about 18 percent of their household income—compared to about 6 percent in the United States, 8 percent in France, 13 percent in West Germany, and 5 percent in Britain. As Japanese income increased in subsequent years, the savings rate rose in parallel. In the mid-1970s about a quarter of Japanese household income was saved. That rate declined in the 1980s, however, to about 15 percent in the early 1990s. But it was still one of the highest levels among the industrial countries, exceeded only by Italy’s savings rate. In the United States the rate approached 10 percent in 1973, then declined to about 5 percent in 1987. The difference in the savings rate between Japan and the United States was due partly to economic and partly to institutional factors. Japanese growth had been faster, and there may have been a time lag between income and consumption growth. Also making savings easier for Japanese workers were the lump-sum bonuses the amount


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of which was not known in advance because it depended on the company’s profits. On the other hand, such institutional factors in the United States as the adequacy of social security for retired people or for those with disabilities and availability of low-cost public tertiary education probably lowered its savings rate. Still, these arguments do not adequately explain Japan’s higher savings rate. Many Americans seemed to have fallen victim to a severe case of what Richard Darman (budget director under President George Bush) once called “now-ism,” a reluctance to defer gratification for the sake of future gains. In contrast, many Japanese, especially the older generation, have felt more inhibited about consumption. They would say that it was mottai nai, wasteful, to throw things away simply because they had become old or to use things carelessly, or unproductively; for example, leaving a light on when no one was in the room. To spend more money than necessary was mottai nai, not only because it was wasteful but also because it was disrespectful to the gods and the ancestors. This mottai nai syndrome inhibited many Japanese from buying big cars and big houses or taking expensive vacations, even if they could afford them. The major accomplishment of the postwar educational system was in raising the overall level of education. As a result, in the early 1990s only 0.7 percent of the Japanese population was illiterate, compared with estimates of up to 20 percent in the United States.8 Japanese students did consistently well on science and math tests; high school graduates in Japan and university graduates in the United States were comparable in terms of basic knowledge of math and science.9 While Japanese schools have created few Nobel Prize winners—or creative minds—they have done an excellent job in raising the average level of education. They have also done well in keeping down the variation in achievement, so Japan did not become a country where a large number of illiterates coexisted with an educated elite. Even after leaving school, many people continue to educate themselves. This explains the many newspapers, magazines, and books published every year and the many documentary programs shown on television. In the early 1990s newspaper circulation per capita was twice as high in Japan as in the United States. The Japanese mass media disseminate information clearly in language suited to people who have finished nine years of compulsory education. They might not satisfy a sophisticated readership, but they serve the general public well. In a functional sense, Japan has become possibly the most literate country in the world.


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Japan’s being a monolingual country has certainly aided educators. Children speak Japanese at home and study it in school, a situation very different from the United States, where many first-grade children do not speak English well because they came from minority groups whose mother tongue is not English. In Japan, since every Japanese child spoke the language, educators could assume that they would become literate in the course of nine years of compulsory education. No exceptions have ever been made. If children are seen to be falling behind, teachers make an extra effort to bring them back to the mainstream by exhorting them to work harder and giving them extra tutoring after class. This is quite different from the situation in a multiethnic country like the United States, where uniform language instruction is difficult and children are allowed to study English at different speeds with the result that many minorities and slow learners never catch up and therefore never develop more than very basic literacy skills. The Japanese school is much like a factory based on mass-production methods. Specifications are laid down by the Ministry of Education. As a bureaucracy situated in Tokyo, the ministry is insulated from populist pressure to lower standards—as did happen in the decentralized school system of the United States. The ministry has been relatively free to set national standards and give detailed instructions about what is to be taught at each grade. Schools are free to select their own textbooks but only from a limited range screened by the ministry. Since each class has about forty students and the aim of education is primarily to impart basic knowledge, students are required to be disciplined listeners and to memorize what the teacher has taught them. Frequent tests check on progress. In this preferred teaching method, initiative is discouraged and creative thinking penalized. It is easy to criticize this teaching method, but it has been an economical way to raise the average level of education. If the country had been willing to spend more money—Japan spends only about 5 percent of GNP on education, less than the percentage in the United States—the schools could have made instruction more individualized. But given that budget allocation, the method adopted has been the only one that could meet national objectives. Some claim that the Japanese method has not helped students develop analytical minds, but this is not true. While the American method certainly relieves bright students of the need to memorize facts they can find in a reference book, and therefore lets them concentrate


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on problem solving, the Japanese method produces average students who are better educated. Memorizing a pattern or a line of causation implants a mental framework, and it has helped many students develop an analytical mind over time. Another reason for the higher average level of education in Japan has been that students spend more days in school that is the case in the United States. In the 1980s Japanese students spent 240 days per year in school, 60 days more than their American counterparts, and so at the end of twelve years of elementary and secondary education Japanese students had received four more years of schooling than their U.S. counterparts.10 Japanese students have also spent more time studying outside the classroom. They do more homework, they go to a juku (private tutoring center) several days a week, watch little television, and spend little time socializing. Although some high school students join sports clubs, and some in vocational school are not required to study very much, for the 40 percent who plan to go to college (among the 96 percent of eighteen-year-olds who graduate from high school), the twelve years of schooling before they enter college will have been a period of intense study. Even those who do not go to college need to graduate from high school with a decent record in order to find work. There is a general consensus among economists that education promotes economic growth. When people have more knowledge and skills, they can help increase production and find new business opportunities in changing economic circumstances. The question is: why have the Japanese been better educated than comparable students in the United States, and what did culture have to do with it? Culture was obviously not the only explanation. Rising income was also an important factor, since it enabled more parents to finance their children’s high school and college education. The government was also committed to education, and funded increasing numbers of schools. But its education policy was influenced by the importance Japanese culture has traditionally attached to education, probably a legacy of Confucianism. One might assume that if a certain number of years of education are made compulsory, that is how many years children will receive. But this is not always the case; since education is not valued universally, compliance may be a problem. In Japan, however, there have been few such problems. People have readily accepted the nine years of compulsory education that was introduced under the prodding of


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American advisors during the occupation. Even in the 1950s, when the country was still poor, nearly 100 percent of school-age children completed the nine years. They not only attended school; they also studied, acquiring at least functional literacy, and most of them wanted to go on to high school. And their parents were willing to support that, if they could afford it. Community Values and Growth Three factors are important in the story of business growth: formal institutions, business management practices, and corporate alliances. Many developing countries do poorly when their government cannot enforce adequate formal institutions. Existing laws may act as a brake on the economy, or necessary laws may be lacking. Even if the right laws are in place, they may be poorly enforced because of government corruption. These factors raise transaction costs and make capital accumulation difficult.11 In Japan’s growth phase after the war, the formal institutions provided a reasonable environment for business. Japan was also fortunate in not facing a separatist movement or ethnic war; people never doubted that they were Japanese. They were taught at school and through the mass media that they were members of one nation; and because they had a common language and a long common history, they readily believed it. As for law and order, Japan did face some problems (terrorist attacks on business leaders, destruction of private property, and ordinary crimes such as murders, thefts, robberies, and frauds), but contained them reasonably well. Despite an increase in the 1970s and 1980s, the number of violent crimes per hundred thousand of population was still 1.0 in 1990, much lower than in the industrial countries of the West: 4.5 in France, 3.9 in West Germany, 2.3 in Britain, and 9.4 in the United States.12 One reason Japan succeeded in keeping crime rates low was that it convinced people that failure to keep up their social obligations would mean a loss of social respect. Because geographical mobility was low and most Japanese were attached to one community or another, this was a serious sanction. This attachment to community was facilitated by the government’s use of the schools for moral education, and by the existence of many national and local cultural assets.


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Institutional problems can arise when government officials exercise their power arbitrarily to enrich themselves or promote their own interests. Police may not charge traffic violators who bribe them, or they may provide better protection to offices and factories that give them pocket money, or they may extort money from individuals. Customs officials may participate in smuggling. Bribes may induce tax assessors to alter valuations, government officers to issue licenses and permits, or judges to lower penalties. Japan had such problems, but not as widely as in many other countries. Democracy undoubtedly helped, but equally important was the belief of the government elite that they too belonged to the Japanese community and that it was their duty to contribute to its welfare. Of course levels of corruption varied, but particularly impressive is the almost total absence of corruption in the court system. Japanese judges might be criticized for other reasons (for example, they tended to automatically dismiss constitutional challenges), but not for bribery. Turning to business management, Japan’s businesses have many important and effective institutions: These include lifetime employment, seniority-graded wages, seniority-based promotion, job rotation, emphasis on management philosophy and objectives, flexible management (little dependence on the job manual), group decision making, group responsibility, emphasis on smooth human relations, ringi,13 and the minimization of status differences between workers and managers. Of these, the most crucial is lifetime employment, because the others either depend on it or are less crucial in determining Japanese corporate productivity. In most Western firms, workers would not develop a strong sense of identification with their company, since it was merely where they earned a living. The interests of the two were often in conflict: workers wanted to get paid more by working fewer hours, but the company wanted them to work longer for less pay. A Japanese company, in contrast, put great effort into convincing its employees that there was no such conflict. When workers joined a company, they had to learn about its corporate philosophy, listen to pep talks by executives, and attend various other training sessions. After hearing so often about the rewards of group-oriented behavior, workers naturally began developing a sense of identification with the company.14 This management method did raise corporate productivity. First, by avoiding hostile relations between management and unions, it reduced industrial strife. Around 1990, strikes cost Japan a total of just


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over 100,000 work days. The Japanese management approach was particularly useful when a company was trying to introduce laborsaving technology: lifetime employment meant that workers were less resistant to new technology, since they knew they would be assigned to another job. Second, such Japanese business practices as the Quality Control (QC) circle would not have worked well without the Japanese management method. Workers are willing to use their off-work time to improve their skills and to work as a team to improve production methods.15 Their willingness comes from two sources: they believe they shared a common destiny with both fellow workers and management, and if their contributions led to increased profits, they are certain they will all be rewarded with bonuses. Certainly, there is some inequality in the distribution of rewards, but not enough to discourage team spirit. The Japanese management method has also been useful in reducing moral hazard. In assembly work, if workers receive the same pay even if the company earns large profits, they may not pay enough attention to their work, and product quality will suffer. From their point of view, the best strategy is to do just what they are told to do if they are watched and do less if they are not watched. They are not concerned if this leads to a decline in quality. The Japanese management method has reduced such “moral hazard” by letting the employees share in corporate profits. Japanese management methods cannot be explained by culture alone, but the two are definitely related. In the early Meiji years, when Japanese business modernization began, a great deal of feudal tradition remained. The prevailing values were derived from the low degree of horizontal mobility and the subsistence nature of the economy. In the rural areas from which the mass of workers came, monetary relations were not strong, and people had little choice in establishing or dissolving social relations, for they were born into certain relationships and maintained them until they died. They also lived in a well-defined and stable social hierarchy, with a great deal of cooperation in economic and social matters.16 When villagers moved to the industrial sector, they did not want to consider relations with their employers purely in monetary terms, and they also wanted their social needs met. As long as their economic needs were reasonably satisfied, they did not wish to move from one social setting to another. They were willing to take a long-term view in assessing benefits


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from work, such as initially low pay that would mean higher pay later on. These psychological traits seem to have contributed to the establishment of lifetime employment.17 If the management method based on such values had not worked in the business setting, it would not have been continued; but it did work. Of course new values had to be introduced since business organizations had to survive in the competitive environment and thus were different from rural villages, but many traditional values remained useful, and Japanese management retained its community orientation. The third factor is business alliances. Large Japanese manufacturing companies did well because their workers were committed to work and cooperated with management, but that was not the whole story. They also did well because business alliances, or keiretsu, could reduce the risk involved in interfirm coordination. A vertical keiretsu usually involved a large assembler and its suppliers. In the case of automobiles, a few tiers of suppliers were involved: the first tier of companies supplied auto assemblers directly, the second tier worked for the first tier, the third tier for the second tier, and so on (when more than three tiers existed). In the mid-1980s, the vertical automobile keiretsu constituted a pyramid of about fifty thousand companies. This arrangement promoted efficiency and decentralization of production.18 If they were not well coordinated, transaction costs exceeded the gain from decentralization, and the arrangement was dysfunctional, but it usually worked to the advantage of the companies involved. Such an arrangement would not work well if the companies involved pursued short-term gains. But this rarely happened in Japan because an assembler and its suppliers tended to create a business community, making their business relationship long-term, and also involving social aspects.19 They were careful in choosing the companies to be included, but once the decision was made, they were willing to make the arrangement last. This was usually mutually beneficial over the long run, but even more important, partners were reluctant to opt out for short-term gains. For once they succumbed to the temptation to do so, they would no longer be accepted by any other group. A lone wolf could not survive in the Japanese setting, let alone prosper. Horizontal keiretsu were also common. The companies involved were usually in other industries and participated on a more or less


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equal footing. Though some intercorporate holdings existed, they differed from the prewar zaibatsu which had been held together by a holding company. A horizontal keiretsu was useful in coordinating a joint business undertaking. For example, a plant export, which constituted an important pillar of Japanese machinery export, normally involved a trading company, various manufacturers, a bank (as a financier), an insurance company, and a shipping company. The plant export was greatly facilitated if no one had to worry whether all the companies involved would carry out their part in good faith and thus keep transaction costs low. Although nonmember companies were sometimes involved in such endeavors, member companies were preferred because they were more trustworthy. Trust relations had been nurtured through successful business transactions as well as social gatherings in the past. It was usually unthinkable for member companies to betray other member’s trust and go for short-term gains. If they did so, they faced sanctions from other member companies and the business community as a whole. Community Values and Stagnation Why did the Japanese economy begin stagnating in the early 1990s? A cultural explanation is that some elements that contributed to growth in the past had weakened, while others became counterproductive. For example, the Japanese are no longer as hard-working today as in the 1950s and 1960s. It is natural that once people begin enjoying a higher standard of living, they become more interested in leisure, consumption, and personal pursuits. When this happened in Japan is not very clear, but it seems to have come in two stages. First, starting in the mid-1960s, workers, especially those in small enterprises in the service sector, began taking off at least one day per week, often one and a half days (a half day on Saturday). The second stage started around 1990, when two days off per week became common. Large companies had offered two days off in the 1970s, but only in the mid-1980s did it began spreading to smaller organizations. Around this time banks, which had opened on Saturday mornings, closed all day Saturday. Until the late 1980s only 20 percent of establishments gave their workers two days off a week,20 but the trend had been established, and government offices began closing two Saturdays a


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month in 1988. In 1992, they stopped opening on Saturday. Teachers also began enjoying two days off a week per month; this was later extended to every week. Average hours worked declined from more than 2,300 to 1,800 between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s.21 Admittedly, noncultural factors are involved in this decline in working hours. For example, in earlier years plenty of overtime work was available if workers wanted it, but in the 1990s the economy was not doing well. And two days off per week was an institutional arrangement, made possible by higher productivity due to capital accumulation. Still, the institutional arrangement only came about because workers became more interested in leisure. One can detect a similar change in frugality. The household savings rate declined from 23 percent to less than 6 percent between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s.22 The relations between income and savings are complicated, so we cannot attribute the decline solely to value change. For example, when income rises, wealth increases; since people can depend on wealth if something goes wrong, they have less need to save from current income. The decline of savings rates in this case is due to the wealth effect, not cultural change. Moreover, the proportion of older people rose in this period. Since savings rates are lower in this group, and often negative, the average savings rate declined. The rise in income and the growing percentage of older people have nothing to do with cultural change, but both occurred in Japan and helped push down its savings rate. But cultural change cannot be dismissed as a factor. For example, in earlier years Japanese people felt guilty about spending money on such things as overseas travel and luxury goods. This is no longer the case. Increasingly, they regard life as something to be enjoyed. Previous generations attached great importance to educating children or leaving wealth to them, but the present generation does not feel as strongly about this, even regarding education.23 If they have extra money, they want to spend it on themselves. Previous generations also experienced economic ups and downs and therefore believed it wise to save any extra income. But the younger generation is accustomed to steadily increasing income. The decline of asceticism is not, however, the major reason for Japan’s economic stagnation since the early 1990s. More important is the strength of community values in Japanese culture, this time as a negative factor. What transformed community values from a positive to a negative factor is the change in the global economy. The


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IT industry, in whose development meritocracy played an important role, became the driving force of industrial economies. The Japanese management method was poorly suited for this change because of its heavy emphasis on team work and pay equality. A second change was the increased intensity of economic competition. One contributing factor was reduced international communications costs, which enabled industrial countries to outsource service jobs to developing countries. Another was the rise of China, whose liberalization, improved infrastructure, and cheap but productive labor force, attracted a great deal of foreign direct investment and made it “the world’s factory.”24 Japan found it particularly difficult to cope with such developments because it had become a high-cost country. With a healthy growth rate in the past and the sharp appreciation of the yen after the Plaza Accord, Japanese per capita GNP rose to $25,430 in 1990, compared to $21,790 for the United States, $21,790 and $22,320 for Germany; only Switzerland and Norway had a higher per capita GNP than Japan.25 But this international comparison of incomes based on the exchange rate does not provide an accurate picture of real income differences. The exchange rate, which is primarily determined by capital flows and the current-account balance, is not a good approximation of the purchasing power parity index, the normal standard for international comparisons of real income. The figure based on the exchange rate overestimated Japan’s real income by about 50 percent in 1988.26 This is because Japanese prices for services and labor had become higher than those of most other countries and the gap did not close because they were not subject to international competition. As a result, Japan found it difficult to adjust to the new international economic environment. The national and business institutions in the United States, which encourage people to pursue their own goals and offer high rewards to those who succeed in competition, are more suitable than Japan’s for industries such as IT, which are driven largely by a small minority of energetic and competent professionals. Until the 1980s global competition was less intense and fewer industries were highly entrepreneurial, so the disadvantages of American industries were more noticeable than their advantages. But the international environment changed dramatically in the late 1980s. Japan was too much of a national community to cope with this. If Japan was to succeed, it had to deregulate, liberalize, and privatize—


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and provide greater rewards to productive people, regardless of their seniority or educational background. But many leaders, in both politics and business, hesitated, feeling the public wasn’t ready for such a major change. They thought the problems facing Japan were temporary and that, with slight modifications, existing institutions would begin to deliver economic growth again. The political leaders responsible for national institutions believed that they could overcome the economic recession with Keynesian methods—pump-priming. But they were wrong. Today, while the economy remains stagnant, the government depends on borrowing for more than half of its budget and has incurred a debt of 700 trillion yen, 140 percent of GDP, a proportion never seen before in any industrial country. The faith of government leaders in the Keynesian prescription has started to falter. More and more feel the situation is different this time around and that institutions must be changed. Institutional reform has begun, especially since the Koizumi government took office in 2001. Progress has been slow, though it must be said that the Japanese economy is more privatized, deregulated, and liberalized today than in the early 1990s. Institutional reform in business has gone further, largely because businesses could not cope with more intense international competition without doing so. Many that did not reform have disappeared or declined in importance. But Japanese companies could not re-create business organizations based solely on meritocracy. Though they began relying more on part-time and contract workers, they kept encouraging regular employees to regard their company as a community and continued to base rewards on seniority and corporate loyalty, though to a lesser degree. One conspicuous example is the auto industry. Even those auto companies that are struggling to survive tend to have great faith in the Japanese management method, at least in its underlying philosophy, and are reluctant to go completely in the direction of meritocracy. Implications This analysis has five general implications. 1. If Japan had a different culture, it might not be a developed country today. In this sense, the country’s culture was a necessary


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condition for Japanese economic development, but culture was not, however, a sufficient condition. Institutions were also crucial. Japanese culture was growth-promoting because Japan created the right institutions. Many of the early postwar institutions that set the stage for economic growth were largely the creation of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), which directed occupation policy. But culture was not unrelated to postwar institutions, for it enabled them to function properly. That institutions can be created independently of culture and have enormous effects on a country’s economy is demonstrated vividly in the varied economic performances of North and South Korea or the Mao and the Deng periods in China. In Japan, the institutions created during the occupation were not the only ones created independently of culture. Many recent changes cannot be explained by culture alone. One clear example is economic liberalization, especially trade liberalization. Without international (especially American) pressure, this simply would not have occurred. In this case, economic liberalization encouraged economic growth, because it exerted greater competitive pressure. 2. Though institutions can be created and can change independently of culture, some institutions that are important for economic development are related to culture. For example, developing countries have to change or create economic rules in order to promote development, but this can be difficult when powerful vested interests are protected by existing rules and too few are concerned for the welfare of ordinary people. Developing countries also face difficulties in creating independent and objective enforcement agencies. To be meaningful, rules must be fairly interpreted and enforced—but this is more easily said than done. People interpret and enforce the rules, and they are invariably tempted to do so to their own or others’ benefit. Japanese politicians and bureaucrats often pursued their own interests, but not as egregiously as their counterparts in many developing countries. The reason is that Japan was more of a national community, and many politicians and high bureaucrats were genuinely altruistic. In this, Japan is unusual; it is a virtually monoethnic country with a long common history throughout which the emperor has served as the head of state. It is easier to teach people that they form a community in which their destinies are intertwined, that those who are intelligent and educated enough to lead the country have to act as the


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father does in the family, and that ordinary people should obey them. This could not be done easily in the postwar years, when social morality was deemphasized in education, but it was implicit in so many traditional practices that the social morality which was predicated on the country as a national community remained effectual. 3. Culture changes as income rises. When people begin to enjoy a higher standard of living, culture may become less growth-promoting. The Japanese today are less hard-working and frugal than formerly, a trend reflected in the decline in working hours and rates of household savings. The stagnation of the Japanese economy that began in the early 1990s cannot be attributed entirely to changes in the work ethic and frugality, but they were important. Per capita productivity, we should note, remained high because of increased physical and human capital. 4. Culture that is growth-promoting at one stage may cease to be at a later stage. A case in point is the community value orientation of Japanese culture. In order to revive the economy, Japanese companies have to discriminate more sharply on grounds of merit. But this is difficult because community values have long been emphasized in Japanese society. Some industries continue to prosper with community-oriented values, the automobile industry is one, where cooperative work is important, particularly for quality control. But such values penalize the individualistic, hard-working people who are required for success in such newly prominent industries as IT. Certainly, Japanese businesses are trying to retool, but they are finding it difficult to go as far in this direction as most American businesses have done. Japan is also finding it difficult to reduce the government’s involvement in the economy. The Japanese government often intervenes to temper market forces, sometimes creating public or semipublic companies that enjoy a certain freedom from competition. One cannot quite say that Japan is a welfare state, but it comes close. Government leaders talk about deregulation, liberalization, and privatization, but they are reluctant to abandon the notion that the government should try to keep the country a national community. In a way, Japan is a victim of its past success. The institutions created by adjusting community values to market forces worked well until recently; many people still expect to begin working again and to see the current recession reversed by greater government spending. 5. All countries have both individualism and community values as part of their cultures, and certainly the United States is no exception.


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National cultures differ only in the relative importance of the two. It is widely thought now that the American emphasis on individualism is more advantageous, but the balance may tip in Japan’s favor if the global economy reaches a new equilibrium. Perhaps only in times of discontinuity will an economy become invigorated by American-style institutions. One should not downgrade community values just because Japan is not doing well today. No country can wholly discard community values in favor of individualistic ones. The Japanese experience shows that the right balance depends on a country’s stage of economic development. The Japanese balance worked until the late 1980s; it has performed less well since then. In many developing countries, what is needed is to strengthen community values and make institutions more workable. Japan may attach too much importance to community values, but its experience shows clearly that they are indispensable for economic development. Notes 1. See, for example, D. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 2. Formal institutions are defined here as rules enforced by the government. One obvious example is the legal code. 3. Informal institutions are defined here as rules enforced by nongovernment entities. They include customs as well as corporate rules (regarding such things as employment). 4. This tendency was first brought to the attention of English-speaking readers by J. Abbeglen in Japanese Factory (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958). 5. Keizai Kikaku-cho (Economic Planning Agency),, Keizai Hakusho 1992 (White Paper on the Economy 1992). (Tokyo: Printing Bureau, Ministry of Finance, 1992), 272. 6. A Japanese psychiatrist relates this psychological disposition to amae (dependence). T. Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1973), 111. 7. E. Seidensticker, “Preface” in Shadows of the Rising Sun, J. Taylor (New York: William Morrow, 1983), 13. 8. M. White, The Japanese Educational Challenge: A Commitment to Children (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987), 2. 9. T. Rohlen, Japan’s High Schools (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 160. 10. T. Rohlen, Japan’s High Schools, 160. 11. For the problems of institutions in the Philippines and Thailand, see K.Yoshihara, The Nation and Economic Growth: The Philippines and Thailand (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Oxford University Press, 1994), part II; and The Nation and


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12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

Yoshihara Kunio Economic Growth: Korea and Thailand (Kyoto, Japan: Kyoto University Press, 1999), part IV. Homusho Homu Sogo Kenkyusho (Research and Training Institute, Ministry of Justice), Hanzai Hakusho 1992 (White Paper on Crime), (Tokyo: Printing Bureau, Ministry of Finance, 1992), 23–25. Ringi is a method by which workers obtain their superiors’ approval for a proposal by having a manager circulate it. For the method of “indoctrinating” workers, see, for example, R. Dore, British Factory—Japanese Factory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). A saying in Japan reflects the popular belief in collective wisdom: sannin yoreba monjyu no chie, or three heads can equal the wisdom of Manjushiri. Monju or Manjushiri is the Buddhist god of wisdom and intellect. For these features of rural society, see T. Fukutake, Japanese Rural Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), part 3 and T. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), 201—13. The psychological traits of the Japanese are given strong emphasis in J. Abbeglen, Japanese Factory and Iwata R., Nihonteki Keiei no Hensei Genri (The Organization Principle of Japanese Management), (Tokyo: Bunshindo), 1977. Wages were lower and working hours longer in part-supply companies than in assembly companies. In Japan, working conditions varied according to the size of the firm; since assemblers were larger companies than suppliers, the assemblers paid higher wages than the suppliers. From the assembler’s viewpoint, then, as long as its suppliers could produce an acceptable quality of parts at acceptable prices and deliver them when needed, it was more profitable to get those parts produced outside. R. Dore, Taking Japan Seriously: A Confucian Perspective on Leading Economic Issues (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 170. Hosei Daigaku Ohara Shakai Mondai Kenkyushu (Ohara Institute of Social Research, Hosei University), Nihon Rodo Nenkan (Labor Yearbook of Japan), (Tokyo: Junposha), 374. Naikakufu (Cabinet Office), Keizai Zaisei Hakusho 2002, 331. Ibid., 327. In 2002, the household savings rate was 6.4 percent. Naikakufu’s homepage. A sample of six hundred parents with children in primary schools were asked who should finance their children’s college education, and 45 percent said the children should. Nihon Keizai Shinbun, May 23, 2004. Japan’s imports have risen sharply in the past two decades, causing serious problems for many companies, especially those that had to compete with Chinese imports. Japan’s imports from China were only $4 billion in 1980, but rose to $12 billion in 1990 and $55 billion in 2000. In 2002, China first replaced the United States as the major source of Japanese imports. World Bank, World Development Report 1992 (New York: Oxford University Press), 218–19. UN Development Program, Human Development Report 1991 (New York: United Nations), 174. One might say that Japanese prices were 50 percent higher than American prices.


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6 Values and Development in Singapore CHUA BENG-HUAT

Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of Singapore for thirty-one years, titled the second volume of his memoirs The Singapore Story: From the Third World to the First.1 Commenting on the subtitle, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan noted that it “expresses the aspiration of all developing countries but so far, alas, an achievement of very few. Singapore is one of those few.”2 Singapore’s economic success story is by now well known and pretty much taken for granted by its citizens. The explanation of that success is more elusive. Much of the credit has gone to the authoritarian regime of the People’s Action Party (PAP), which has governed Singapore since 1959. But other authoritarian regimes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have done far less well. Political structures are clearly one significant factor in Singapore’s economic success. The other important cause lies in the values that underpin Singaporeans’ determination to strive and prosper. These are usually taken to be the ethnic cultural values of the majority Chinese population. As the sociologist Peter Berger put it, if Singapore were inhabited by Latin Americans rather than Chinese, it would not have been economically so successful.3 The ruling regime also prefers the values explanation—but that renders the explanation suspect to its critics, who see it as a rationale for the authoritarianism.

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The “Chinese values” explanation rests on three aspects of economic life in Asia. First, many small enterprises throughout Southeast Asia have been and continue to be owned and operated by ethnic Chinese. Obviously, not all ethnic Chinese are entrepreneurs, especially in Singapore where they constitute about 75 percent of the population. Nevertheless, the generalization has sometimes fostered racist violence against ethnic Chinese in other countries, most recently in Indonesia in 1998, where the destruction of Jakarta’s Chinatown, along with the murder and rape of many Chinese, followed the fall of Suharto. Second, the rapid rise of capitalism in East Asia included three locations where Chinese predominate: Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Third, these three places share the “Confucian” heritage with Japan and South Korea. In the early 1990s, this fact led to a generalized explanation of Confucianism as the East Asian equivalent of the “Protestant ethic” in Max Weber’s explanation of the rise of capitalism in Europe.4 The Confucian explanation lost some of its persuasive edge after the 1997 Asian regional crisis, which exposed the structural weaknesses of the newly industrializing economies (NIEs). The effects of the crisis were unevenly felt. In the case of South Korea, one of the worst affected, the crisis suggested that government financial support of industries was more significant than cultural values to the success of the big conglomerates that served as the engines of national economic growth. In contrast, Singapore suffered only indirectly and recovered rather quickly. Indeed, the sustained global economic downturn that followed created far greater economic difficulties than the crisis. Then there is the case of Malaysia. Affirmative action policies to promote enterprise and capital ownership have had some success in producing Malay entrepreneurs and professionals under conditions of rapid industrialization and economic growth. Since Malays are Muslims, their financial success would suggest that Confucianism does not have a monopoly as a “cultural” explanation for economic success in Southeast Asia. But a very substantial gap in wealth persists between the Chinese and Malay Malaysians. Structural weaknesses exposed by the Asian financial crisis and the Malaysia case are not enough to eliminate Confucianism as part of the explanation for the rapid development of East Asia and Singapore, though they challenge its explanatory primacy. To better understand the role of culture in Singapore’s success, it is necessary first


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to consider both domestic conditions in Singapore and the global economic structure within which Singapore began to industrialize. Historical Context: Domestic Politics Founded as a trading post for the British East India Company in 1819, Singapore was born of the expansion of European mercantile capitalism and its colonization of Asia for resources and markets. With the focus on trade, little industrialization occurred. By the end of World War II, trade activities were in serious decline. The decline was compounded by the shrinking of the British Empire, which shut down its far-flung military bases, including those in Singapore, in the late 1960s. It was at this time that the drive for Singapore’s independence emerged, led largely by left-leaning individuals. And it was at this time that the People’s Action Party came into power. The PAP had been established in 1954 by a coalition of British-educated social democrats, with no popular base, and left-leaning Chinese-educated leaders with mass support. Both factions shared a socialist ideology, articulated in the language of decolonization and capitalist exploitation popular at that time. The PAP rose to power rapidly, winning the first general election in Singapore in 1959. The mass support for the left-leaning Chinese-educated leaders in the PAP came from youth in Chinese schools and newly unionized workers, whose leaders included Indians and Malays. The coalition between this group and the British-educated social democrats came apart during the 1961–62 referendum on the conditions for merger with peninsular Malaya and the other British territories in what was then Borneo to form the Federation of Malaysia. After the controversial referendum, Singapore joined Malaysia in 1963. The left faction broke away to form the parliamentary opposition as the Barisan Socialis. Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965, after two years of continuous disagreements between the Malayan and Singaporean leaderships. The Barisan Socialis withered away after it decided to boycott the 1968 general election; since then, the PAP has had no effective opposition in Parliament. However, the legacy of the left remains. Ironically, political demise has kept its vision pristine because it never had to face the difficulties of ruling. This vision continues to serve as a resource for oppositional


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discourse. Moreover, the austere lifestyle of the left leaders, signifying materially and symbolically their commitment to equality with the working masses, has served as a backdrop against which the firstgeneration PAP leadership defined itself politically. Imprinted on the triumphant social democratic faction of the first-generation PAP leadership were the asceticism and social commitments of the left that had won mass support. The nascent PAP government knew that to succeed politically its members had to appear as ascetic and public-spirited as the defeated left wing. This asceticism continues to be symbolized by the formal party uniform of white shirts and white trousers, without neckties, worn on all party and national ritual occasions. In general, party members and particularly members of Parliament are encouraged not to be ostentatious in lifestyle. The self-perception of the PAP has been that it always takes the moral high road in public policies and eschews populist pressures. Singapore has a well-deserved reputation for its aversion to corruption; it is among the least corrupt countries in the world according to Transparency International. However, in the early 1990s, outgoing Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew raised the salaries of high government officials, making them competitive with the private sector and thus the world’s best paid: Singapore’s prime minister has a higher salary than the president of the United States. The public has been unhappy with the pay raise, placing a serious blemish on the otherwise highly ascetic and accountable character of the PAP government. The legitimacy of the PAP government is difficult to assess, particularly in relation to its neighbors in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). First, Singapore’s population is almost entirely from migrant stock. The large Chinese majority are indigenous. In recognition of this, Malays were declared the indigenous population in the national constitution, although even the Malays came from the neighboring archipelago. In all neighboring countries, despite ethnic conflicts, the ownership of the decolonized new nation by the subjugated indigenous population was not in dispute. Second, the island of Singapore had no traditional governing regime or structure other than British colonial rule. Consequently, after independence, no traditional governing structure, such as the Malay sultanate, could be resurrected and re-formed to constitute the basis of a new, independent government. Third, the island gained its independence without any history of bloody struggle, as in Indonesia or


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Vietnam; consequently, the military did not figure at all in the structure and operation of the nascent government. Indeed, on the day of independence, Singapore had no armed forces of its own. In short, the legitimacy of the state and government of Singapore had to be constituted on modern lines with democratic procedures and economic development. General elections have not been suspended since 1959, although this could be easily accomplished by a simple act of a parliament in which the PAP wields absolute power. Elections have seldom been fair and equal; through the use of legal and administrative procedures, the field is always tilted toward the incumbent PAP. The legitimacy of the PAP government has been enhanced by its performance: economic growth and improvements in the well-being of the population have enabled the ruling party to avoid excessive coercion and maintain mass support and loyalty. This is the PAP’s “performance principle.” It has allowed the PAP to build up a large store of legitimacy, which it can draw on to risk occasional repressive practices and to retain antidemocratic legislation. Although the political legitimacy of a government is dependent on economic performance, good economic performance has been the exception in the Third World. And even knowing what should be done has not always led leaders to do it; often enough rulers have plundered the wealth of new nations. What motivated PAP leaders to embark on development instead of enriching themselves warrants explanation. The New International Division of Labor As a colonial trading center, Singapore had very little industrial capital. Moreover, neither self-government in 1959 nor separation and independence from Malaysia in 1965 were anticipated. But both events pushed Singapore to industrialize. The newly independent PAP government immediately set up a statutory board, the Economic Development Board, to bring in investments for the nascent industrialization program, which had to depend on investment from the state itself and from foreign direct investments (FDI). At the time, many Third World leaders saw foreign capital as evil in disguise—neoimperialism after decolonization. Singapore’s choice ran against this ideological grain.


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Economically, this period was identified with the New International Division of Labor (NIDL), the process whereby manufacturing companies from developed countries, seeking to escape high labor costs at home, moved low-end manufacturing to low-productioncost/cheap-labor locations abroad. The rapid economic expansion of East Asian capitalist economies is due in large part to this global geographical shift of low-end manufacturing, beginning in the mid1960s. The coincidence of Singapore’s industrialization and the NIDL was critical. At that time, three of the largest pools of surplus labor in Asia were unavailable for capitalist exploitation. The largest, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), was simply not interested in capitalism, nor were the other Communist countries in the Indochina peninsula. The second largest potential labor pool, India, was engaged in its own form of socialism based on state enterprises and import substitution. And the third, Indonesia, was caught up in political turmoil in the 1960s, and from the 1970s onwards was awash with oil wealth and therefore had little need for foreign capital. The locking-up of these large labor pools meant that Singapore and the other Asian NIEs had very little competition for FDI from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s. By then, Singapore’s industrialization was well on its way: it had been transformed from a country with high rates of unemployment to one that is perennially short of labor and thus depends on its ASEAN neighbors for its labor supply. By the early 1980s, the other countries in Asia and elsewhere in the capitalist periphery began to embark on the same mode of industrialization: low-end manufacturing to feed the global market. The PRC opened its doors to foreign capital in 1978. The rest of Asia soon discovered how difficult it is to compete with the low wages of China’s large labor force: massive devaluations of commodities and assets soon followed worldwide. Had Singapore come into the market for FDI at the same time as or later than the PRC, its ability to attract foreign investment capital would have been seriously in doubt. All the more so if the values that account for Singapore’s economic development were based on its inheritance of Chinese culture, since that culture was also deeply embedded in the people of the PRC, the preceding decades of communism notwithstanding. Singapore’s timing was crucial. As competition for FDI intensified, Singapore used deliberate wage and industrial policies to move into manufacturing that used increasing


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amounts of capital and higher technology. It also expanded its service sector, including global financial services. But the earlier question remains: what motivated the nascent government to embark on development rather than plundering the nation’s wealth once it had dispensed with the opposition? The integrity and sense of public responsibility of the first generation leadership of the PAP is undeniable, and this leaves analytic space to invoke “culture” as an element of the explanation. Pragmatism as National Ideology The PAP, it will be remembered, was originally allied with the social democrats and the left. One ideological element that separated these two coalition partners was the utopianism of the latter, compared to the economic pragmatism of the former. The social democrats were concerned with creating and better distributing material wealth and public goods. Because the island nation has no natural resources, material conditions can only be improved if wealth is created through economic development. From the beginning of its rule, the PAP recognized this; economic pragmatism has been its guiding principle. Every government policy is rationalized and justified by one single measure: whether it enhances the likelihood of economic growth. Accordingly, education expenditure must emphasize a productive workforce, not “intellectual” training, so science and technical education are emphasized over arts and humanities. Welfare must not lead to a declining work ethic; only minimum cash handouts are given to the abjectly needy, in order to reduce discretionary expenditures by the poor. On the other hand, extensive subsidies are provided to promote home ownership, which stabilizes family life and encourages property investment and wealth formation. Moreover, monthly mortgage payments require homeowners to stay employed. Better housing also improves health and thus reduces absenteeism. Home ownership has contributed greatly to transforming the population into an industrial workforce, in an interesting example of how expenditures on social welfare can be designed to promote human capital and long-term development. Public policies in Singapore are never justified solely in terms of political or moral principles but are adjusted according to the unfolding and future trajectory of the economy. This flexibility is apparent


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in population policy. Abortion was and continues to be readily available in public hospitals at very low cost. During the early period of economic development, family size was controlled: two children per family. Financial penalties were imposed on larger families and educational opportunities were reduced for the third and subsequent children. When fertility rates started to fall below the replacement rate, in the late 1980s—precisely as one result of economic success— larger families were then encouraged through generous tax incentives to potential parents. However, this encouragement is selective. Under the controversial eugenic presumption that parents who have survived the very competitive education system to reach universities have better genes to transmit to the next generation, these incentives apply only to families in which the parents have third-level education. A less controversial justification—that such families tend to have higher incomes and therefore can better afford to support more children adequately—was added in response to a public outcry over the selective new policy. But a limit of two children is still the rule for those without higher education. The PAP’s economic pragmatism is facilitated by its lack of either religious or political ideology. Whatever their private religious beliefs, the public policy of the PAP leadership is apparently unaffected by any religious morality. The ready availability of abortion has already been mentioned; the absence of religious ideology was also evident during the short experiment in the early 1990s when “religious knowledge” was taught in secondary schools as part of moral education. When it was discovered that students were becoming more religious as a result of these lessons and that religious differences were causing divisions, the curriculum was immediately withdrawn. Does the PAP’s secular pragmatism rest on anything more than economic rationality? This pragmatism is embedded in a larger set of practices consistent with the Confucian cultural heritage of the Chinese majority. Confucianism is not a religious system. There is no Chinese “religion of the book,” which accounts for the ease of conversion of the Chinese into nearly every other major religion. Confucianism is a philosophy of this-worldly practices of governance, of unequal structural arrangements of social actors across different social terrains and scales. Its essential aim is the achievement of harmony in every realm, from the self to the family, state, and eventually the world. Although it entails no explicit economic philosophy,


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the maintenance of social harmony and political stability implies a condition in which economic development can flourish. Indeed, the PAP government views political and social stability as the very foundation of economic prosperity, which accounts for some of its antidemocratic and authoritarian strictures. This view has wide and deep resonance among the Singaporean Chinese population, in spite of the fact that only a very small minority of this population is sufficiently educated to be able to read and interpret any Confucian texts. Familial Relations and Economic Growth It is of course arguable whether people need a knowledge of philosophical texts, or even basic literacy, to transmit cultural values. It is more important for traditional practices to be embedded in everyday life than explicitly codified in written texts. Indeed, beyond a certain point education may be detrimental, since education frequently produces an inquisitive and skeptical mind that challenges the usually taken-for-granted claims of tradition. Confucianism is typically transmitted among ethnic Chinese through the family and familial relationships. Three of the five fundamental relationships in Confucianism are familial ones: father-son, husband-wife, and siblings. The structure of each of these dyads is conceived as hierarchical, but the exchanges are reciprocal. It is the father’s responsibility to raise the son, for which the son must reciprocate with respect; the duties and prerogatives of the two positions are necessarily different and unequal. Properly reciprocal exchanges will result in social harmony. A family can foster economic well-being and growth if each member accepts his or her position and corresponding responsibility in the hierarchical structure. The relationship between family and enterprise, particularly among overseas Chinese, has been extensively documented.5 The family as a social institution is still relatively intact in Singapore. This is partly because, on such a small island, one is never far from one’s family, so relatives are readily available when assistance is required. The social significance of neighbors is radically reduced and trust remains within the family, in contrast with large nations where members of the same family may be widely dispersed, and neighbors more often become the first line of assistance. In Singapore the effect of geography is reinforced by a government that sees reliance on the family as one pillar of its ideology.


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This profamily ideology is translated into profamily social policies: social welfare measures are channeled through the family rather than targeting individuals. For example, if one individual is hospitalized, the spouse and working children pay the medical expenses. Only after the compulsory medical savings of immediate family members are exhausted will the state pick up the remaining costs. This profamily social policy is especially pronounced in public housing policy, as I describe below. Profamily state policies will only succeed if they jibe with popular cultural values. A contrast to liberalism may be useful here. According to liberal conceptions, an individual who comes of age is free to declare him- or herself a free individual with no particular obligation or responsibility to the family. Such an attitude would be unacceptable, indeed unintelligible, to most Singaporeans. The practice of grown children contributing directly to the welfare of the family remains common. It is also common for a family to pool resources not only to maintain present material well-being but also to support plans for the future. The savings of the family as a whole are commonly used to support the education of one of the children, in the hope that the child will improve the family condition in the future. This entire phenomenon illustrates two features of the Singaporean worldview: the family is not restricted to living generations but extends also to future ones, and education is the most likely way to advance the family’s fortunes. Education for Upward Mobility Education is an investment not only in individual upward mobility but also in the society’s economic expansion. In colonial times the British provided few educational opportunities, leaving the ethnic communities to provide for the education of their own children. Chinese primary and secondary schools were ubiquitous. Urban schools were funded and managed by clan associations, while those in squatter and rural areas placed well-off local residents on school governing boards. School fees were very low, with the associations or local boards providing much of the financial support. These efforts in educating their own culminated in 1950 in the establishment of Nanyang University, the only Chinese-language university outside China and Taiwan.


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Mass education was initiated and expanded very quickly under the PAP government. The population responded enthusiastically, with unforeseen consequences. At independence the PAP government had to adopt four official languages: Mandarin, Malay, Tamil (spoken by most of the local South Asian population), and English. The lingua franca of public administration and commerce was English, and it was therefore the economically privileged language. This increasingly led parents to enroll their children, particularly the boys, in state-run primary schools, where English is the primary medium of instruction. By the early 1970s Malay and Tamil schools had disappeared, while enrollment in Chinese language schools was in decline. The government then instituted a national education system with English as the primary medium of instruction and the other three languages as second languages. As a result, Singapore has become an English-speaking nation, struggling to maintain a reasonable literacy standard in the three Asian languages. From an economic point of view, with the increasing internationalization of English, this has been a plus, but the “Asian-ness” of Singaporeans has become more elusive and its maintenance has become an arena of ideological conflict. The importance of education to Singaporeans cannot be overstated. Their children’s educational performance is a source of shared anxiety for all parents—this is part of the national psyche. One of the country’s major gray-market economic activities is tutoring schoolchildren of all ages. Tutoring is the main source of income for most needy university students; many teachers have quit their regular teaching jobs to become individual tutors or have set up tutoring centers as registered businesses. This gray economy is estimated to exceed a billion dollars annually. Tutoring not only increases financial pressure on the family but also adds study hours to a student’s routine, reducing time for nonacademic activities. With such a heavy investment of time and money, the psychological pressure on children to perform well becomes even more intense, adding up to a very competitive educational environment from primary through secondary school. Such hot-house educational environments are common in East Asian nations, giving rise, for example, to the infamous “cram schools” of Japan and Taiwan. The rhetoric and practice of “meritocracy” dominates education in Singapore. Primary school students either enroll in schools their parents attended or in schools close to their homes. Jockeying for a place in one of the choice schools is very intense among primary


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students. At the end of six years of primary education, a national examination differentiates students in terms of academic abilities, and each is assigned to a school that reflects his or her achievements. So the secondary school system is a hierarchical structure, where the schools are ranked, the brightest go to the best school, and so on. Those deemed unsuitable for secondary education will be asked to enroll in low-end trade schools. After four years, another national examination further separates students into those bound for university education and those headed for higher-end technical education. The first group will be examined again after two years of junior college, and only those who obtain satisfactory grades will be admitted to university. Ultimately, no more than 20 percent of the cohort that started together will be admitted to local universities. At each hurdle in this long race, grades are the only criterion for entry to the next level. The competition at each level is by now folklore and is regularly satirized in theater and other media. One recent film was titled I Not Stupid, a “Singlish” translation of the Chinese, “Children are not stupid.” It features three primary school students from different class backgrounds whose scholastic ineptness is a common bond. The film touched a nerve: parents were chastised in Parliament for putting too much pressure on their children, while the public saw it as a criticism of the education system itself. Meritocracy worked well in Singapore’s first two decades of nation building because all children started relatively equal in a newly developing economy. At the local universities, most students were the first in their families to attend a university, signaling very rapid upward mobility. By the mid-1980s, however, the influence of family circumstances on academic performance was already noticeable. Students from middle-class professional families were increasingly overrepresented in local university enrollment. In recent years the class structure has become even more rigid, and even the government admits to concern about the possible emergence of a permanent underclass. If meritocracy is to continue working well, simple equality of opportunity will not be enough. More resources will have to be committed to students from lower-income families to help them compete with the better off. Since a university degree has been the ticket to a stable middle-class occupation and lifestyle for the last four decades, many who do not make the grade at local universities now enroll in universities abroad.


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Those who cannot afford to go abroad enroll in distance-learning programs provided by foreign universities, operating through a local business partner. For some financially strapped Australian universities, the combined income from full-fee paying Singaporean and other Asian students studying on the main campus and enrolled in distance-learning programs has become an essential source of income. Unfortunately, many of these Asian students are bitterly disappointed to learn that the degrees they have earned from lesser British and Australian universities are not valued by some potential employers. Nevertheless, the “paper chase,” as Singaporeans call it, continues to intensify, putting pressure not only on individuals but also on the collective psyche. The Centrality of Housing Immediately upon securing parliamentary power, the PAP government established the Housing and Development Board (HDB). Housing, it was thought, would demonstrate the new government’s efficacy in “delivering the goods.” Successful rehousing of the overwhelming proportion of the population living in congested, aging urban shophouses or squatter areas would increase popular support and political legitimacy. To understand Singapore’s housing policy, it helps to be familiar with the country’s social security savings system. In the mid-1950s, the British colonial administration introduced the Central Provident Fund (CPF), a compulsory social security savings retirement scheme. When it was first instituted, the rate of saving was a few percentage points of a wage earner’s monthly wage, matched by the employer. As the economy grew, the savings rate rose in step with wage increases; in 1984, it reached 25 percent from the employee, matched by the employer. In the mid-1980s recession, the employer’s contribution was reduced to 10 percent and the employee’s to 20 percent. When the economy turned around, the employer’s contribution rose gradually to 20 percent in 1997, when it was reduced again in the face of the Asian regional financial crisis. Obviously, the employer’s rate of fund contribution has become a mechanism for regulating labor costs. Notwithstanding the fluctuating rates, the provident fund constitutes the single most important financial resource of each Singapore worker. The savings will be a hefty sum at the end of a career if not drawn down in the interim.


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Beginning in 1964 with rental flats of minimal standard for lowerincome families, the HDB moved quickly to “sell” better and bigger flats on a ninety-nine-year lease. This got off to a slow start until 1968, when households were permitted to use their CPF savings to pay the monthly mortgage. By the mid-1980s, more than 80 percent of Singaporean families owned their ninety-nine-year leasehold flats. Meanwhile, the use of CPF funds for mortgages was extended to households that purchased the much more expensive housing sold by private developers. The result is that 90 percent of Singaporean households are homeowners. The attractiveness of investing in a public housing flat was greatly enhanced when the resale policy provided an opportunity for capital gains. A family that purchases a ninety-nine-year leasehold flat has the right to sell it after five years of occupancy to another eligible household, keeping the capital gains derived from the sale. The same family may then apply again to the HDB for a new subsidized flat; each eligible family is permitted to make two purchases of subsidized new flats. From the institution of the home-ownership program in the late 1960s until the 1997 Asian regional crisis, almost every household that sold its flat to upgrade to a larger one or downgrade to a smaller one (to realize capital gains) made a substantial amount of money. Prices of housing had also inflated rapidly, pushed up partly by the high demand for housing and partly by the progressive reduction of a construction subsidy in public housing that increased the prices of new flats. During the 1997 regional financial crisis the property bubble burst and prices declined sharply, some by almost 30 percent from their peak values in 1996, leaving more than 100,000 households with negative equity. Investment in public housing no longer guarantees profit and is subject to the vicissitudes of the market. Price fluctuations aside, public housing ownership is especially interesting because of the ways it blends public policy and private interest in a developing economy. At the household level, home-ownership is a focus of investment. Moreover, the desire for ownership and the need to meet monthly mortgage payments serve to discipline wage earners. This was and continues to be an essential element in the population’s transformation into a disciplined industrial workforce. Providing housing for close to 90 percent of households, the HDB is practically a monopoly, one that makes citizens dependent on the state. This dependency has enabled the government to use housing as a carrier of other social policies unrelated to housing, the most striking


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being its profamily policy. First, only households are eligible for new subsidized flats from the HDB. Second, young families who elect to live near their parents are given priority in housing allocation, reducing waiting time by a couple of years and adding cash grants toward the purchase of the flats. Third, never-married singles are permitted only to purchase older, smaller resale public housing flats at market value, and only after age thirty-five, on the grounds that the family should not be split up prematurely. Young unmarried adults, excluded from home ownership in public housing and equally from the very high rents and even higher prices of private condominiums, are thus forced to live at home until they form their own families or until they are old enough to purchase resale public flats. Restrictions against singles therefore facilitate the pooling of family resources. Finally, the fact that the entire family can be evicted if any member contravenes housing regulations, for example by conducting a nonregistered business in the flat, causes family members to discipline themselves. The government has also used the population’s housing dependency to coerce political compliance. During the 1997 general election, faced with the possible loss of some contested seats in largely publichousing constituencies, the government threatened that constituencies that elected non-PAP candidates would be the last to be upgraded. (Upgrading is a cost-sharing program in which housing units in older housing estates are renovated and public spaces upgraded in order to maintain property values.) Faced with such a threat, only the most committed would vote against the PAP. Public protests were met with the cavalier response that the PAP was merely exercising incumbency advantages. Housing dependency on the state has thus hampered the population’s ability to fully exercise its political rights. Nonetheless, housing has become the single most important investment and asset of every Singaporean household—so much so that the government admits that most Singaporeans are “asset rich but cash poor.” This began to pose serious problems at both the national and family level when structural unemployment became a reality, as Singapore moved toward a mature capitalist economy in the early years of the twenty-first century. Into the Next Phase of Development At the end of four decades of continuous social engineering and stateguided economic growth, in the early years of the twenty-first century


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Singapore is a nation of well-educated, skilled, relatively high-income wage earners working for multinational corporations or large stateowned enterprises. The PAP government had largely neglected small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in the early years of independence, although SMEs provide up to half of national employment. Since the mid-1980s recession, and with the pressures of the new knowledge-based economy, the government has been increasing its support for SMEs with generous grants for research and assistance to help them make forays into the region and to globalize. The PAP government’s authoritarianism, its suppression of dissent, its undermining of opposition political parties, and discrediting of vocal individuals, while unrelentingly exhorting people to focus on making a living, has engendered a disciplined but politically docile population. It is docile not because it is uninformed or apathetic, as is sometimes said. On the contrary, it is well informed, especially about the punishing ways of the regime. It is docile because it is powerless. Singapore’s population is educated and disciplined, but it is more adept at executing business plans and public policies than at exercising critical faculties, creativity, or imagination—qualities increasingly perceived as necessary for the knowledge-based economy. In recognition of this condition, the government has been trying to reengineer some of its educational policies to promote different modes of learning for present and future generations. It is increasing expenditure in the cultural sphere to encourage greater deviation from the narrow paths of established professions in the hope of increasing creativity that may be harnessed into new enterprises. Inevitably, the government has encountered criticism and new demands; for example, to recognize the rights of gays, roll back the boundaries of censorship, conserve what little natural environment remains, and restrain the seemingly unstoppable reach of state-owned enterprises into every business sector because of their superior financial position relative to private entrepreneurs. This is a new phase of social and economic development for Singapore: a mature economy that can no longer compete for low-end jobs on the basis of cheap labor, in which structural unemployment will be a permanent feature, and which will be increasingly vulnerable to shocks from the globalized capitalist economy. Fortunately, the PAP appears aware of this complex constellation of emergent issues. In 2001 it established an Economic Restructuring Committee and a Remaking Singapore Committee to poll public opinion for future


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planning and development. Whether it is able to radically reconfigure itself for this uncertain future is the essential question. That culture matters in some way is obvious in all comparative social research. How much does it matter? Does placing culture at the forefront of any explanation of social and economic development unduly neglect the significance of history and social structure? In this chapter I have tried to do justice to the historical and structural context—domestic political conditions and the global capitalist economy—in analyzing the rapid economic development of Singapore from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. To the extent that these historical–structural conditions do not fully account for the country’s rapid development, there is also space for cultural explanations. Here, the values of the majority ethnic Chinese population, particularly in the emphasis on family, have played a significant role in the development process, or so I have argued. The case of Singapore also shows that the mere presence of development-friendly values is not sufficient. They have to be shored up, ideologically and institutionally, through profamily social policies like the national housing program, which not only provided housing for every household but also transformed the population into a nation of homeowners. Values mattered in Singapore’s development, but the historical circumstances in which the country embarked on the development process were fortunate ones, and the government had to provide substantial guidance and institutional support to assure the continuity, expression, and practical effectiveness of those values. Notes 1. Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story, 2 vols. (Singapore: Times Publications, 1998 and 2000). 2. Kofi A. Annan, quoted in The Singapore Story. 3. Peter Berger and Michael Hsiao, eds., In Search of an East Asian Development Model (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988). 4. Tu Wei-ming, ed., The Triadic Chord: Confucian Ethics, Industrial East Asia and Max Weber (Singapore: Institute of East Asian Philosophy, 1991). 5. Among the most recent are Yao Souchou, Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, Practice and the Myth of Chinese Enterprise (London: Routledge, 2002); Thomas Menkhoff and Solvay Gerke, eds., Chinese Entrepreneurship and Asian Business Networks (London: Routledge, 2002); Ong Aiwha, Flexible Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and Chan Kwok-bun, ed., Chinese Business Networks: State, Economy and Culture (Singapore: PrenticeHall, 2000).


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7 Market Development, Political Change, and Taiwanese Cultures ROBERT P. WELLER

Taiwan can lay claim to two modern “miracles,” both of which took most social scientists by surprise. The first miracle was economic. Almost no experts in the 1950s expected much beyond poverty from Taiwan’s economy. The island had been a backwater of mainland China through the 1800s, followed by fifty years of Japanese colonialism and major damage to its infrastructure during World War II. Things did not look much better when the Republic of China retook control after the war and moved entirely to the island after losing the civil war to the communists in 1949. The new leaders were known for corruption and massive inflation, hardly a recipe for building a modern economy from the ruins of poverty and war. Nevertheless, Taiwan was becoming an economic powerhouse by the 1970s and was a developed country by nearly any statistical measure by the end of the 1980s. The political “miracle” took longer, but was just as unexpected. When Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek brought Chinese rule back to Taiwan, it was through a single-party authoritarian system under his personal control. The Nationalist Party was organized along Leninist lines, thanks to the influence of Soviet advisors during early periods of unity with the communists against common enemies (first warlords and later the Japanese). Political dissent was crushed, freedom

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of speech and association were tightly limited, and elections occurred only at the lowest and least significant political levels, and then only as single-party contests. In 1987, however, the apparently permanent “state of emergency” due to the Communist insurgency ended. Within the next few years dissidents were released from prison, opposition parties were legalized, and all offices up through the president became elected. Taiwan is a successful democracy by any standard, and it achieved this through a peaceful transition. The achievement is even more remarkable given the island’s diplomatic limbo: because China claims the territory, no powerful countries recognize Taiwan, and it is left out of nearly all major international organizations and treaties. One reason the social sciences have had such a poor record anticipating these developments in Taiwan is an inadequate understanding of the role of culture. We have tended to err either by ignoring culture altogether, or by assuming that certain aspects of culture are set in stone, which blinds us to its potential for change. As one might expect from a place with most of its roots in China’s long history and complex society, Taiwanese culture contains many strands. One goal of this chapter is to understand the range of relevant cultural values in Taiwan and their interaction with their institutional contexts. Taiwan inherited cultural resources for quite varying economic attitudes. Imperial China had a strong state that gave very low status to merchants and favored central economic control, but it also allowed extensive market development where merchants thrived. A cultural emphasis on hierarchy and consensus was met with strongly individualistic streams and chronic structural conflicts, even within the family. These cultural strands constantly interacted with each other and with broader economic and political processes. The analysis that follows examines some of the cultural features that appear closely related to successful market economies, to political democratization, or both. These include individualism, a work ethic, and a high value set on education, civility, and trust with its associated social capital. I will attend in particular to the long heritage from imperial China, which has shaped Taiwan’s culture more than anything else. These cultural features will not always be the same as those the West has found useful. There may be more than one path to market success and to democracy. Ample evidence already exists for alternate modernities and alternate civilities in East Asia.


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Chinese Cultures and Market Behavior Max Weber took a long look at imperial Chinese economic culture and concluded that it offered little potential for capitalist development beyond the simple merchant capitalism of trade for profit. He noted that the early Chinese economy had many features in common with that of medieval Europe, but that it had not had Europe’s capitalist revolution. One reason for this, he argued, was the successful creation of an imperial state over two thousand years ago, ending a period of interstate competition that had driven rapid change in both material culture and thought in the centuries before the Qin and Han dynasties. One consequence of this unification, in Weber’s view, was that systems of thought never developed that might offer the driving tension that Protestantism provided in Europe. Daoism left people living in an “enchanted world,” while Confucianism consistently downgraded the world of the market. Merchants ranked lowest in a Confucian class hierarchy, inferior to scholars, peasants, and artisans. In some periods of Chinese history they were not even allowed to take the civil service examinations. China viewed itself in many ways as a tributary state, with the larger economy working primarily through centralized redistribution, supported in large part by rural tax payments and corvée labor. Merchants, in this view, were social leeches who profited from the productive labor of others. This Weberian understanding was enormously influential among China scholars in the 1950s and 1960s, but it has not stood the test of time. First, of course, this line of analysis failed to predict or explain the tremendous economic successes of many Chinese societies in the last half of the twentieth century, including Taiwan. Just as important, it did not sufficiently recognize either China’s enormous commercial development during the last millennium or the cultural features that underpinned it. Small-scale production of commodities for markets has been a standard feature of Chinese life for many centuries. Some areas saw mass production of commodities like porcelain or silk for long-distance trade. Even a backwater like Taiwan, which only became a province in 1884, lived primarily by the market; by the late 1800s many of its farmers produced high-grade rice which they exported to the mainland and to southeast Asia, buying cheaper rice for their own meals.


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They also exported tea, camphor, sugar, and other commodities for the world market. Late imperial mainland China had extraordinarily well-developed land and labor markets in many areas. While the degree of commercial development varied widely, the cultural infrastructure for dealing with markets was sophisticated. Shareholding corporations, for example, were widespread. They were common not just in business arrangements but also formed the legal basis for many village-based organizations such as community temples or lineages. Chinese were also intimately familiar with contracts, and it is still very easy to find peasant households that have retained Qing Dynasty contracts for land sales, property arrangements when families divided, and many other purposes. China’s legacy of economic culture is thus complex and multiple. It contained elements of centralized state control and elements of market freedom. It varied over time and space with peripheral areas often having less commercial development. Attitudes toward the economy also varied by class, especially because the political elite was trained in Confucian philosophy. To some extent, though, nearly every individual participated in this range of market cultures, acting sometimes in accord with the state-centered model and sometimes with the market-based model. Individualism For Weber, Calvinism had facilitated the capitalist revolution in part by freeing the individual from the “sib fetters” of family and kinship, allowing a new range of social interactions based on individual responsibility and trust beyond personal ties. Important sources for individualism had long existed in Western cultures, from both religious and classical republican sources, but individualism grew to its current culturally dominant position only with the triumph of market capitalism. More communal versions of the self largely gave way to the idea of an autonomous individual. One worry about China’s economic future from Weber through the development theory of the 1960s was that a Confucian emphasis on harmony and hierarchy, on the fundamentally social nature of the self, would prove incompatible with market economics. Like an earlier Europe, though, China in fact had many lines of thought about the self, some of which offered a high degree of in-


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dividual autonomy. Confucianism certainly did emphasize harmony and hierarchy, taking an idealized image of the patrilineal family as a metaphor for society as a whole, and emphasizing how actions must accord with people’s proper roles. “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down,” as the proverb goes. But there is another side to this. As William de Bary has written, “Confucian ethics, instead of being primarily a social or group ethic, as it is often referred to, starts with self-cultivation, and works outward from a proper sense of self to the acceptance of reciprocal responsibilities with others.”1 Those responsibilities could include challenging both harmony and hierarchy. Confucian officials had a duty to remonstrate with an emperor who was following improper policy, for instance. They were morally obliged to disagree with mistaken authority, and China has honored officials who suffered, sometimes at the cost of their lives, in carrying out this responsibility. An annual festival still commemorates Qu Yuan, whose remonstrance led to his suicide two millennia ago. Other ideas also offered resources for individualism. Daoists tended to celebrate eccentrics, like the Eight Immortals—some known for their appearance as beggars, some for their indulgence in women and wine, none of whom showed much attachment to the communal virtues of family or state. Buddhists had a rather different reputation for individualism, particularly visible in the frequent criticism that they avoided communal responsibilities (filial piety above all) by leaving the family to cultivate themselves. Popular worship of spirits also picked up on these themes, allowing for both highly communal and highly individualized notions of self. In the realm of gods, temples often promoted images of gods as parallel to secular bureaucrats, given ranks and titles by the earthly emperor in a feudal process that reinforced the cosmic power of the state. On the other hand, many deities were associated with violence and asocial behavior. Ghosts—generally thought of as the spirits of the unworshipped dead—were the extreme form of unincorporated spirits. Often nameless, they affected the living by causing illness or other problems. They could be bought off with offerings, and they would also grant wishes on a kind of contract basis. Asocial, atomized, amoral, they might do anything. It is no coincidence that ghost temples grew particularly large and popular during the period of Taiwan’s most rapid market growth in the 1980s. By the late 1980s many people had capital, with few


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outlets for investment. The era of cheap labor had ended in Taiwan by then, but the small-scale pattern of Taiwanese entrepreneurship meant that few had the means to invest in capital-intensive industry. Political restrictions still prevented investment abroad. The result was ultimately unproductive investment in land and the stockmarket—two bubbles that would burst a few years later. In this atmosphere where wealth seemed to bear little relation to anything beyond luck and connections, ghost temples suddenly grew to dominate the religious scene, because ghosts (a little like gangsters) will enter into contractual arrangements to help people without regard to the broader community moralities of Taiwanese god temples. The most popular temple on the island for a while honored seventeen unidentified dead bodies and their dog, followed closely by one to a Japanese-era bank robber. All would do anything in exchange for repayment in gold medallions or opera and puppet show sponsorship, and some grew famous especially for helping people win in an illegal lottery that swept the island at the time. This was a fee-for-service religion of individualized spirits for individual gain. The temples are still popular, though they faded significantly when the economy opened up again in the 1990s. This issue of ghosts brings up the two sides of individualism. Chinese ghosts do offer an image of individuals unfettered by social ties, whose relationships are above all based on market and contractual exchanges. On the other hand, they also tend to be malevolent and unreliable exactly because they lack the control of broader communal and social ties. In the same way, individualism is an important underpinning of market success but sometimes leads to self-serving behavior—greed, corruption, crime—that undermines the market system. Individualism may be one key to a thriving market economy, but only if it is somehow embedded in the broader society. Even in the United States individualism has broader social supports, as Granovetter and others have argued.2 The key, then, is less about having the cultural resources to develop a Western-style individualism than having the resources to combine an ethic of individual achievement with broader social values. It may well be that thriving market economies are compatible with a wide range of such combinations. Indeed, a kind of networked capital seems to have developed in most Chinese societies. This is a form of social capital built around interpersonal relationships, guanxi. These relationships overlap with but are not identical to the ascribed and


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particularistic ties that Weberians saw as an obstacle to market development. They include ties of kinship and neighborhood, but even these are fundamentally socially constructed in China. Beyond the immediate family, such ties create an easier path for the development of guanxi, but there are no guarantees. Trustworthiness (xinyong) is as important a consideration as blood; in this sense, even kinship networks are selective. Other kinds of ties, like classmates or just friends (both accepted Confucian relationships with a long history), are even more obviously constructed. Numerous studies have now documented the importance of such ties in Taiwan and many other Chinese societies, as I will discuss further below. Work, Discipline, and Savings For Weber, Protestantism created an inherent tension with the world: Calvinism led not to the fatalism one might expect from its belief in predetermination, but to a constant pressure to prove oneself to be among the elect through success in the secular world. Work became an end in itself, as people lived to work instead of working to live. Capital accumulation for reinvestment was a natural byproduct, because people no longer consumed as conspicuously. Weber recognized that this was an ideal type, and that market capitalism would eventually enforce this sort of behavior using the “iron cage” of its own logic, with no need for Calvinism. Still, in his view the Protestant tension with the secular world had been a crucial driver of early modern capitalism. One reason he was pessimistic about China’s economic possibilities was that he saw no moral tension to drive people toward ever greater efficiency of work. Neither Confucianism nor Daoism, he argued, lifted Chinese out of their “enchanted world” in a way that would drive new forms of secular behavior. This claim, however, always ran up against an empirical problem: the Chinese seem to work very hard indeed, and they show high rates of savings. Thomas Metzger wrote an extended analysis of possible Confucian sources for a tension with the world that would parallel Weber’s analysis of Protestantism, based on the neo-Confucian demand for constant reform of the self.3 While it is not clear how this philosophy would have influenced the behavior of ordinary people in China, Harrell has argued that quite different factors promoted hard work and high savings rates.4 Filial piety demands that people


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provide for their descendants—not just their children, but an entire patriline that extends, in principle, forever. Informants will often offer just this explanation, and they see it realized concretely through practices like the creation of large lineage estates that could generate significant income. They work hard and save so that their descendants will prosper forever. None of this led to a capitalist revolution comparable to Europe’s, in part because of the broader political system that encompassed these values. Nevertheless, they would be important causes of China’s eventual comfort with market capitalism. They are not really functional equivalents of the Protestant ethic—the logic driving them is quite different—but they have been crucial to the market success of many Chinese societies. Education Education was not one of the areas that Weber particularly stressed, but most current development professionals give it a high priority. Some of the reasons are common sense: all but the worst jobs require basic literacy and numeracy, and this trend is only increasing. Small entrepreneurship, which is frequently an engine for growth, benefits particularly from education. Other reasons stem from the regular correlation between educational levels and many indicators of development, including high income, good health, and low birth rates. Societies can institutionalize education in ways that produce little direct effect on secular change, which is probably why Weber did not emphasize it. All the societies that Weber compared systematically to Europe (China, India, and the ancient Near East) had traditions of literacy and even of virtuosic textual mastery. There is a great difference, though, between education as the extraordinary skill of the monk or the government clerk, and education as a way of opening up the world to the broader society. That is why the Protestant move to encourage everyone to read and interpret the Bible directly was so radical, especially paired with the development of the printing press. Even by this measure, though, late imperial China does not look bad. While it is true that the upper reaches of Confucian educational competence were both extraordinarily virtuosic and limited to a very small group, we have increasing evidence for broad levels of lesser degrees of literacy through a wide range of the male population (and


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a much smaller range of the female). Also, an enormous expansion had occurred in numbers of schools and in the publishing industry that included new genres aimed at a popular audience, like religious morality books (baojuan). This occurred before the major influx of Western influences in the nineteenth century. Just as importantly, the idea that education was a key to social mobility and that it was in principle available to anyone was central to Chinese understandings of social life. Unlike a genuinely feudal system, late imperial China offered everyone the imaginative possibility of going from rags to riches based on hard work and study—Dale Carnegie with Chinese characteristics. Few achieved this, of course, but the very idea mattered. Education and its possibilities were crucial in how people thought about social status, but the entire economic system also allowed for the possibility of significant mobility, both upward and downward. Most land, for example, could be bought and sold on the open market by late imperial times, and peasants were not tied to the land, unlike their contemporaries in Russia or Japan. As with any cultural value, however, many other factors also contribute to shaping behavior. People recognize the potential value of education, but must balance it against other needs, pressures, and opportunities. Taiwan had been something of a frontier society up through the nineteenth century, and certainly not a center of education. The Japanese, however, enforced a universal education policy for males. Their goal may have been political above all else—everyone was forced to learn Japanese—but the result would prove beneficial long after the Japanese left. The nationalists continued to promote education, again partly as a tool for moral control over youth. As the economy developed, however, people also increasingly saw that education would be a key to wealth. Economic Culture in Practice On the eve of the major Western influx in the nineteenth century, Taiwan, like all of China, already had a long familiarity with markets and commodity production, with contracts and corporate shareholding. On the other hand, the Taiwanese also had a set of values that downgraded mercantile success and channeled the best and brightest into politics and away from economics. These values themselves


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determine behavior only as people make decisions under the constraints of daily life. Thus various aspects of this complex and sometimes contradictory tradition could come to the fore, depending on the changing structure of society as a whole. One of the most dominating influences has been the structure of the state, which underwent radical transitions over the course of the twentieth century. Culture helps shape political systems themselves, but that should not lead us to underestimate the effects of political change on culture. The work ethic I have discussed, for example, has developed in different ways in various Chinese contexts. Many overseas Chinese develop the ethic even more powerfully than it had existed at home. Like many voluntary migrants, of course, they were not a random sample of the population. Migration selected for entrepreneurial characteristics like willingness to take risks and to work very hard. In addition, most of the early Chinese migrants had the long-term intention of returning home. They were trying to build up family estates in a dramatic way. Chinese patterns of networked capital—the reliance on personal ties in market relationships—also varied in their effects. They have become important primarily when the broader political context allows relatively free economic activity but without offering it significant support. This has been the case for overseas Chinese communities in much of Southeast Asia, and was also true for Taiwan under the nationalists. Most of these cases saw a few large businesses with very close government ties; in Taiwan’s case a significant number were owned directly by the state or the Nationalist Party. The vast economy of small producers, however, was generally left to its own devices. The state did little to create a legal or institutional infrastructure to support this informal economy, in which one out of every eight Taiwanese is a “boss.”5 Small entrepreneurs had little or no access to legally sanctioned credit, for example, because banks would not make loans unless the borrower already had significant collateral. This encouraged a boom in rotating credit associations, postdated checks, and other social mechanisms with no underpinning in the legal system. These extralegal connections functioned effectively only because they were embedded in known social relationships. In a study of 743 companies in Taiwan’s largest business groups, Gary Hamilton found that every single firm had co-owners, including both family members and other personal connections, and he sees these ties as the backbone of the


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manufacturing sector.6 People relied on personal forms of trust because they lacked institutionalized forms. The result of this Chinese cultural heritage in the political context of Taiwan has been an economic pattern that looks quite different from development out of a partially shared cultural background in Japan or South Korea, where a few very large corporations dominate the economy. While some have suggested that this reliance on interpersonal ties discourages the development of very large companies, the evidence is now overwhelming that this particularly Chinese and Taiwanese adaptation of capitalism to networks of personal ties has worked very well. Even if it is true that large corporations are more difficult to organize under this system, it is no longer clear that large corporations are necessarily superior in the current economy dominated by innovation and market flexibility. We also have evidence, however, that Taiwanese will begin to rely on more purely market-based relationships when the political and legal systems encourage it. This has been increasingly true over the last few years in Taiwan, where more and more business managers say they prefer to rely on impersonal qualifications and may look for partners with whom they have no prior connection. It is not yet clear how important this pattern will become; for now, networks of connections remain crucial. This general reliance on personal ties has worked more successfully than modernization theorists expected. The explanation is largely that Chinese consciously create those ties based on ideas of trustworthiness (xinyong). They are not simply ascribed relationships predetermined by crusty tradition. In this case, premodern social ties have adapted themselves quite easily to modernity. On the other hand, personal solidarities also form the core of corruption. The late imperial government recognized this in its fear of cliques and its avoidance rules, which prevented officials from serving in their home areas. These mechanisms still did not prevent enormous amounts of rent-seeking by late Qing officials. The cultural ties that have served so well in developing small entrepreneurs in most Chinese societies have also formed natural lines of corruption. Without going into detail about corruption, it is enough to point out that China’s cultural heritage, exactly because of its richness and complexity, has the potential to develop in different directions, and that the political and economic context will be as important as the cultural repertoire in determining actual behavior.


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Chinese Cultures and Political Behavior Chinese tradition seems to offer few possible roots for democracy. China’s various political systems—imperial, nationalist, and communist—were all designed to be thoroughly driven from top to bottom, right up to the waning years of the twentieth century. The rulers of the imperial system never had the slightest intention of working democratically, and both the nationalists and the communists who ruled China for most of the twentieth century shared an essentially Leninist understanding of how the single-party state should work. Both paid lip service to the ideas of democracy, in their very different ways, but both in fact institutionalized powerful authoritarian rule. Even at the village level China had no institutional mechanisms of self-government. In late imperial times, the magistrate held all legal authority, and any village-level political organization served to further his social control or ability to tax. The main techniques for this during the Qing were the baojia system, which organized people into units of ten, with mutual responsibility for surveillance and monitoring behavior, and the village contract (xiangyue) system, in which the magistrate or local elites would read an imperial statement about moral behavior. In practice, local elites like large landlords tended to control villages and would work closely with magistrates. This pessimistic conclusion cannot, however, be the whole story. Taiwan peacefully lifted its decades-long “state of emergency” in 1987, legalized opposition political parties, and embarked on a rapid and remarkable course of democratization. This has been successful by almost any measure, leading ultimately to the election of a president from outside the Nationalist Party. No one could have imagined this two decades earlier. As with economic behavior, this success has important cultural precursors even without any kind of democratic tradition. Similarly again, those cultural elements are no guarantee of success, but simply offer a potential line of development that can only be realized under certain circumstances. Civility Democracy requires a set of values and social understandings as well as an institutional structure. China and Taiwan certainly lacked the institutional traditions, but they did not lack the kinds of community


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resources that Robert Putnam’s work on social capital identifies as crucial to democratic development. These resources are the social bonds that allow the creation of a public sphere and eventually a civil society. I will discuss two such resources in particular: civility and trust. The concept of civil society had no real equivalent in China until it was imported in the twentieth century. Even now there are several competing translations for the term. Quick definitions often take civil society as those social organizations that fall between the family and the state. It is also worth recalling, however, that not all such social organizations are civil. Gangsters, lynch mobs, and terrorist cells all fall between family and state. The quick definition needs to be expanded by adding at least two other aspects of civility. First, these organizations must allow room for other groups whose agendas may differ. Second, they must accommodate, and be accommodated by, the state structure. Two core Chinese concepts with long histories capture a great deal of this meaning of civility: wen and li. Wen literally means writing, but was used in many ways that overlap with “civil” and related words in English, including wenming (civilization) and wenhua (culture). Referring to officials, it indicated civil authorities, as opposed to the military. Li is usually translated as ritual or propriety. It included a wide range of behavior from the imperial rituals of the state cult to simple courtesy. Some of the greatest neo-Confucian thinkers, including Zhu Xi and Sima Guang, wrote manuals of li for household use, which included everything from how to conduct weddings to the proper format for writing letters or using calling cards. Ritual and courtesy are in many ways the same thing, and they meet a core need of civility: they allow people to interact and cooperate in spite of differences in interest, background, and even culture. The imperial Ministry of Li was thus responsible for diplomacy, among other things. These concepts of civility provided a resource for some amount of tolerance in late imperial China. In practice, however, they could become tools of political control as easily as they could develop into sources for civil society. Both wen and li found themselves at the center of republican (and later communist) propaganda campaigns that were intended to solidify control by managing even the smallest aspects of identity. Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life Movement in the 1930s, for example, promoted personal hygiene and polite behavior


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in an effort to remold the population. It explicitly harked back to Confucian ideas of li even as it promoted the ideals of modernity, and all in the service of a very uncivil state. The long-held ethic of civility may have been important to the consolidation of democracy in Taiwan, but like any cultural value, it was no guarantee of any particular result. Trust and Social Capital The work of Robert Putnam, first in Italy and more recently in the United States, has brought increasing attention to the role of social capital in civil society. Putnam argues that horizontal ties of social trust create a sphere where individuals can influence the publicly shared understandings that govern collective life. These ties foster high levels of trust, which facilitate social coordination and decrease opportunities for corruption. An absence of such ties encourages an all-powerful state to step into the breach. Thus, he argues, northern Italy has fostered a thriving economy and civil society because of its long tradition of community association, while southern Italy has lagged behind because it relies instead on patron–client ties and other forms of vertical relationship.7 China does in fact appear to possess some of the resources that social capital theorists think are important. Certainly it was far better endowed than some recent observers have claimed. Francis Fukuyama’s assertion that “the lack of trust outside the family makes it hard for unrelated people to form groups or organizations” in China, for example, will not stand up to close scrutiny.8 Chinese societies featured many kinds of organizations of unrelated people, and they still do. Local elites organized into charitable groups to provide granaries for famine relief and schools for the children of the poor. They also constructed networks based simply on friendship, which was, after all, one of the five core Confucian social relationships. Groups of unrelated people ran most temples dedicated to community deities. These were often organized as shareholding corporations, with local surname groups or neighborhood regions holding the shares. Sworn brotherhoods provided another cultural mechanism to unite a group of unrelated people through the metaphors of kinship. Various broader religious movements, from Buddhism to secret sects, brought people together as well. All these mechanisms


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still exist in Taiwan. Even the kinship ties beyond the nuclear family that most people draw on are as much achieved as ascribed. Historically, the large lineages of southeast China were not the automatic results of descent from a common ancestor, but were the creations of groups already on the ground, who left some kin out and included others. The kin ties people actually mobilized in daily life also show their achieved nature, as people will draw selectively on certain kin. These networks are important in business, as I discussed briefly above, but also in politics. They played a major role in the organization of local elections in Taiwan during the authoritarian period. The village of Xinan, for example, consisted of four single-lineage hamlets, each of which put up its own candidates for office when I lived nearby in the late 1970s. Each also attempted to make sure that no one voted for candidates outside the lineage. At the level of township politics, regular factional alliances with roots in interpersonal connections (and held together by the strong glue of patronage) provided the main lines of competition under single-party rule. Probably more important than those token elections in the long run is the way these traditional connections have allowed people in Taiwan to adapt extraordinarily quickly to democracy once they finally had a chance. Changing institutional structures is not enough to guarantee the success of democracy, as the failure or at least very stumbling beginning of democratic reforms in many places attests. The survival of these ties through decades of harsh authoritarian rule in Taiwan has allowed a much easier transition to democracy than, for example, many Eastern European cases where communism had successfully atomized local social ties. A note of caution, however, is appropriate here. The concept of social capital runs the danger of fostering a naive and romantic communitarianism, a Toquevillean ideal type of local communities united through their voluntary organizations. In fact, of course, distinctions of power, wealth, age, and gender affect even village-level ties of trust. The situation is particularly complex in Chinese societies because the state often worked, or attempted to work, through just these ties. The actual political legacies of such groups are thus mixed. Local temples could indeed act against an aggressive state, as when some temples in Taiwan organized against the Japanese takeover in 1895. But they could also organize hand-in-hand with the state, as when local elites organized militias against the Taiping Rebellion in the midnineteenth century and based them in local temples. Modern Taiwan’s


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environmental movement also shows some of the civil potential of temple-based ties. In one case the local temple successfully organized people in a three-year crusade against construction of a light oil refinery. It offered funds to the protesters and organized religious parades to the construction site in support of the demonstrators, who knew that they would not get government permission for a secular march. Many people say that a referendum on the project was defeated primarily due to the urging of a possessed spirit medium. Elsewhere on the island, though, an identical refinery was built with little resistance after the investor made large donations to all the local temples. As with all the cultural resources I have discussed, these horizontal ties of trust have to be seen in a broader political and economic context. By themselves they are no guarantee of change. One sign of Taiwan’s successful transition to democracy was a sudden flowering of both social movements and civil organizations of all kinds after the long “state of emergency” was finally lifted in 1987. The decade before this had gradually seen some organizations develop in politically safe fields like environmental protection and consumers’ rights. Immediately after 1987, though, Taiwan gave birth to full-blown movements in labor, women’s rights, indigenous people’s rights, and nearly every other kind of social interest. Groups also suddenly thrived in areas well outside politics, from village-level amateur baseball teams (which had been forbidden before) to globalizing new Buddhist movements. Most of these organizations came after democratization was well under way. They appear to be effects of democratic transition more than causes. Their rapid rise, however, was only possible because of the cultural and social resources that already existed. Ties like this appear to have played a crucial role in the successful consolidation of democracy more than in the transition itself. Implications One could easily expand this brief discussion of factors important to market development and democratic politics. The expansion would be unlikely, however, to alter this general overview of the relationship between culture and change. Chinese culture offers multiple possibilities; its varied strands magnify or diminish as people draw on them differently in particular social, political, and economic contexts.


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While culture alone is not the sole engine of change (or of stasis), it is an intimate part of the way people perceive and respond to their broader environments. Culture always affects how policies develop and work on the ground, but we cannot always easily read those effects off broad descriptions of tradition or lists of cultural traits. The complex and changing currents that make up culture demand careful local knowledge, properly placed in context. While culture is both malleable and multiple, it is never simply an artifact of broader social forces. For all its messiness and change, culture has deeply influenced how Chinese societies have developed, and will continue to do so. For example, the uniquely Chinese cultural resources for things like trust or individualism grew out of traditions very different from the ones that fostered those ideas in the West. These resources have helped create the success of the Taiwanese patterns of networked capital that I have discussed and of the alternate civilities that helped Taiwan consolidate its democracy. Even though the global spread of Western ideas has had a profound effect on all Chinese societies over the past two centuries and longer, the existence of these indigenous traditions should lead us to expect that the Taiwanese will develop their own solutions to the problems of modernity. To some extent, we can see this in some of the few areas in which direct foreign development aid and advice made a difference for Taiwan. Most of this was in the two decades after about 1950, when the United States became committed to the long-term success of the island (particularly through the U.S. Agency for International Development). There has been no such aid since Taiwan lost its international standing in the 1970s, and so it is not directly relevant to democratization. For the island’s early economic development, however, United States aid played a role in the very successful land reform of the early 1950s and in encouraging the switch to an export orientation about a decade later. Both events have been widely hailed as models, but both also relied as much on internal conditions as on external aid and the economic thinking behind it. I have already discussed how the move to a more open market meshed well with earlier traditions of networked connections. The land reform also succeeded because of the island’s unique conditions: an earlier Japanese colonial land reform that had clarified murky ownership patterns, a local landlord elite that the (KMT) government had thoroughly cowed in the violence of 1947 and to whom


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the government had no political ties (almost unknown in the history of land reforms), and the possibility of privatizing various Japaneseera monopolies whose shares could compensate landlords for their lost land. In the absence of those conditions, a similar KMT land reform had failed earlier on the mainland, creating an opportunity for the communists and their far more radical land reform. The unique confluence of conditions in Taiwan’s land reform meant that it did not generalize well as a model, although it was heavily promoted. Much the same can be said about all of Taiwan’s “miracles,” both economic and political. Pressures toward more open markets and an export-oriented economy rarely work as well as they did in Taiwan, for instance. Taiwan’s democratization has not yet been taken as a model for others, with the exception of some people looking at China’s future. Even there, however, in spite of some significant similarities, very different conditions (the communist economic legacy, the vast size difference, the divergent positions in the global political order) should make us wary of assuming that China will simply follow in Taiwan’s footsteps. While Taiwan may not provide a model, it does offer some important lessons. It shows, for instance, how “traditional” cultural features like local religious or personalistic ties can maintain reservoirs of social capital even under very authoritarian regimes. These are hardly the only cause of Taiwan’s economic and political changes, but they played an important role in the successful implementation of both. Taiwan’s experience also forces us to remember that cultures adjust in response to external conditions, and that we should not assume—as the early modernization theorists did—that cultures tied to earlier social and political systems cannot adjust very well to the new global economy. Taiwan’s particular cultural path does not look entirely the same as anything in the West, but it too looks like a successful solution to modernity’s challenges. Notes 1. William Theodore de Bary, “Confucian Education in Premodern East Asia,” in Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity, ed. Wei-ming Tu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 33. 2. Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 481–510. 3. Thomas A. Metzger, Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China’s Evolving Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).


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4. Stevan Harrell, “Why Do the Chinese Work So Hard,” Modern China 11, no. 2 (1985): 203–26. 5. Gary G. Hamilton, “Culture and Organization in Taiwan’s Market Economy,” in Market Cultures: Society and Morality in the New Asian Capitalisms, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), 41–77. 6. Ibid., 64. 7. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 8. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995), 75.


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Part III India


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8 India How a Rich Nation Became Poor and Will Be Rich Again1 GURCHARAN DAS

Does “culture” in some way help to explain the fact that the same Indian economy that was stagnating for the first fifty years of the twentieth century began to grow at a respectable clip after 1980 and was among the fastest-growing in the world by the end of the century? Consider the following hundred-year trend: between 1900 and 1950, the Indian economy grew on average 0.8 percent a year, but the population also grew at about the same rate; thus, net growth in income per capita was nil and we rightly called our colonial economy stagnant.2 After independence, economic growth picked up to 3.5 percent between 1950 and 1980, but so did population growth (to 2.2 percent); hence the net effect on income was 1.3 percent per capita, and this is what we mournfully referred to as “the Hindu rate of growth.” Things began to change with modest liberalization in the 1980s when annual economic growth rose to 5.6 percent. This happy trend continued in the reform decade of the 1990s, when growth averaged 6.2 percent a year while population slowed to 1.8 percent; thus, per capita income rose by a decent 4.4 percent a year. As a benchmark, recall that the West’s industrial revolution took place at a 3 percent GDP growth and 1.1 percent per capita income

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growth after 1820. To appreciate the magnitude of the Indian change after 1980, let me illustrate: If India’s per capita GDP had continued growing at the pre-1980 level, then its income would have reached present American per capita income levels only by 2250; but if it continues to grow at the post-1980 rate then it will reach those levels by 2066: a gain of 184 years! How does one begin to explain India’s economic performance over the past century? The Indian nationalist blames the first fifty years of stagnation on British colonialism. But a trade economist will counter this by showing that the world economy was also stagnant during that period (especially after World War I) when world per capita GDP grew annually at just under 1 percent.3 The main culprits, he would say, were conflict and autarky. Disgraceful protectionism by most interwar governments slowed both the world’s and India’s economy. Although the Indian economy picked up after 1950, the neoclassical economist would argue that it performed below the world economy, which experienced a “golden age” driven by trade expansion until 1971. Like the rest of the Third World, India did not benefit from global trade expansion because it had closed its economy and pursued “import substitution.” Moreover, Nehru’s socialism had shackled the economy with fierce controls on the private sector, pejoratively called “Licence Raj”; hence its annual GDP growth was 1.5 percentage points below even the third world average between 1950 and 1980.4 This changed dramatically with modest liberal reforms in the 1980s and more sweeping ones in the 1990s as the Indian economy integrated with the rest of the world. In those twenty years it not only outperformed the world economy significantly but it was among the fastest-growing economies in the world.5 Gradual technological diffusion, rising capital accumulation and productivity, and the expansion of education help economists to explain a good deal of the story. There is also the value of accumulated learning through time. Collective learning is Hayek’s term, and he applied it to the cumulative experience that generations build up, which is embodied in language, technology, and ways of doing things.6 But economic explanations are not enough. That India adopted democracy (in 1950) before capitalism (in 1991) is also significant because democracy’s redistributive pressures, such as free power to farmers and other subsidies, have dampened growth and also explain why India’s reform process has been so painfully slow. Economists


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also find it puzzling that the liberal institutions of the British Raj did not engender faster growth during the colonial years. The rule of law, the relative peace of Pax Britannica, a nondirigiste administration, the railroads and canals: all these were market-friendly, after all. I believe that national confidence also plays an important role. The more damaging impact of colonialism may well have been to Indian minds: it created an inferiority complex from which they have only recently recovered. Douglass North has rightly emphasized the importance of beliefs.7 Businesspeople understand the value of confidence in entrepreneurial success and in creating a climate for investment; historians too emphasize the power of self-belief in national success—Roman history and Britain’s rise in the 1800s are examples. After independence, India’s confidence certainly rose, especially as democracy took root, but the flawed economic institutions of Nehruvian socialism damaged that confidence. Once these socialist institutions began to be replaced by capitalist ones in the Reform period, confidence returned and young Indian minds finally became decolonized. I discovered this changed mood when I traveled extensively across India in the 1990s, and I think it also explains the current economic success.8 A Galloping Tour of Indian Economic History I shall now amplify my arguments by taking the reader on a galloping tour of Indian economic history. From this story I shall draw lessons about the role of institutions and culture in development. In passing, I shall touch upon the great questions of Indian history: Did the British impoverish India? Why didn’t the railroads engender an industrial revolution? Did Nehru’s socialism dampen India’s progress? What is the consequence of democracy preceding capitalism? We Begin with the Mughals India’s nationalist historians have portrayed its precolonial economy as a golden age of prosperity, whose fabulous wealth set the Europeans upon their great voyages of discovery.9 Under the Mughal Empire in the late 1500s, India’s wealth did indeed sustain more than one hundred million people. With plenty of arable land, its agriculture


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was certainly as productive as Western Europe’s, and even the subsistence-oriented peasant got a decent return.10 India also had a large, skilled workforce that produced not only cotton but also luxuries for the aristocracy. Consequently, the economy produced a large financial surplus, which the Mughals used to support their growing empire and finance spectacular monuments like the Taj Mahal.11 In 1497 the Portuguese sent Vasco da Gama with a flotilla of four ships to find India’s wealth. But the two-year voyage was not a commercial success and the Indians were not interested in European clothes and goods, for they made far better ones. But Vasco Da Gama told King Manuel of Portugal of large cities, large buildings and rivers, and great populations. He spoke about spices and jewels, precious stones and “mines of gold.” He believed that he had found India’s legendary wealth.12 It took the English a hundred years to discover this wealth. Initially, they came to plunder but soon discovered the rewards of trade. They found that India produced the world’s best cotton yarn and textiles, and in enormous quantities.13 What the Indians wanted in exchange from the Europeans was gold and silver, for which they had an insatiable appetite. Hence, there was a constant flow of gold to India, which absorbed a good deal of the bullion the Spaniards mined in the New World. Having learned about cotton textiles from India, the English turned the tables and brought an industrial revolution to Britain—destroying the work lives of millions of Indian weavers. A Leading Manufacturer in the 1700s India was a leading manufacturing country in the early 1700s. It had 22.6 percent of the world’s GDP, which came down to around 16 percent by 1820, closer to its share of world population.14 It had a developed banking system and vigorous merchant capital, with a network of agents, brokers. and middlemen. Given the country’s enormous financial surplus, skilled artisan class, large exports, abundant arable land, and reasonable productivity, why didn’t a modern industrial economy emerge in India? Why did India instead become impoverished? The fact is that despite a dynamic and a growing commercial sector that responded to market forces and extensive foreign trade, eighteenth-century India was significantly behind Western Europe in


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technology, institutions, and ideas. Neither an agricultural revolution nor a scientific revolution had occurred, and “in the long run the manual skill of the Indian artisan could be no substitute for technological progress,”15 which required new attitudes. Notwithstanding the surplus and the trade, in the middle 1700s India had a “per capita product perhaps two-thirds of that in England and France.”16 There is no easy answer to the problem of why the country was prosperous and the people were poor. One explanation is that even in the 1700s India had a large population and plenty of cheap labor. Prosperity comes with rising productivity, and a rise in productivity depends on technology. When the supply of labor is elastic, it is more economical to hire people than to invest in machines. Hence, an Englishman observed in 1807, “in India it is seldom that an attempt is made to accomplish anything by machinery that can be performed by human labour.”17 The British Raj and Indian Poverty India’s nationalist historians have blamed the British Raj for India’s poverty. The classic nationalist case is that India had been rich before the British came, and colonialism weakened agriculture and “deindustrialized” India, throwing millions of artisans out of work. Britain’s trade policies encouraged the import of manufactures and the export of raw materials; finally, it drained the wealth of India by transferring its capital to Britain. Nationalists claimed that Lancashire’s new textile mills crushed India’s handloom textile industry and threw millions of weavers out of work. India’s textile exports plunged from a leadership position before the start of Britain’s industrial revolution to a fraction of previous levels. The indigenous banking system, which financed these exports, was also destroyed. Since the colonial government did not erect tariff barriers, Indian consumers shifted to cheaper English millmade cloth and millions of handloom workers were left in misery. British colonial rule “deindustrialized” India (a favorite nationalist phrase). Once an exporter of textiles, India became an exporter of raw cotton.18 Britain also changed the old land revenue system to the disadvantage of the farmer, who had to now pay revenue whether or not the monsoon failed. This led to famines. The worst one, in 1896–97,


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affected ninety-six million people and cost an estimated five million lives. Although the railroads helped in the trade of food crops, the enlarged national market sucked away the peasant’s surplus, which he had earlier stored for the bad years. Moreover, the British government transferred its surplus revenues back to England. Since India consistently exported more than it imported from the middle 1800s into the early 1900s, Britain used India’s trade surplus to finance its own trade deficit with the rest of the world, to pay for its exports to India, and for capital repayments in London. This represented a massive drain of India’s wealth.19 In recent years some historians have challenged this nationalist picture. They have argued that Indian industry’s decline in the 1800s was caused by technology. The machines of Britain’s industrial revolution wiped out Indian textiles, in the same way that traditional handmade textiles disappeared in Europe and the rest of the world. Fifty years later Indian textile mills would have destroyed India’s handmade textiles. India’s weavers were, thus, the victims of technological obsolescence.20 They also found that the land tax had not been exorbitant: by 1900 it was only 5 percent of the agricultural output or half the average per capita tax burden. There had been a “drain of wealth,” but it was only about 1.5 percent of GNP every year. The revisionist historians argued that India’s payments to Britain were for real military and civilian services and to service capital investments. Also, the overhead cost of the British establishment—the so called “home charges”—was in fact quite small.21 If India had maintained its own army and navy it would have spent more. True, India did have a balance of payments surplus, which Britain used to finance part of her deficit, but India was compensated by the import of gold and silver that went into private Indian hands. India Begins to Reindustrialize Indian entrepreneurs began to set up their own modern textile mills after 1850 and very slowly began to recapture the domestic market. In 1896, Indian mills supplied 8 percent of the total cloth consumed in India; in 1913, 20 percent; in 1936, 62 percent; and by 1945, 76 percent.22 Although India did not participate in global trade expansion between 1870 and 1913, Indian businesspeople made large profits during World War I, which they reinvested after the war. Thus, India’s manufacturing output grew 5.6 percent per year between


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1913 and 1938, well above the world average of 3.3 percent.”23 The British government finally provided tariff protection in the 1920s, which helped industrialists to expand and diversify. By independence in 1947, Indian entrepreneurs were strong and in a position to buy out the businesses of the departing British. Industry’s share in India’s GNP had doubled from 3.8 percent in 1913 to 7.5 percent in 1947, and the share of manufactures in her exports rose from 22.4 percent in 1913 to 30 percent in 1947. No Industrial Revolution? One of the intriguing questions of history is why India failed to create an industrial revolution. Karl Marx predicted that the railroads would transform India and usher in an industrial revolution. Indeed, by World War I, some thought that it was about to happen. By 1914 India had the world’s third largest railroad network, the largest jute manufacturing industry, the fourth largest cotton textile industry, the largest canal system, and 2.5 percent of world trade.24 Although a colony, it had a very liberal regulatory regime—far friendlier to investors than the one that replaced it after independence—and after the 1920s its infant industry was also favored by tariffs. It had a merchant class hungry to become industrialists. Industrialization did, in fact, pick up after the war, when industry’s share in national output doubled. But it was not enough to broadly transform an agricultural society. Modern industry employed only 2.5 million people out of a population of 350 million. Amiya Kumar Bagchi, the Marxist economist, suggests that the reason no industrial revolution occurred was the lack of effective demand during the colonial period, which limited business opportunity. Indians were just too poor to buy modern goods and services.25 But if the domestic Indian market was small, couldn’t the entrepreneur have supplemented it by producing for export? Morris D. Morris says no, and blames supply constraints: Indian entrepreneurs were uncompetitive because of a shortage of technology, skilled labor, and capital, all of which raised the cost of production.26 The historian Rajat Ray argues that Indian businessmen did not export because they made inferior products, unacceptable to the world market. In his view, technological backwardness was the single biggest failing.27 But surely they could have imported technology, as did Jamshedji Tata, G. D. Birla, and others.


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Unlike nationalist historians, I do not think there was a British conspiracy to underinvest in India or sabotage Indian business. Bombay’s textile mills were built with credit, technical assistance, and machines from Britain, although they were a competitive threat to Manchester’s mills. I believe India’s industrial revolution did not occur for four reasons. First, Indian agriculture remained stagnant, and you cannot have an industrial revolution without an agricultural surplus or the means to feed a rapidly growing urban population. Second, the international trading environment turned hostile with protectionism after World War I, followed by the Depression. Third, the colonial government did not educate the masses, unlike the Japanese state. Finally, a colonial mindset pervaded the Indian middle class—even the hardiest potential entrepreneur lacks confidence when he is politically enslaved. The Verdict on British Rule? Did the British impoverish India? Without question, in the 1700s it plundered and looted India’s wealth, as all conquerors have done in history. But did it create ongoing institutions that were to India’s detriment? The answer has to do with the nature and theory of colonialism. True, its industrial revolution threw millions of weavers out of work, but that would have happened anyway when the new technology reached India. British government policy could have cushioned the impact by erecting trade barriers and thus saved an enormous amount of human suffering, but protecting handlooms would have been a temporary palliative. Odd as it may sound, I believe that Britain did not “exploit” India enough. Had it made the massive investments in India that it did in the Americas, India would have become more prosperous and a much bigger market for British goods. A richer India would have been a better customer, a better supplier, and a firmer basis of Empire.28 Britain’s main failure was in not educating the Indian masses. Britain’s education system in India produced only a thin upper crust of extremely well-educated Indians, ignoring the masses. Hence 83 percent of Indians were illiterate at Independence.29 Although Britain could not lift Indians out of poverty or avert famines, it did give India the institutions of democracy: the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and a free press. It built railways, ca-


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nals, and harbors. It gave India almost a hundred years of peace—the Pax Britannica. Although it brought modern values and institutions, it did not interfere with the country’s ancient traditions and religion. Hence India has preserved its spiritual heritage, and its old way of life continues. Many despair over the divisiveness of caste, but the hold of the Indian way of life is also a bulwark against the onslaught of global culture. Independence and “License Raj” After independence, democracy took root in India and gradually the masses acquired a stake in the system, periodically electing representatives even from the lowest castes. The rulers also adopted a Fabian socialist economic path, and Indians did not turn to capitalism until 1991, although there was modest liberalization of the economy in the 1980s. Thus, India embraced democracy before capitalism, which makes its journey to modernity unique and explains a good deal. Jawaharlal Nehru and his planners did not trust private entrepreneurs, so they made the state the principal entrepreneur. Not surprisingly, they failed to create an industrial revolution. Instead India experienced an agricultural revolution in the early 1970s. It thus had an important precondition for the industrial revolution—an agricultural surplus—but the industrial take-off eluded it. Its investment rate rose from 6 percent to well over 20 percent, and yet this did not engender a take-off. Why? I think at least six things were wrong with India’s mantra. One, it adopted an inward-looking, import-substituting path rather than an outward-looking, export-promoting route; it thus denied itself a share in world trade and the prosperity that trade brought in the postwar era. Two, it set up a massive, inefficient, and monopolistic public sector; hence its investments were not productive and it had a poor capital:output ratio. Three, it overregulated private enterprise with the worst controls in the world, and this diminished competition. Four, it discouraged foreign capital and denied itself the benefits of technology and world-class competition. Five, it pampered organized labor to the point that it has extremely low productivity. Six, it ignored the education of its children. Nehru’s strategic planner, P. C. Mahalanobis, made two incorrrect assumptions. He assumed that there were no opportunities for rapid


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export expansion in the 1950s, but it turned out that tiny Hong Kong could earn more from its exports than the whole of India, as India’s share of world trade declined from 2.2 percent in 1947 to 0.5 percent in 1990. He also assumed that competition was wasteful—but productivity rarely improves without it. Even more damaging were the creeping controls on the private sector. The most bizarre was the licensing system. It began with the Industrial Licensing Act of 1951, which required an entrepreneur to get a license to set up a new unit, expand it, or change the product mix. A huge number of untrained clerks, engineers, and bureaucrats at the Directorate General of Technical Development, operating on inadequate information, vetted thousands of applications on an ad hoc basis. These low-level functionaries took months on futile microreviews of applications which they finally sent to the administrative ministry for approval. The ministry again lost months reviewing the same data before it sent the application to an interministerial licensing committee. After the minister approved, the investor had to seek approval from the capital goods licensing committee to import machinery. If he needed finance from a state financial institution, he had to repeat the same scrutiny afresh. The result was enormous delays, sometimes lasting years, with staggering opportunities for corruption. Large business houses set up parallel bureaucracies in Delhi to follow up on their files, organize bribes, and win licenses. If the entrepreneur did finally get started and made a success of his enterprise, he was again in trouble. It was an offense punishable under the law to manufacture beyond the capacity granted by the license. India became the only country in the world where the production of sorely needed goods was punishable by law.30 The system thwarted competition, entrepreneurship, and growth without achieving any of its social objectives. It fostered monopolies and it proliferated uneconomic-sized plants in remote, uncompetitive locations, employing second-rate technology. Bureaucrats who did not have a clue about the basics of running a business made decisions on the technology, size, and location of plants. By the late 1960s, it was becoming clear that India was on the wrong path. But instead of changing course after Nehru, Indira Gandhi introduced more controls. She nationalized banks, discouraged foreign investment, and placed more hurdles before domestic enterprise. Hence industrial growth plunged from 7.7 percent a year between 1951 and 1965 to 4.0 percent between 1966 and 1980. The


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productivity of Indian manufacturing declined half a percent a year from 1960 to 1985.31 Thus Mohan proclaimed 1966 to 1980 as “effectively the dark period for the Indian economy.”32 It is hard to blame Nehru for adopting the wrong economic model, for such was the wisdom of the age. Dozens of economists visited India and hailed his bold experiment.33 It is fair, however, to blame Indira Gandhi, for by then Japan’s miracle was evident, and Korea and Taiwan were following in its footsteps. But ideology is only one part of the story. An important reason for nonperformance was poor implementation. Even Nehru’s socialism did not have to degenerate into “License Raj.” India After the Reforms Although there was modest liberalization in the 1980s, the decisive turning point came in July 1991 when the minority government of Narasimha Rao announced sweeping reforms. It opened the economy to foreign investment and trade; it dismantled import controls, lowered customs duties, devalued the currency and made the rupee convertible on the trade account; it virtually abolished licensing controls on private investment, dropped tax rates, and broke up public sector monopolies. As a result, growth rose to 7.5 percent a year for three years in a row in the mid-1990s, inflation came down from 13 percent to 6 percent by 1993, exchange reserves shot up from $1 billion to $20 billion by 1993 and had surpassed $100 billion by the end of 2003. This was as important a turning point as Deng’s revolution in China in December 1978. Surprisingly, the elected coalition governments that succeeded Rao continued the reform process, and despite its slow, incremental pace, it has made India one of the fastest-growing major economies in the world.34 Indians have traditionally not placed a high priority on making money. Hence, the merchant or bania is placed third in the four-caste hierarchy, behind the brahmin and the kshatriya, and only a step ahead of the laboring shudra. After the economic reforms, money making became increasingly respectable and the sons of brahmins and kshatriyas began to get MBAs and wanted to become entrepreneurs. The business pages of newspapers became livelier; chief ministers in the states scrambled for private investment; judges became more even-handed in industrial disputes. As a result, India is in the


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midst of a social revolution rivaled, perhaps, only by the ascent of Japan’s merchant class during the 1868 Meiji Restoration. There has also been a mental revolution, illustrated by the changed attitude to English. After the British left, Indians constantly carped about the English language. But in the 1990s this carping died down. Quietly, without ceremony, English became one of the Indian languages. English lost its colonial stigma, oddly enough, around the time that the Hindu nationalists came to power. Young Indians in the new middle class think of English as a skill, like using Windows. Encouraged by flourishing private television channels and supported by their advertisers, the newly emerging middle classes avidly embrace Hinglish, an uninhibited hybrid of Hindi and English, and this popular idiom of the bazaar is rushing down the socioeconomic ladder. The purists naturally disapprove, but Indians are more comfortable and accepting of it today because they are more relaxed and confident as a people. Their minds have become decolonized. The world economy, meanwhile, has shifted its focus from industry to information, much to India’s advantage, with its success in outsourcing software and business processing. These “Bangalores” have given Indians confidence, and they reflect a new social contract. The new entrepreneurs did not inherit wealth; they have risen on their talent, hard work, and professional skills. A new self-belief has emerged among urban youth that needs no confirmation from others, especially from the West. Composers of music, such as A. R. Rehman, display an exuberant nonchalance, as do the new young Bollywood pop stars. So do new fiction writers like Arundhati Roy, along with beauty queens, cricket stars, and fashion designers. Some Lessons Neoclassical economic theory explains a great deal about why the Indian economy, stagnant in the first half of the twentieth century century, went on to become one of the world’s fastest-growing by the century’s end. It tells us, for example, that protectionism by governments in the 1920s and 1930s dampened world trade and slowed down both the global and the Indian economies. It also explains why India performed below the world average between 1950 and 1980: thinking that trade had impoverished it in the colonial period, India closed its economy and denied itself the fruits of a “golden period” in


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world trade between 1950 and 1970. “License Raj” and other institutions of Nehru’s socialism also suppressed growth. Finally, neoclassical economics explains how, by dismantling controls and integrating into the global economy, India has become more competitive and is growing rapidly after the reforms. But this is not the whole story, and we must turn to institutions and attitudes to understand the incentive structure of the Indian society. Indians blame colonialism for impoverishing them. But as we have seen, matters are more complex. Colonialism did not “deindustrialize” India, as the nationalists argued; handloom textiles died in India (and the world) because of technological obsolescence. Colonialism’s bigger damage was to Indian confidence, which included Indian entrepreneurs. This confidence began to grow with Gandhi’s freedom movement in the first half of the twentieth century, and industrialization did pick up. However, its impact on society was insufficient to create an industrial revolution. After Independence, India’s confidence certainly rose as democracy took root, but the flawed economic institutions of Nehruvian socialism acted as a damper. Once these socialist institutions began to be replaced by capitalist ones in the Reform period, self-assurance returned to the Indian marketplace. Today’s mood in India is the opposite of what existed a hundred years ago. Insecurity and inferiority afflicted colonial India, which is all too apparent in the writings of Bengali writers of the nineteenth century, such as Bankim Chandra Chatterji. Today, writers, such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy exhibit a matter-of-fact self-assuredness that reflects a changed national mindset. India embraced democracy first and capitalism afterwards, and this has made a difference. India became a full-fledged democracy in 1950, with universal suffrage and extensive human rights, but only in 1991 did it open itself up to the free play of market forces. For the rest of the world, it has been the other way around. In the West, suffrage was extended gradually in the last century, and as mass political parties developed, democracy began to impinge on capitalist institutions and practices. India’s democracy has an overwhelming majority of poor voters: 70 percent still live in rural areas; organized labor is less than 10 percent of the labor force; and the middle class is around 20 percent of the population. Because of democratic pressures, India tried to redistribute the pie before it was baked. It set up intricate regulatory


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networks before the private economy had transformed a rural into an industrial society. It began to think in terms of “welfare” before there were welfare-generating jobs. The result, as we have seen, was a throttling of enterprise, slow growth, and missed opportunities. It is the price India has paid for having democracy before capitalism—or rather too much democracy and not enough capitalism. Since politics is a short-run game and growth a long-run one, no situation will ever be completely optimal. This explains why Indian politicians do not bother about education because results take a long time. When a politician promises rice for two rupees a kilo even though it costs five rupees in the market, he wins the election. Since the mid-1960s, politicians have vigorously competed in giving away free goods and services to voters. When politicians do that, where is the money to come from to create new schools or improve old ones? India’s damaging fiscal deficit (around 10 percent of GDP for the center and states combined) is a testimonial to the downside of competitive politics, and it teaches that the demand for publicly provided goods and services is insatiable in a democracy. But India’s problems of governance go far beyond the need to appease interests. The weakening of its democratic institutions, begun by Indira Gandhi in the 1970s, caused widespread corruption, political violence, and populist giveaways, and paralyzed problem solving. Conspicuously absent are disciplined party organizations, which help leaders in other democracies to mobilize support for specific programs. Hence, individual leaders rely excessively on personal appeal to win elections. When in power, leaders tend to take the easy way out, which is not to act at all. Will capitalism and its cousin, globalization, succeed in establishing a comfortable place for themselves in India? The answer depends on their ability to deliver prosperity broadly. It also depends on leaders in government and business championing the classic liberal premises of free trade and competition. It will require leaders to state four points clearly: (1) some people will not fare as well as others in the competitive marketplace; (2) the winners will far outnumber the losers; (3) capitalist democracy is the best arrangement we have found; and (4) globalization is not only a good thing, it is a great leap forward in history. My fear is that capitalism’s success in India is threatened not so much by the leftists or protectionists as by the timidity of its defenders.


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The curious historic inversion between democracy and capitalism means that India’s path into the future is evolving through a daily dialogue between the conservative forces of caste, religion, and village; the leftist and Nehruvian socialist forces that dominated the country’s intellectual life for forty years, and the new forces of global capitalism. These “million negotiations of democracy” slow down the pace of economic reform, but they also mean that India might have a more stable, peaceful, and negotiated transition into the future than, say, China. It might also avoid some of the deleterious side effects of an unprepared capitalist society like Russia. Although slower moving, India is more likely to preserve its way of life and its civilization of diversity, tolerance, and spirituality against the onslaught of the global culture. Does Culture Matter? Cultural explanations have been a vigorous industry in India for over a hundred years. Colonial officials routinely blamed India’s poverty on the otherworldly spirituality of Hindu life and its fatalistic beliefs. Max Weber attributed the absence of development to the caste system. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist, found that India’s social system and attitudes were an important cause of its “low-level equilibrium” of low productivity, primitive production techniques, and low levels of living.35 Deepak Lal, another economist, similarly explained economic stagnation in a low-level “Hindu equilibrium” around the caste system, which bought stability in the context of political warfare, monsoon failure and climatic uncertainty, labor shortage, and an undervalued merchant class.36 David Landes, the historian, blames the enervating heat, which is hard to work in. For this reason, rich countries lie in temperate zones and poor ones in the tropics and semitropics.37 While institutions and culture undoubtedly do matter, we are all skeptical of national stereotypes and easy cultural explanations of the sort that were common a hundred years ago. In my experience, successful Hindu entrepreneurs can be both otherworldly in religion and aggressive in business. The Indian farmer, though caught in the caste system, responds quickly to market-based incentives, as the Green Revolution testifies. Brahmins, despite their supposed contempt for manual labor, will plow their land vigorously if they have to. And


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Rajput Thakurs, who never worked for a living, will shed their feudal ways for the sake of a commercial opportunity. Moreover, the great many non-Hindus in India had also been stuck in the same stagnation. Other Asian countries were as backward as India but had no “Hindu equilibrium” to explain away their stagnation. And Indians who migrate to other countries outperform those who stay home, Hinduism notwithstanding. Thus, I am uncomfortable with the “otherworldly values of the Hindus” or the “immobilizing effects of the caste system” and the “conservative habits of the merchant caste.” I believe that Sir John Hicks’ Economic Principle does trump in most cases. It states that “people would act economically; when the opportunity of an advantage was presented to them, they would take it.”38 It explains not only the diffusion of the Green Revolution across India but also the demographic transitions currently underway in many states. When seeking an explanation for a nation’s wealth and poverty, my preferred method is to begin with economic factors as proximate causes that motivate a businessperson to invest: the size of the market, the capability of suppliers, distribution hurdles, and the state of competition. If this does not satisfy, I seek answers in institutions, some of which are, of course, intimately tied to culture. I have found that institutions can evolve rapidly as incentives change in society and can be transformed fairly quickly: during the 1990s India was able to dismantle many of the institutions of Nehruvian socialism and replace them with capitalist institutions. Finally, if none of these factors provide a satisfactory explanation, then I turn to attitudes and social structure. I find Deepak Lal’s distinction between material and cosmological beliefs useful.39 The material beliefs of a civilization are about ways of making a living and are the subject of economics; cosmological ones are about how to live and are in the realm of “culture.” The rise of the West was accompanied by a change in both sets of beliefs, but East Asia’s success required mainly a change in material beliefs; it has become prosperous without losing its soul. In other words, it is possible to modernize without westernizing. Ever since the British Raj, material beliefs have been changing in India, but not our cosmological beliefs. Our continuing inability to distinguish between the “modern” and the “Western” in India is surely the cause of some of our grief. I wish


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we could only accept that a great deal of modern Western culture, especially its material beliefs, is not the West’s property but a universal, critical way of thinking that belongs to all rational human beings. Then we would not waste our energies on swadeshi (protectionism), hindutva (preserving the ancient Hindu civilization), and futile language debates (“remove English from primary schools”). The debate between modernization and Westernization, begun in the early 1800s by Ram Mohan Roy, continues to rage in India. At its root is a fear of losing the Indian way of life. The older generation fears it more than the young, who have less colonized minds and more confidence that in adopting the West’s material beliefs they need not lose their own cosmological ones. Notes 1. For this chapter, I have borrowed generously from my book, India Unbound (New York: Knopf, 2001). 2. Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy, 1820–1992 (Paris: OECD, 1995). 3. Angus Maddison, The World Economy in the 20th Century (Paris: OECD, 1989). “World” numbers refer to a thirty-two-country average made by Maddison representing 80 percent of world output. 4. Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy. 5. Arvind Virmani, “Star Performers of the 20th/21st Century: Asian Tigers, Dragons, or Elephants,” September 1999. Updated 2004. http://www.ICRIER.org 6. Hayek calls it “the transmission in time of our accumulated stock of knowledge,” Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 27. 7. “Belief structures get transformed into societal and economic structures into institutions—both formal rules and informal norms of behavior. The relationship between mental models and institutions is an intimate one.” Douglass North, “Economic Performance through Time,” in Empirical Studies in Institutional Change, eds., Lee Alston, Thrainn Eggertsson, and Douglass North (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 348. 8. Gurcharan Das, India Unbound (New York: Knopf, 1996), 228–43 9. For example, R. C. Dutt, The Economic History of India 1757–1837, rprt. (Delhi: Government of India, 1963), xxv. In the European mind, the name Golconda became the symbol of the haunting wealth of India. David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 60. 10. According to Irfan Habib, its population was closer to 150 million. “Potentialities of Capitalist Development in the Economy of Mughal India,” Journal of Economic History 29, no.1: 32–37. According to Maddison, “at its peak, it is conceivable that the per capita product was comparable with that of Elizabethan England.” Angus Maddison, Class Structure and Economic Growth: India and


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11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

Gurcharan Das Pakistan since the Moghuls (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), 18. See W. H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar (Delhi: A Ram, 1962) for a description of living conditions at the end of the sixteenth century. The annual revenues of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1659–1701) are said to have amounted to $450 million more than ten times those of his contemporary Louis XIV. John Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 188. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also M. N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India, The Cambridge History of India, vol. 1.1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 5. The East India Company’s export of cotton fabrics from India rose from 221,500 pieces to 707,000 pieces in the 1680s. N. Steensgaard, ”The Growth and Composition of the Long-Distance Trade of England and the Dutch Republic before 1750,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World 1350–1750, ed. James Tracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 102–52. Angus Maddison,Monitoring the World Economy, 30. Paul Bairoch confirms that India had a 25 percent share of the global trade in textiles in the early 1900s. “The Main Trends in National Economic Disparities Since the Industrial Revolution,” in Disparities in Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution, eds. P. Bairoch and M. Levy-Leboyer. (New York: Macmillan, 1981). Tapan Raychaudhuri, “The Mid-Eighteenth Century Background,” in The Cambridge Economic History of India, eds., Dharma Kumar and Meghnad Desai, vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,1983). 32. Angus Maddison, Class Structure and Economic Growth, 18. F. Buchanan, A Journey from Madras…(1807), cited in Raychaudhuri, 1983, 291. Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule (London, 1901); R.C. Dutt, The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age (London, 1906). Sir William Bentinck, a contemporary English observer, wrote, “The bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India,”quoted in Deepak Lal, The Hindu Equilibrium: Cultural Stability and Economic Stagnation, India 1500 B.C.–1980 AD, vol 1(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 184. Paul Baran calculated that 8 percent of India’s GNP was transferred to Britain each year. The Political Economy of Growth (New York: 1957), 148. Irfan Habib put the drain in 1882 at 4 percent of national income. “Studying a Colonial Economy—Without Perceiving Colonialism,” Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985): 375–76. B. R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India, 1870–1970, The New Cambridge History of India, vol 3.3 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15. It was less than 2 percent of exports at the end of the 1800s and 1 percent of exports in 1913, see K. N. Chaudhuri, “India’s International Economy in the Nineteenth Century: An Historical Survey,” Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985): 375–76.


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22. Rajat Ray, Industrialisation in India: Growth and Conflict in the Private Corporate Sector (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 34 ff. 23. B. R. Tomlinson, 1993, 143; Rajat Ray, Industrialisation in India, 341. 24. Morris D. Morris, “The Growth of Large Scale Industry to 1947,” in The Cambridge Economy History of India, vol. 2, eds, Dharma Kumar and Meghnad Desai (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 553. 25. Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Private Investment in India 1900–1939 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 26. Morris D. Morris, “The Growth of Large Scale Industry to 1947,” in The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, eds., Dharma Kumar and Meghnad Desai (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 553–676. 27. Rajat Ray, Industrialisation in India, 2. 28. But then “no colonial power helped its colony to industrialize.”Arthur W. Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870–1913 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), 225. 29. There were only nine agricultural colleges in the whole of India in 1946, with a total enrollment of 3,110 students, G. Blyn, Agricultural Trends in India 1891– 1947, (Philadelphia: 1966). 30. Bhagwati and P. Desai, Planning for Industrialization (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). This book nicely describes the pathology of the License Raj. 31. Isher J. Ahluwalia, Industrial Growth in India: Stagnation Since the Mid-Sixties (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). 32. Rakesh Mohan, “Industrial Policy and Controls,” in The Indian Economy, ed. Bimal Jalan (New Delhi: Viking, 1992), 107. 33. A galaxy of world-renowned economists came to India and applauded Nehru’s policies. Among them were Rosenstein-Rodan, Arnold Harberger, Jan Timbergen, Ragnar Frisch, Ian Little, Richard Eckaus, Max Millikan, Nicholas Kaldor, Richard Goodwin, Oskar Lange, Brian Redway, Alan Manne, and James Mirlees. 34. In fact, the first opening can be traced to the last years of Indira Gandhi, who began to loosen some controls. Rajiv Gandhi’s reforms in the mid-1980s were more important. J. Bradford Delong discusses this in “India since Independence: An Analytic Growth Narrative” in In Search of Prosperity: Analtytic Narratives on Economic Growth, ed. Dani Rodrik (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 184. 35. Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama, vol. 2, appendix 2 (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 1843ff. 36. Deepak Lal, The Hindu Equilibrium: Cultural Stability and Economic Stagnation, India 1500 B.C.–1980 AD, vol 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 2–3. 37. David Landes (1998), The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: W.W.Norton), 45. 38. Deepak Lal, Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Factor Endowments, Culture and Politics on Long-Run Economic Performance (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14 39. Ibid., 8.


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Part IV Islam


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9 Egypt as a Model of Development for the World of Islam BASSAM TIBI

Egypt occupies a pivotal position in the history of Islam’s exposure to European expansion. The encounter with Europe posed a great challenge to Muslims: it not only stopped Islamic expansion but also penetrated the territory of Dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam. The West challenged Islam’s claim that Islam ya’lu wa la yu’la alayh, “Islam is superior.” Islamic civilization flourished long before the rise of the West, but for a host of reasons it has stagnated since the 1600s and has succumbed to the expanding Western model. There were many possible responses to this painful development, ranging from rejection, adjustment, and praetorianism to the recent return of the sacred in the guise of “political Islam” (al-Islam al-Siyasi). In this case study of Egypt, I examine all these responses and how they have affected the development of state and society. Why Egypt as a Case For the Study of Islam and the Culture of Modernity? Egypt provides a textbook case for the encounter of Islamic civilization with the West because it reflects all the Islamic responses to the challenges arising from the crises addressed here. That encounter 163


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dates from the late 1700s, beginning with Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. Hegel famously described Napoleon as “the World Spirit on horseback,” that is, the spirit of the French Revolution, spreading the values of Western civilization. Napoleon’s proclamation to the Egyptian people, in Arabic, supports this interpretation: In the name of the French Republic (jumhur), based on foundations of Liberty and Equality, Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the French forces, informs the whole population of Egypt: for many decades those in power have insulted the French nation (millet) . . . the Mamalukes, who were brought from the Caucasus and Georgia, have been corrupting the best region of the whole world. But God, the Omnipotent, the Master of the Universe, has now made the destruction of their state imperative. I came only to rescue your rights from the oppressors. . . . I worship Almighty God and respect his Prophet Mohammed, and the Glorious Qur’an more than the Mamalukes. Tell them also that the people are equal before God.1

It is tempting to compare this liberation of Cairo by a Western leader in 1798 with that of Baghdad in April 2003. President Bush’s address to the Iraqi people at the end of February 2003 is reminiscent of Napoleon’s proclamation. Bush too promised freedom. But in neither case were the pledges redeemed, and both French troops in Egypt and U.S. troops in Iraq were met with hostility. Why? The simple answer is that the values of a progressive culture of freedom cannot successfully be introduced from outside. On the contrary, even positive impositions can be perceived as threats. To bear fruit, the introduction of new cultural attitudes and behaviors needs to take root in the local culture. Two hundred years later, we can see the positive cultural impact of the French occupation. But the circumstances were different. After French troops left, the Albanian officer Muhammed Ali established himself as the ruler of Egypt in 1805. But while he attempted to copy the successful European military technology, he was reluctant to adopt the success culture related to it. This ambivalence can also be seen in the modernizing efforts of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Ralston’s characterization of its efforts at military modernization as purely “importing the European army” is apt.2 Ali probably did not understand that importing technology would have significant side effects. Modern technology is more than just tools:


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it is undergirded by a worldview and value system distinctly different from the preindustrial one prevailing in Islamic civilization, then and now. Unfortunately, one still encounters educated Muslims who favor modern science and technology but are inimical to the values attached to both. The premodern worldview continues to shape the Islamic mindset in the twenty-first century. The two most prominent nineteenth-century Muslim reformers in Egypt, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi and Mohammed Abduh, spent time in Paris, studying science and technology, Montesquieu and Rousseau, law and politics. They returned friendly to cultural innovation, but only if it did not touch Islamic values. I will call this attitude “semimodernity,” the adoption of modern techniques while rejecting the worldview that produced them. In this chapter I ask whether political Islam’s call for an exclusive hall Islami, “Islamic solution,” offers Muslims any genuine solution to the crisis of modern Islam. As noted, there has been a broad range of responses to the exposure of Islamic civilization to the culture of the West over the past two centuries, from admiration in the 1800s to contemporary anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism. The most influential contemporary Egyptian Muslim Brother, Yousef al-Qaradawi, exemplifies the latter. This Islamist stands in the fundamentalist tradition of his predecessors Sayyid Qutb and Hassan alBanna, both Egyptians, who founded political Islam. Qutb called for a wholesale rejection of any cultural influences from the West. The Islamist al-Qaradawi continues this line, ridiculing adoptions from the West as hall mustaward, “imported solution.” Indicating the lack of knowledge in the West about what is really going on in the world of Islam, some Western textbooks and other publications present alQaradawi as a voice of “liberal” or “moderate” Islam.3 Because Sunni Muslims constitute about 90 percent of the Muslim community, it is Egypt, with its authoritative religious institution, alAzhar University, and not Shi’i Iran, with its spiritual center of Qom, that most deeply influences what happens in the rest of the Islamic world. Mecca and Medina are of course the divine centers of Islam, but Saudi Arabia lacks intellectual and religious authority, despite its efforts to export Wahhabism. Hence in 1990, when Saudi King Fahd needed a fatwa or legal judgment to support his decision to allow the deployment of U.S. troops during the Gulf Crisis, he asked the Sheykh of al-Azhar in Cairo, not the grand mufti of his own monarchy, to issue it.


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Along with Turkey, Egypt has been the center for adopting modern technology in the world of Islam. This did not, however, result in the value change needed for a culture of success. It is true that in the 1800s the Egyptian and Turkish core of the Ottoman Empire were the centers of considerable effort at cultural innovation in the world of Islam. But adoptions from the West were allowed only if they did not contradict Islamic shari’a. The Islamic reform of the late 1800s through the early 1900s failed to achieve its goals and gave way to a fragile liberalism followed by a populist secular nationalism that ended in the pan-Arab populism of Gamal Abdel Nasser. In terms of development, praetorianism also failed; in Egypt it has given way to political Islam, the most powerful defensive cultural response to modernity in our time. This retraditionalization of Islam in Egypt is a new “invention of tradition” rather than a revival of traditional Islam. Unfortunately, it can be expected to last for decades. In sum, there were four different responses in Egypt’s history to the challenge of modern success culture: Islamic reform, liberalism, secular pan-Arab nationalism/praetorianism, and currently political Islam. The return of the sacred in the shape of a religious–political vision for the future is the outcome of these previous failed experiments. Will contemporary political Islam succeed, or will it too fail at the end of the day? Many leading scholars in the West, including Jürgen Habermas,4 are optimistic. At least in the case of Egypt, I question their interpretation of the return of the sacred as a religious renaissance, particularly Habermas’s dubious formula of a “postsecular society.” Modernizing Egypt: The Pendulum Swings Between Reform, Liberalism, Populist Pan-Arabism, and Islamism When the oldest Muslim university, al-Azhar, was founded by the Fatimids at the same time as the city of Cairo more than a thousand years ago, it was, consistent with the orientation of its founding fathers, a Shi’ite institution of learning. It remained so for some two centuries, until Saladin reintroduced Sunni Islam to Egypt after defeating the Fatimids in 1171. Today al-Azhar is the most authoritative institution of Sunni Islam. Both for this reason and because it has been the center of intercultural encounter between Islam and the West, Egypt continues to be the focal point for religio-ideological responses to the European incursion into the world of Islam.5


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Historians view Muhammed Ali as the founder of modern Egypt. His attempt to build a modern state based on the legacy of Napoleon’s rule would have far-reaching effects. In particular, sending students to study in the West to acquire modern training and skills and building up a modern strong state entailed considerable exposure to modern knowledge. The experiment, which produced such influential thinkers as Tahtawi and Muhammed Abduh, led to attempts at a reconciliation between Islamic belief based on divine revelation and secular modernity based on reason. Toward the end of this period, a new tradition of relatively secular Islamic liberalism was emerging. At first some common ground seemed to exist between reform Islam and liberalism in Egypt. As Nadav Safran notes, however: “The gap between reformist Islam . . . and liberal nationalism steadily increased until the two became mutually exclusive.”6 At the end of the day both failed to meet the challenge and had to give way to a new force, the populist pan-Arab nationalism of Nasserism. The powerful authorities representing al-Azhar (i.e., the religious establishment) were not favorable to either. The problem confronting Egyptian society is aptly expressed by Safran as the need to develop a subjective, humanely oriented system of ideas, values and norms that would serve as a foundation for a political community under new conditions of life, to replace the traditional system based on objective divine revelation. In such an endeavor the leaders had eventually to come to grips with the problem of the possibility of conflict between reason . . . and the . . . divine revelation. . . . The problem remained unresolved, at least as far as the Qur’an was concerned. . . . During the progressive phase of their endeavor the intellectual leaders had tended to ignore this remaining problem.7

The Islamic scribes of al-Azhar not only undermined the Islamic reform pursued by M. Abduh but also shunned the ideas of the Western-educated liberal Egyptians. In doing so, they deprived reform Islam of the possibility of affecting the Islamic worldview and prevented it from putting down roots in their educational system. The military rebellion in 1952 toppled the monarchy, and al-Azhar became subordinated to the office of President Nasser. Nasser’s secular, praetorian regime revived an old Islamic tradition in which the ulema acted as legitimator, and religion was above all a tool of legitimation. But the “praetorian state” did not bring about significant cultural change. The problem Safran outlined in the passage above was again


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ignored until political Islamists gave it their own answer: an Islamist parochial model of development. As Fouad Ajami observes: An inquiry into religion in Egypt is really, and has to be, an inquiry into the nature of authority in that country. . . . To the extent that Egypt’s Islam forms the cultural system of the country, it will always matter. Rulers and opponents alike will phrase their concerns in Islamic categories. While there are some things which this cultural system will not tolerate . . . beneath that “cosmic” level, cultural limits—in Egypt and elsewhere—can be stretched to accommodate a wide range of things.8

Both Islamic reform and liberalism failed to accomplish this cultural accommodation. Until “political Islam” emerged, Islam was exploited for the purpose of legitimizing all kinds of government, whether monarchical, as before 1952, or “revolutionary populist republican” under Nasser. The Islamist opposition in the 1970s, led by rising counterelites, took the form of underground movements. This phenomenon heralds the new Islamism. Both the legal Islamists who participate in institutions and jihadists who are committed to terror represent a new political culture directed against Western values. Does this “post-secular” (Habermas) model promise a specific Islamic pattern of modernization? Are the Islamist groups of Egypt to be regarded as, in their own cultural way, a modernist movement? One should recall that Egypt is a major Sunni country, and that, despite the existence of al-Azhar, Sunni Islam, in contrast to Shi’i Islam, has no institutional clerical organization. The existence of the waqf (the institution of pious endowments) makes no difference in this regard. In Islamic history, Sunni Islam was the denomination of the ruler and had no need to establish an underground religious tradition. Contemporary militant underground movements oppose the current regime and are thus a recent phenomenon in Sunni Islam. In social terms, the mosque is central. In Sunni Islam the Muslim scribes traditionally control the mosque. However, in addition to the state-run public waqf controlling and financing the mosques, we increasingly see private mosques, supported by endowments from wellto-do faithful. Saudi funding supplements these endowments and the related mosques, contributing to the political abuse of mosques in Egypt and elsewhere and providing a home to politically militant Salafist Islamists.


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The Egyptian monarchy had been content with winning over the rector of al-Azhar University (the Sheykh al-Azhar), who as the supreme religious authority became the chief legitimator. There was no effort to impose a distinctive religious–political interpretation of Islam, and the Egyptian king did not exercise religious authority, in that he did not proclaim himself caliph in any context. Nasserist praetorianism was secular, even though it used al-Azhar to impose a religious doctrine tailoring Islam to its secular ideology. But the values and worldview of praetorian Nasserism were secular only on the surface; the Islamic worldview persisted underneath. Secularism remained rhetorical and therefore meaningless. The praetorian rulers claimed modernization but gave the Islamic worldview9 a wide berth; no cultural change took place. After Nasser’s death in 1970, Sadat came to power. He curbed this secularism in an effort to use the Muslim Brotherhood against his leftist Nasserist foes, but was finally slain by the jihad movement, an offshoot of the same Brotherhood. John Waterbury evaluates the accomplishments of the praetorian rulers and shows how much the development of society under both regimes was wanting.10 In fact this failure was due not only to political and economic policy, but to culture as well. Egyptian praetorianism under Nasser and Sadat failed to come to grips with how to culturally accommodate secular needs to religious beliefs, how to reconcile reason and revelation in a developing Islamic society. The exploitation of religion for political legitimation precluded any effort at resolving this problem. The needed unfolding of development-oriented values was sacrificed for the sake of legitimation. Under Sadat, Islam was used as a legitimacy device and was simultaneously employed by the Islamist opposition to delegitimize the established religious institutions, in particular al-Azhar, for standing in the service of the regime. Thus, Islam had two brands: one was regimist and the other was a mobilizing ideology for an oppositional underground movement. In Egypt, Algeria, and elsewhere, rulers and opponents competed to use both school and mosque as forums for their activities. But neither the state nor the Islamist opposition ever took pains to rethink or reshape existing values and the prevailing worldview. Both have pursued Islam in an instrumental manner, though for different purposes: either to use Islamic values to legitimize power or to provide religious legitimacy to oppose the regime. Neither, however, has attempted to


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pursue a cultural accommodation of social change or to encourage serious thinking about solutions to development-related needs. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the world of Islam, the mosque is the marketplace for public politics. As a rule, every mosque has an imam. Unlike the Shi’ite imam, the Sunni imam is not a holy figure but a humble Muslim prayer leader and preacher in the Friday service, as well as an administrator and caretaker of the mosque. In general the imam is also seen to be the leader of the Muslim umma, or community. In Egypt the majority of imams are recruited among al-Azhar graduates and employed by the Awqaf ministry (the Ministry for Religious Affairs). In this, they are subject to the state. Even under Nasser, however, private mosques far outnumbered others: in 1964 there were fourteen thousand private mosques compared with three thousand run by the state. Under Sadat the politicization of Islam backfired: Egyptian Islamic fundamentalists presented their Islam as the only hall (solution) to the country’s social and economic crisis. In this context, the balance shifted even more in favor of the private mosques, and in 1970 there were twenty thousand of them. By the time Sadat was assassinated in October 1981, the number of ahali (private) mosques had risen to forty-six thousand, compared to six thousand state mosques. With Saudi funds the number of these private mosques skyrocketed. Hamid Ansari found that the mosque serves both as a place for political activities and as a recruiting station for these militant fundamentalist underground organizations.11 This is not peculiar to Egypt; it is true for most Islamic countries, notably Algeria. One of these underground organizations in Egypt, al-Jihad (Holy War), was behind the assassination of Sadat, the president who had once released Islamists from jail. This group and many similar organizations are splinters of the original Muslim Brotherhood movement. They are radical, extremist, and underground, while the Muslim Brothers have moved to form the moderate centre of Islamism that aims to be represented in public institutions. Unlike the new institutional approach of the Muslim Brothers, these jihadist groups subscribe to “terror in the mind of God” and legitimize the use of force in an irregular war. Despite this difference between institutional and jihadist Islamism, both share the same values and worldviews, as well as the political goal of an “Islamic state.” Wickham, Baker, and likeminded observers are therefore quite wrong in their favorable assessments of the Muslim Brothers.12


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“Jihadist Islamism” and “institutional political Islam,” whether in Egypt or elsewhere, are not two different movements but two varieties of the same phenomenon, differing only in the means they employ. In the main, the young followers of underground political Islam are from the lower middle class, mostly with a university education but with no urban roots, having migrated from rural areas. Members of this class have not come to grips with their new urban environment and perceive all social ills as the result of Westernization and deviation from true Islam. The formula of a return to Islam is a magic one, rhetorically articulating an alternative and promising a better future but with no prospect of real success. Islamists reject their social environment, perceived as the source of their cultural anomie, alienation, and socioeconomic problems, as an expression of jahiliyya (pre-Islamic ignorance, unbelief), seeing nothing creative, innovative, or promising in it. This wholesale rejection merely cements the impasse in the country. The Return of Political Islam in Sunni Egypt Under the Impact of the Islamic Revolution in Shi’i Iran In the 1960s U.S. universities began to offer Middle Eastern studies. Over the decades, perspectives have changed, as we see by comparing two studies dealing with Egypt, both published by Harvard University Press. In 1961, Nadav Safran published his fine study, Egypt in Search of Political Community. Safran sympathized with liberal Egyptian thinkers even as he showed why they failed to establish a pattern of culture that promotes progressive development. In 2003 Raymond William Baker published Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists.13 Baker saw Islam rather than liberalism as Egypt’s likely vehicle of progress. However, being Muslim myself and intimately familiar with Islam, I cannot easily quiet my fear of these new Islamists (hence the title of my book on the subject, The New Totalitarianism14). Islamism cannot be the framework for a democratic civil society that promotes development and a market economy. Unfortunately, scholars in the West often fear they will be accused of “Orientalism” if they say as much. Many experts have asked whether the Iranian events could affect or even be repeated in the Arab world, particularly Egypt. To be sure, no one can deny the spillover effects of the Shi’ite Islamic Revolution


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in Iran into the neighboring Sunni Islamic countries, including Egypt. But the effects were limited to demonstrating that the existing regime could be toppled in favor of establishing an Islamic order. The Shi’ite model itself cannot be exported into a Sunni environment. Did Egyptians learn from the results of the Iranian revolution that the “Islamic state” is not an apt solution for Egypt’s problems with development? Unfortunately, what mainly seems to have been learned was tactical: the martyr’s suicide death (suicide bombers) and the underground tradition of secrecy and mystery-mongering. To be sure, Hasan al-Banna had already introduced the new interpretation of jihad as jihadism (i.e., terrorism), as well as a new Sunni tradition of a political underground. But this novelty did not include the jihadist suicide bombing now also common among Sunni Islamists all over the world. This is an expression of the Shi’i impact that first spilled over into Lebanon, where Iran supports the Lebanese Hizbollah. The clandestine activities of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt were a kind of underground activity that existed before the Islamic Revolution in Iran. But again, it was Iran that inspired Jama’at Islamiyya, which made an established tradition out of these clandestine activities. Taqiyya is part of Shi’i belief; it means dissimulation to deceive the enemy. Shi’ites were persecuted by the Sunni state and needed this deception to save their lives. In politics taqiyya means to deceive one’s foes. Sunni Islamists who adopted clandestine underground political activism from political Shi’a Islam also embraced the practice of taqiyya (in the Sunni version of Iham/deception). Many Western experts fail to grasp this new taqiyya and therefore take Islamists’ pronouncements about democracy at face value. The history of modernization in Egypt, which began in 1798, is much older than in Iran, where it began with the founding of the Pahlavi dynasty after World War I. Oil was discovered in Iran in 1908. Reza Shah, who came to power in 1925, wanted to use oil revenues to construct a modern centralized state, which had not existed before. The model for Iran was Kemalist Turkey. In contrast, Egypt began its experiments with a modern state more than a century earlier, in the late 1700s. Modernization followed in 1805 with Muhammed Ali’s reforms, which were inspired by the French impact. Resistance to this modernization had already begun during Napoleon’s sojourn, when the religious authorities of al-Azhar University revolted against the innovations he had introduced. This rejection of innovative change continued under Muhammed Ali’s rule, but he considerably curbed


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the political power of the ulema, while at the same time enlisting their institutions to legitimize himself. Egypt’s epoch of reform Islam and liberalism ended in 1952 when the Free Officers took over, replacing liberalism with praetorianism. By then the Muslim Brotherhood was somewhat important, but it stood clearly at the fringe of Egyptian politics, its actions restricted to the underground. After it failed to establish cooperation with the Free Officers, it rebelled but was silenced by Nasser and never had an opportunity to recover and gain any power in politics until Sadat provided outlets. Unlike Shi’ite Islam, Sunni Islam has a long tradition of religiously legitimizing the existing political order. As noted above, Al-Azhar University is the authoritative institution of Sunni Islam and has generally practiced this legitimating function in Egypt throughout its history. The Muslim Brothers, although Sunni, were the first important opposition to the existing political establishment on religious grounds. Under Mubarak, the Muslim Brothers have been able to penetrate society and even the religious establishment. For example, after Iraq was liberated from Saddam in April 2003, a fetwa was issued in the name of al-Azhar against the United States and the Iraqi Governing Council. The Sheykh of al-Azhar could not prevent this fetwa, revealing that he lacked the authority in his own institution that his predecessors enjoyed. Another fetwa of al-Azhar, against the reform Muslim Abu-Zaid, was published in November 2003 and was based on the judgment of the Islamist Mohammed Imara. Both cases indicate that Islamists have infiltrated al-Azhar. During the praetorian years of the military regime under Nasser, no Islamist activism in Egypt was politically tolerated. Fundamentalists were neutralized or suppressed and lacked any space for action. Al-Azhar University was made directly subordinate. Before its “reform” by Nasser, it had been a relatively autonomous institution, which, though embedded in the establishment, had embraced only the Islamic sciences (Koranic exegesis; Hadith science, meaning work with the traditions of the Prophet; and fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence), and did not teach secular sciences. Through the reform legislation of 1961, the university acquired additional secular faculties such as medicine, engineering, agricultural science, economics, and a number of secular arts. Al-Azhar thereby lost its exclusively religious character, although it continues to be the most authoritative seat of learning for all Sunni Muslims.


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The secular praetorians from Nasser to Mubarak have continued to evoke Islam in their discourse in a functional capacity; they have not, like Ataturk in Turkey, promoted secular institutions and a related worldview. Instead, an Islamic legitimation by the religious establishment served to bolster an only superficially secular populist ideology. Until the defeat of 1967, Nasser was the pan-Arab hero celebrated throughout the Arab region. Pan-Arabism was a secular ideology, but religion was not really depoliticized, and there was no real separation between religion and politics. From Underground to a Parallel Sector: “Mobilizing Islam” in Egypt In the early 1980s, President Mubarak inherited from Sadat an Egypt with a strong Islamist opposition, both institutional and jihadist. The terms political Islam or Islamism denote a variety of religious fundamentalism. At issue is not Islam as a religion, but Islam as a concept of political order. The two directions of political Islam—terrorist extremism, or jihadism, on the one hand, and institutional Islamism on the other—differ in the methods employed but share the goal of establishing an Islamic state of Hakimiyyat Allah (God’s rule). In Egypt, jihadism has declined, but the “mobilizing Islam” of the institutional Islamists has succeeded in establishing a parallel sector in society. The historical background for the emergence of political Islam in Egypt is the country’s exposure to the West since the late 1700s. This induced a process of rapid and uneven social change. One characteristic of such processes is asymmetrical urbanization, which mostly affects cities like Cairo. At the end of World War II, Cairo had some two million inhabitants; today over eighteen million live there. The majority of Egyptians continue to live in rural areas, but the rate of rural–urban migration is accelerating. This already high rate of migration was exacerbated after the 1967 Six Day War when an additional two million refugees poured into the city from the Canal Zone. Any European unfamiliar with urban centers in Asia and Africa would be appalled by the sheer masses of people on Cairo’s streets and would scarcely be able to comprehend that some quarter of a million people live in the city’s cemetery. But given the chronic housing shortage, migrant peasants have no other choice: to have a roof over their heads in any of Cairo’s poor quarters seems a luxury by comparison. Cairo’s urban growth has been more a process of


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the ruralization of its suburbs than a real urbanization. This applies to most metropolitan cities in the Middle East and is an underlying cause of the instability of Arab politics. Members of fundamentalist groups generally come from the lower middle classes and rural backgrounds, and most either have an academic education or are in the process of obtaining one. Usually these people have only recently migrated to Cairo. Uprooted from their rural milieu, they are alienated and culturally lost in a noisy, dirty, densely populated city, where everything seems anonymous. These rural migrants left the countryside hoping to find a better future in the city. School attendance expanded greatly under Nasser, and acquiring a university education created great expectations of upward mobility. But the people of this lumpen intelligentsia found themselves in a situation of cultural anomie. The occupational frustrations of this poorly educated intelligentsia became politicized, and political Islam became their umbrella. The populist expansion of Egypt’s universities created serious problems. Unwisely, Nasser guaranteed jobs—although with minimal salaries—for all graduates. Today, the huge number of university graduates plagues Egyptian society. These members of the lower middle classes who migrated from rural areas to Cairo are the major opposition to the existing regime and have been mobilizing other social groups. The focus of this “mobilizing Islam” is the city, not the countryside. On the surface, Cairo looks like a Western city, with neon lights, advertisements, automobiles, buses, and so on. But in this seemingly New York-style environment there is no innovative urban culture. To fundamentalists, it is the “crusaders and Zionists,” the “enemies of Islam,” who have imposed this alien environment on Islam. Their millenarian yearnings call for a total casting off of everything that has been adopted from the West. Islamic fundamentalism is therefore not only a doctrine of salvation, but also a plea to de-Westernize. Islamic fundamentalists are not traditionalists; their return to Islam is highly selective. Many have a modern educational background and are, in effect, semimodernists, who divide modernity into technoscientific instruments and cultural values. They favor adopting the instruments, but vehemently reject the related cultural values and worldview, demonizing them as Western. Mubarak has successfully curbed the activities of jihadist Muslim militants, but the decline of jihadist Islamism in Egypt cannot be equated with a general decline of political Islam. The call for an


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Islamic political order as an alternative to the existing secular one continues to be heard everywhere. The parallel sector, built by the institutional Islamists, is an established reality no one can ignore. It will pose serious challenges to any further development in Egypt, in particular in the course of the succession of Mubarak. Which Islam For Egypt’s Future? Although Sadat’s assassin, Khalid al-Istanbuli, was an army officer, Islamists have not deeply penetrated the armed forces. In the past decade, however, they have added the mosque and the university campus to their battlefields. Their control of the parallel sectors and the major professional associations enables them to mobilize other social groups. In fact, today we must speak of emerging counterelites challenging the ruling Egyptian political elite. In the long run these peaceful (i.e., institutional) Islamists are a more serious challenge to the regime and to political society than the jihadist militants. The Kifaya protest is a case in point. As mentioned, the Islamists of Egypt have even begun to penetrate al-Azhar, the pillar of Sunni Islam. True, the Sheykh al-Azhar is sometimes heard to speak against these Muslim groups on Egyptian television, branding them as misled or as falsifiers of “true Islam,” and Mubarak’s National Democratic Party launches publications in which members of the religious establishment, which backs the government, write about and define what “Islam” is. But while the Islamic interpretative monopoly is still firmly on the side of the Mubarak government, the balance is rapidly changing. It appears indeed that the Salafists and Islamists, not the Westerneducated elite, will determine the future of Islam in Egypt. The latter is not comparable to the Kemalist elite in Turkey. Its members continue to favor what Raymond Hinnebusch calls the “secular, liberal democratic” road and an alliance with Western industrial states,15 but it is weak, and counterelites are growing powerful in Egypt (and Turkey). True, under Mubarak the fundamentalists no longer have the room for maneuver they once enjoyed under Sadat, but the regime still needs to appease them and fails to do so. What could be done in Egypt to promote the development of an Islam compatible with democracy, human rights, and civil society? Elements of such an Islam do exist in Indonesia; Robert Hefner calls them “civil Islam.” Could this also happen in Egypt? Unfortunately,


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the ideology of political Islamists does not generally go far beyond a politicization of the Islamic cultural system and a defensive cultural attitude vis-à-vis the West. What of the Azharites, the foremost authorities of the Islamic establishment? Compared to them, the Islamists have for the most part only a superficial and inadequate knowledge of Islam. Have there been significant efforts by the Azhar establishment toward the cultural accommodation of social change with respect to Islam as a cultural system? Most scholars doubt this. One of them, Daniel Crecelius, concludes that the responses of the ulema “to the challenges of modernization have been predictably, instinctively defensive, characterized by a strong desire for self-preservation.” Moreover, “Unwilling or unable to direct change, or even to make an accommodation to it, they have in the end been overwhelmed by change which inexorably penetrated first the government and the ruling elites, then their own institutions and other social groups.”16 From the point of view of Islamic orthodoxy (Salafism) anything new that is added to the primary sources (the Koran and Hadith) is to be pejoratively called bid’a (literally, “innovation,” but with the connotation of “heresy”). The Egyptian ulema at al-Azhar have always reacted to innovations in this way. If they ever did assent to a change, it was always for the sake of pragmatically legitimizing an action of the ruler, a kind of conformism that did not involve relinquishing their own attitude of rejection or rethinking their worldview. In addition to this simultaneous legitimation and rejection, Crecelius adds a new category: “obscurantism.” This applies to all innovative measures. Even Nasser’s radical reforms could not bring the crudely medieval worldview of al-Azhar to conform to the regime’s politics of modernization. For instance, the obscurantist al-Azhar authorities both assented to and undermined the state birth control program aimed at solving Egypt’s most serious problem, overpopulation. Crecelius correctly concludes that the ulema have successfully managed to delay the process of modernization.17 Since Islamic civilization was exposed to modernity, al-Azhar University has made no significant contribution to the cultural accommodation of social change. Legitimation hand-in-hand with obscurantism characterizes the dealings of the ulema, who, together with the Western Orientalists whom they bitterly oppose, take Islamic culture to mean the philology of the Arabic language and the exegesis of traditional sources perceived as sacrosanct. In fact, no attempt was made at “rethinking Islam.”


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Some point out that the authoritative two-volume work of alAzhar, published under the auspices of the late al-Azhar sheykh Jadul-Haq,18 no longer incriminates cultural innovations on religious grounds as bid’a, and even warns against too sweeping use of this traditional Islamic formula. However, this open-mindedness stops short of actually endorsing or accommodating social change. It does not call for movement toward an “open Islam.” In fact, al-Azhar usually sides with Islamists against liberal Muslims. When the reformer Nasr Hamid Abu-Zaid published a book that argued from a rational rather than a scriptural point of view, a court declared him a murtad (apostate). He was divorced from his wife against his and her will and in 1995 was forced to flee to the Netherlands. In November 2003 alAzhar issued a binding fatwa against a new book by Abu-Zaid. I am afraid one can only conclude that the “new Islamists” in Egypt do not represent an “Islam without fear,” but rather a watered-down religious neo-absolutism they sell as wasatiyya (centrism). A cultural change of the prevailing worldview standing in the way of development continues to be lacking. Conclusions: Reaffirming the Centrality of Egypt Egypt has been a place where both positive and negative changes have occurred in Islamic civilization in response to modernity, past and present. Islamic reform and liberalism in the Middle East were born in Egypt; at present, we see political Islam flourishing there in both its institutional (peaceful) and jihadist (terrorist) shapes. Earlier, there seemed to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Looking back over the past two centuries, one can see remarkable accomplishments such as the reformism of M. Abduh and the accomplishments of great personalities representing Egyptian liberalism. But there were also great setbacks, such as the emergence of the fundamentalist Muslim Brothers in 1928 and the Jama’at Islamiyya since the 1970s. Both failed to provide the needed patterns of cultural change for promoting social and economic development. The third way (i.e., the alternative to the first path of unsuccessful liberalism and the countermodel to it presented by the Muslim Brotherhood), was the praetorianism of Nasser, which also failed. His successors, Sadat and Mubarak, are widely considered in the Middle East to be mere caricatures of Nasser, the great charismatic leader.


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The ruling elite around the current Mubarak regime is, like all others in the Middle East, composed of survivalists, not modernizers. The United Nations Development Program’s Arab Human Development Report implicitly accuses these elites not only of denying their people democracy and human rights but also of blocking development. Another UNDP report charges that Middle Eastern peoples are being denied access to modern knowledge.19 That “the new Islamists” should be seen as a hopeful sign, as some optimistic U.S. scholars suggest, I strongly doubt. I believe they promise not an “Islam without fear” but a “New Totalitarianism,” hidden by taqiyya (dissimulation) in its Sunni version of Iham/deception. In other parts of the world of Islam the situation appears to be better. But in the past decades, it is the Arab Middle Eastern Islam that has influenced non-Arab Islam, not the other way around. In Indonesia and Malaysia, Wahhabites proselytize for their unreformed Salafist and political Islam. One wishes, on the contrary, that a variety of Indonesian “civil Islam” would put down roots in Egypt, the hub of the Middle East, but it continues to be the other way around. Muslims from all over the world come to Cairo to learn “true Islam” at al-Azhar. But contemporary Egyptian Islam is neither liberal nor civil. One should not be deceived by the moderate institutional Islam of the Muslim Brothers nor by what is called the “New Islamists.” Their jihadist offspring are a warning. The new Islamists in Egypt are not what the country needs to come to grips with the challenges of cultural modernity and structural globalization. It is most important to continue studying what happens in Egypt, since what happens there will continue to provide the model and affect the future of Islamic civilization, as has been the case in the past. But the outlook is grim. Notes 1. This flyer was translated by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, The Arab Discovery of Europe. A Study in Cultural Encounters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 13–16. 2. See chapter 3 on the Ottoman Empire in David Ralston, Importing the European Army. The Introduction of European Military Techniques and Institutions into the Extra-European World 1600–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 43–78. 3. Joyce M. Davis, Between Jihad and Salam. Profiles in Islam (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), chap. 12 on Qaradawi; and also the texts by al-Qaradawi in the most distorting reader, Charles Kurzmann, ed., Liberal Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 196–204.


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4. B. Tibi, “Habermas and the Return of the Sacred. Is It a Religious Renaissance? A Pronouncement of a ‘Post-Secular Society’, or the Emergence of a Political Religion as a New Totalitarianism?” Religion-Staat-Gesellschaft, 3, no. 2 (2002): 265–69. 5. Louis J. Cantori, “Religion and Politics in Egypt,” in Religion and Politics in the Middle East, ed. Michael Curtis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981), 77–90. On the history of Egypt and with regard to Islam there, see P. J. Vatikiotis, The Modern History of Egypt, 2nd ed. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976) especially 13ff., 176ff., and 413ff. 6. Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community. An Analysis of the Intellectual and Political Evolution of Egypt, 1804–1952 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 85. 7. Ibid., 179. 8. Fouad Ajami, “In the Faraoh’s Shadow: Religion and Authority in Egypt,” in Islam in the Political Process, ed. James P. Piscatori (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 12–35, 30ff. 9. On Islamic worldview see B. Tibi, Islam Between Culture and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2001), chap. 2, 53–68 and B. Tibi, “The Worldview of Sunni Arab Islamic Fundamentalists: Attitudes Towards Modern Science and Technology,” in Fundamentalisms and Society, eds. Martin Marty and Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 73–102. 10. John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat. The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), in particular 93–100. 11. Hamid N. Ansari, “The Islamic Militants in Egyptian Politics,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 16 (1984): 124–44, particularly 127–29. 12. Carrie Rosefsky-Wickham, Mobilizing Islam. Religion, Activism and Political Change in Egypt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Raymond William Baker, Islam Without Fear. Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 13. Rosefsky-Wickham, ibid.; Baker, ibid. 14. See B. Tibi, Der Neue Totalitarismus. Heiliger Krieg und Westliche Sicherheit (Darmstadt: Primus, 2004). 15. Raymond A. Hinnebusch, “Children of the Elite: Political Attitudes of the Westernized Bourgeoisie in Contemporary Egypt,” The Middle East Journal, 36 (1982): 535–61. 16. Daniel Crecelius, “Non-Ideological Responses of the Egyptian Ulama to Modernization,” in Scholars, Saints and Sufis: Muslim Religious Institutions in the Middle East Since 1500, ed., Nikki R. Keddie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 167ff., particularly 185. 17. Ibid., 208. 18. Bayan li al-Nas (Cairo: Matba’at al-Azhar, 1984 and 1988), was edited by the al-Azhar sheikh (Jadul-Haq Ali Jadul-Haq) and includes statements on all important issues of life. 19. UNDP, Arab Human Development Report (New York: United Nations, 2002, 2003).


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10 Cultural Matters and Developmental Dilemmas in Indonesia ROBERT W. HEFNER

In Indonesia the paradoxes of culture and development loom unusually large. A Muslim-majority nation long renowned for its tolerance and moderation, Indonesia has in recent years been plagued by some of the world’s worst Islamist violence. In the early modern era (1500s to 1700s), the island expanse that was to become Indonesia was distinguished by the scale of its commerce, which rivaled that of capitalism in the early-modern West. The historian Anthony Reid has dubbed this period a veritable “age of commerce” and observed that a Muslim-based commercial culture was established across the region at that time. Despite these promising cultural precedents, however, the commercial expansion that Indonesia experienced from the 1970s to the late 1990s drew little on Muslim businesses, relying instead on the country’s small but dynamic Chinese minority. Although they are just 2.5 percent of Indonesia’s population, Chinese-Indonesians control 60 to 70 percent of all nonagricultural private capital. Rather than contributing to the country’s modern economic boom, the old Muslim business class actually declined during the first two decades of the New Order (1966–98), although it has recently shown signs of revival. The imbalance between a prosperous Chinese minority and a less-successful Muslim majority remains a major source of tension in the country

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In this chapter I will review the role of culture in Indonesian political and economic development. I will suggest that culture matters, and matters deeply, in contemporary Indonesia’s development. But culture matters here in a way that defies one-sided generalities, reflecting the complex ways in which culture interacts with politics and economics to determine social outcomes. The Indonesian case also shows that the key to getting culture right, so that values and social networks contribute to positive political–economic outcomes, is to get right the societal coalitions and policies through which the values in question can be socially realized. It is particularly important that leaders in state and society promote policies that scale up “good” cultural capital while containing the organizations, networks, and values inimical to progress and civic peace. This challenge is nowhere greater than in plural societies like Indonesia, where the bearers of different cultural traditions live side by side, often competing for scarce political–economic resources, sometimes with disastrous results. From New Tiger to Asian Disaster During the 1990s, Indonesia was celebrated as one of Asia’s new economic tigers. With its large population (215 million in 2003), the country seemed well on its way to becoming Southeast Asia’s greatest industrial power. But since the Asian economic crisis of 1997 and 1998, and the elite bickering, ethnoreligious violence, and Islamist extremism that followed, Indonesia no longer seems poised to play this role. Not that the country is descending into Sudan- or Pakistan-like ungovernability, although such a possibility is not out of the question. It is more likely that, as it continues its transition toward a more decentralized and relatively less authoritarian (if not fully democratic) post-Suharto arrangement, Indonesia will achieve middling economic growth while suffering high rates of corruption and periodic outbreaks of political violence. Indonesia in the 2000s will probably look less like an East Asian tiger and more like other middle-tier countries in southern Asia and Latin America. To understand how this came to be and what it might say about culture and development, we need to appreciate the scale of the economic transformation Indonesia has undergone. Between the mid1960s and the late 1990s, Indonesia made a transition from the ranks of the world’s poorest countries—with a per capita GDP barely larger


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than Ethiopia’s in 1965—into the ranks of Southeast Asia’s industrializing giants. Of course, by comparison with its more prosperous neighbors, Thailand and Malaysia, Indonesia remained a relatively low-income country. In the mid-1990s, for example, its annual per capita income sat at about $900 (at present it is just under $600), half of Thailand’s and just one-third of Malaysia’s annual per capita income. Statistics on per capita income, however, obscure the depth of the economic transformation the country had undergone. During the 1970s, the average annual rate of growth was a booming 7.9 percent, compared to a mere 2.0 percent for the period from 1960 to1965.1 It was not only the pace of GDP growth in precrisis Indonesia that seemed to announce the country’s arrival as a new Asian tiger. Earlier, until the 1980s, Indonesia differed from its neighbors in that oil and gas production, not export manufacturing, dominated industrial expansion. So thorough was this dominance that between 1975 and 1984 the share of nonpetroleum industries in Indonesian manufacturing actually declined. As the Australian economist Hal Hill has noted, “Indonesia began to exploit its strong potential comparative advantage in labor-intensive manufactures only in the late 1980s, a decade after its . . . neighbors and two decades after [the East Asian NIE’s Newly Industrialized Economies].”2 However, in the late 1980s, the country did finally exploit this comparative advantage, and to stunning effect. This change of development tack was prompted less by cultural values than by state policies and state–business coalitions, gently prodded by the World Bank and Indonesia’s aid donors after a steep decline in oil prices beginning in 1982. An oil exporter and founding member of OPEC, Indonesia was forced by the price decline to seek out new sources of government revenue. At World Bank urging, the country implemented a broad deregulation designed to stimulate export-oriented manufacturing. This had an immediate and beneficial effect. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the manufacturing sector grew at a rate of 15 to 20 percent per year. Between 1980 and 1987 the total value of manufactured exports rose from U.S.$500 million to $4 billion, at an average annual rate of 34 percent.3 Having earlier depended on oil and gas for three-quarters of its export earnings and two-thirds of government revenues, Indonesia now changed course, pulling itself into the ranks of developing Asia’s export-oriented manufacturers.


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The combined effect of these changes was that, by the mid-1990s, Indonesia had a booming economy, a vigorous industrial sector, a modest but expanding middle class, and an increasingly assertive business community. Suharto’s “New Order” government (1966–98) made significant improvements to the country’s educational system as well. Between 1965 and 1990, the percentage of young adults with basic literacy skills skyrocketed from 40 to 90 percent. The percentage of youths completing senior high school was equally impressive, rising from 4 percent in 1970 to more than 30 percent by the late 1990s. In these and many other respects, Indonesia in the late 1990s seemed well on its way to joining the second generation of Asian tigers. These achievements make all the more striking the scale of Indonesia’s economic decline after 1997. In July of 1997 a currency crisis swept nearby Thailand, and the panic soon spread to other countries in East and Southeast Asia. The tumble in the value of currencies soon became a full-blown economic crisis, with Indonesia experiencing the most disastrous downturn of all. After almost thirty years of 6 to 7 percent annual growth, its gross domestic product shrank 15 percent in 1998. A poverty rate that had declined to just 13.7 percent in early 1997 shot up to 50 percent by late 1998. School enrollments fell as well, with some 20 percent of the elementary age population dropping out of school. The economic crisis was soon compounded by a political crisis. Determined to shift blame for the crisis from the president, in early 1998 regime spokespersons blamed Chinese shopkeepers and “hoarders” for food shortages and rising prices. During the first months of 1998, angry mobs attacked Chinese-owned storefronts, homes, and churches in towns across Indonesia. After weeks of scattered violence, the conflict climaxed on the nights of May 13 and 14, 1998, when the capital and many other major cities were rocked by rioting and looting. Under pressure from his former allies in the military and governing party, President Suharto resigned a week later. Fifteen hundred people died in the May riots; an estimated 150 Chinese- Indonesian women were also allegedly raped. The criminal gangs responsible for these acts were widely believed to be linked to hard-line rogues in the armed forces, and their actions were seen as part of a strategy to create a climate of terror among Indonesian Chinese. Over the next few weeks, an estimated 100,000 Chinese Indonesians, most of them from the upper ranks of the business class, fled


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Indonesia for Malaysia, Singapore, and other destinations. Equally important, $25 to $30 billion of investment funds were moved offshore, paralyzing industrial production. Although some of these funds are now flowing back into the country, investment remains below pre-1998 levels. Despite a few signs of recovery, then, Indonesia’s long-term prospects remain unclear. The country is blessed with abundant natural resources, an adequate physical infrastructure, and a work force that is at least moderately well-educated. But social and cultural problems cast a long shadow over Indonesia’s future. The main uncertainty centers less on economic values than on the ideals and institutions required to coordinate public life and citizenship in a deeply plural society. Without some kind of operative consensus on these matters, neither the market nor the state can function effectively. Is Indonesia to be a multiethnic and secular–nationalist state? Or is it to be an Islamic state? Is Indonesia to convey full and equal rights to all of its citizens—Chinese as well as indigenous “sons of the soil” (pribumi), Christians and Hindus as well as Muslims? Or will it differentiate citizens by race and religion? Uncertainty as to the terms for nationhood and citizenship places Indonesia’s long-term progress in question. In all these respects, Indonesia is a prime example of something seen in many other parts of the world, but often overlooked in discussions of culture and development. It is not the bearer of a single culture or civilization, but a deeply plural society in which several civilizational cultural traditions coexist, interact, and sometimes compete in the same limited social space. Under the best of circumstances, this country’s pluralist resources might well serve as a rich cultural capital for sustainable development. However, again and again in modern Indonesian history, disagreements over the terms for managing the country’s pluralism have given rise to violence and instability. Particularly troubling is the fact that, rather than harnessing the country’s pluralism to the task of progressive development, some among the political elite have engaged in what we might call sectarian trawling, scaling up religious and ethnic divisions for their own short-term advantage. As with the riots of May 1998, these efforts may bring short-term benefit to their factional instigators, but they wreak havoc with the political and economic system as a whole. To understand what all this might say about culture and progress in Indonesia’s future, we need to look a bit more closely at how things got to be this way.


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Colonial Cultures The colonial era in what used to be known as the Dutch East Indies began more than three hundred years ago, with Dutch incursions into Java and eastern Indonesia’s spice islands. In the centuries that followed, the Dutch succeeded at creating what was widely recognized as one of the most profitable and efficient of European colonies anywhere in the world. When, in the middle 1800s, the British set out to expand their rule to the whole of colonial India, they looked to the Dutch East Indies as a model. As noted above, before the Dutch arrived, the Indonesian archipelago had had a vigorous commercial tradition, with royal courts on Java and neighboring islands sponsoring long-distance trade and small-scale manufacture.4 As the structures of colonial rule were put in place, the most lucrative native enterprises were either seized by the Dutch or driven out of business by European and Chinese competitors. In contrast with British India, Dutch investment in the East Indies diversified very little outside its primary base in plantation agriculture; among total Dutch investments in the Indies, manufacturing had only one-seventh as large a share as it did in British investment in late colonial India.5 The Dutch colonial economy showed a distinctive pattern of ethnic segregation as well. As in many other European-controlled plural societies, large-scale enterprises were owned and managed by Europeans who relied heavily on modern technologies and organizations. By contrast, the middle management of these enterprises, as well as the great bulk of the colony’s midscale commerce, lay in the hands of Indonesia’s energetic entrepreneurial minority, the Chinese. Relying on family networks and lateral ties of friendship and alliance known as guanxi,6 the Chinese created extraordinarily efficient firms, which dominated everything from shopkeeping and small-scale manufacture to the Dutch-sanctioned distribution of opium. Finally, small-scale agriculture, petty trade, and ceremonial positions in government were in the hands of the 96 percent of the local population regarded as indigenous “sons of the soil” (pribumi). About 90 percent of the indigenous population was Muslim, but this population was itself further segmented by ethnic and regional divisions. Chinese have emigrated to the islands of Indonesia for well over a thousand years. Working with local Muslim merchants and rulers, they played an important role in the great commercial boom of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. All historical evidence indicates that


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the native economic culture was hybrid and very permeable during this period, with Chinese and indigenous actors collaborating to innovate in everything from sailing technology to finance.7 The relatively easy blending of Chinese and indigenous culture was facilitated by the fact that, until the late colonial era, the great majority of Chinese immigrants were males who arrived on their own, took local wives, and then adapted to local culture. Many Chinese converted to Islam; a few were Muslims even before they arrived. As in Thailand and the Philippines, many Chinese immigrants in the early centuries eventually completed their adaptation by assimilating entirely into the local population. All this changed in the modern era. During the long century of Dutch colonial expansion (1830–1942), the number of immigrants arriving from China increased exponentially, as did the proportion of women in their ranks. The new immigrants were far more likely than their forebears to live in all-Chinese neighborhoods. The breadth and dynamism of their associations also lessened the pressure to assimilate to local society. The use of Chinese language and script became widespread, as did Chinese-language schools. Dutch legal policies reinforced this antiassimilationist tendency, enacting codes that required Chinese to dress differently from native Indonesians and subjecting Chinese residents to a different set of laws. The Dutch also set aside large sectors of the native economy for the Chinese to manage. Whereas centuries earlier the divide between Chinese and natives had been relatively permeable, colonialism strengthened the divide and burdened it with a far more explicit measure of ethnic and class antagonism. At first the Indonesian war for independence (1945–49) did little to reverse this heritage of pluralist segregation. The American-mediated peace pact signed in December 1949 protected the ownership rights of Europeans at the commanding heights of the economy—plantations, mining, and manufacturing (most of the Dutch enterprises would be forcibly nationalized in the late 1950s). During its first years the republican government placed a high priority on industrialization and the growth of native (pribumi) businesses. It also adopted a relatively liberal regime on foreign investment, subject only to a 51 percent Indonesian equity restriction.8 But because of Indonesia’s political instability, among other factors, little foreign investment flowed in, and government efforts to promote indigenous private enterprise met with little success.


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Political events, meanwhile, conspired to make even moderate economic progress impossible. Pressed by shrinking landholdings and the economy’s downward spiral, a significant portion of the country’s poor rallied to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), especially on the densely populated island of Java. Before 1965 Indonesia, a majority Muslim nation, had the unusual distinction of having the largest Communist Party in the non-Communist world. Among its varied slogans, the PKI called for nationalizing European enterprises and developing a system of cooperatives to wed a putatively indigenous collectivist culture to state socialism. Faced with these pressures, the government gradually adopted a series of statist development policies.9 Announced in 1955, the second Five-Year Plan placed less emphasis on private sector development and more on state enterprise. Although the language of these programs was socialist, much of their appeal lay in the fact that, after Indonesian independence, the European role in the Indonesian economy was receding, while that of the Chinese was on the rise. As in other Southeast Asian nations during these years,10 many attempts were made to promote indigenous rather than Chinese business, primarily by creating import licenses and import-substitution industries.11 As Ruth McVey12 has noted, however, the Chinese steadily expanded their share of the private sector. They did so despite discriminatory policies that at times verged on the draconian. For example, in 1959 Chinese traders were summarily expelled from the East Javanese countryside in an unsuccessful effort to eliminate Chinese dominance in rural trade and finance. The Chinese advantage lay in the fact that, in addition to a tradition of hard work, the immigrants had adapted the culture of the extended family and guanxi networking into a more expansive mechanism for facilitating trust, information exchange, and finance. Equally important, they did not hesitate to update their economic culture by incorporating Western management techniques and industrial technologies, especially in their manufacturing enterprises. It is important to recognize that much of the native population had its own traditions of diligence and hard work. In fact, a few native groups, like the Minangkabau of West Sumatra and the Buginese of South Sulawesi (both of whom are Muslim), had well-established traditions of long-distance trade and economic migration. These legacies had allowed the Minangkabau and Buginese to take advantage of the heightened commercial opportunities of the colonial era.


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No native ethnic group, however, could match the Chinese for the breadth of their trade networks or the diversity of their skills. Chinese trade networks extended from small towns and villages in the Indonesian hinterland to Batavia (capital of the Dutch East Indies), Singapore, and even southern China. Equally important, social elites among overseas Chinese (unlike their high-Confucian counterparts in mainland China) organized much of their family and public life around enterprise. The social elite among the native Indonesian population, by contrast, tended to regard business with disdain, preferring government employment and patrimonial privilege to business. Rather than diminishing, this preference only increased during the early independence period, as native Indonesians moved into positions of power previously monopolized by the Dutch. New Order Scalings The final years of the Sukarno era brought this troubled mix of economic decline and political conflict to a horrible climax. In 1965 the Indonesian economy experienced hyperinflation approaching 600 percent per annum. Labor strife was widespread, and the national infrastructure continued to deteriorate. The country’s political climate changed suddenly, however, after a failed left-wing officers’ coup on the night of September 30, 1965. The military officers who stepped in to restore order blamed the Indonesian Communist Party for the coup attempt. In the months that followed, most of the PKI’s leadership and hundreds of thousands of its members were rounded up and killed, in one of this century’s bloodiest episodes of civil violence.13 During 1966 and 1967, the Suharto regime consolidated its power and put a priority on stabilizing the country, politically and economically. Over the next three years, it brought inflation under control, liberalized laws regulating foreign investment, and implemented programs to intensify agriculture. During the first years of the New Order, Western-trained liberal economists played a large role in shaping macroeconomic policies. They were able to do so not because they represented an important political constituency, but because the national economy was in such dire straits. Many in government remained sympathetic to statist economic policies. For political reasons, the one segment of the native business community that was best prepared culturally to respond to new economic


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policies, the modernist wing of the Muslim community, was excluded from the new governing coalition. The modernists had been highly critical of President Sukarno, not least because of his flirtation with the Communist Party. They paid a price for their opposition: their party, the Masyumi, was banned in 1960. The Muslim business community that supported Masyumi also saw its fortunes decline, because of both the deteriorating national economy and discrimination by government officials. With the arrival of the post-Sukarno New Order, the modernists hoped to see the government rehabilitate their party and formulate policies supportive of Muslim business interests.14 To the dismay of the Muslim leadership, however, the Suharto government upheld the ban on Masyumi and barred its leaders from participating in newly organized Muslim associations. Though its decision was motivated by political rather than economic concerns, by taking these actions the government missed a vital opportunity to strengthen the one segment in the native population that had the cultural endowments to launch market-oriented programs. Other political factors also worked to diminish the chances for any substantial scaling up of Muslim economic culture. In 1967 the government committed itself to a market-oriented program of industrialization by introducing a generous foreign investment law.15 Under the laws regulating foreign investment, foreigners were required to take local partners who contributed a share of equity capital and presumably acquired business acumen as a result of their collaboration.16 However, most of the people chosen as partners for foreign investors were either Chinese-Indonesians or regime cronies who, while holding official title to certain businesses, handed their management over to Chinese. The Chinese were preferred over their native counterparts because of their capital, superior business acumen, and established commercial networks. The Suharto government also preferred working with Chinese entrepreneurs because the latter were less likely to mount a political challenge than were native, especially Muslim, businessmen. Continuing a pattern begun in the early independence period,17 the pariah status of the Chinese prevented them from organizing politically, thus making them less likely to protest bureaucrats’ demands for kickbacks and favors. This developmental coalition of foreign investors, Chinese businessmen, and patrimony-minded government officials only heightened the resentment that many in the Muslim business community felt toward the Chinese and liberal economic policies. Muslim busi-


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ness families were not the only ones unhappy with New Order policies. Student radicals, economic nationalists, and at least a segment of the military also objected to the new investment regime, which many saw as selling out the country to foreign and Chinese capital. Popular opposition like this led to regular outbreaks of fierce political protest from 1974 on. Although the leaders of these protests were not particularly anti-Chinese, many protests spiraled into fierce antiChinese violence when they gathered mass support. Not without reason, many people came to see the business ethos of the Chinese and the Suharto regime as crony capitalist, a perception that did much to discredit economic liberalism as a whole. The effects of public dissatisfaction were visible not only in street protests but also in jockeying among the New Order elite itself. Sensing the indigenous and, especially, Muslim public’s dissatisfaction with Chinese economic dominance, some among the political elite concluded that the best way to counteract Chinese market dominance was through politically leveraged state enterprise. Here was a domain in which pribumi Indonesians could assert their dominance quite effectively. After the price of oil rose worldwide in 1973, generating an enormous increase in revenues, the so-called economic nationalists convinced Suharto to inaugurate programs for a state-dominated, integrated industrial base.18 It was in this realm, economic nationalists imagined, that native elites would be able to outpace their Chinese rivals once and for all. Unfortunately, rather than strengthening the economic culture of native Indonesians, these efforts tended to scale up the most predatory and cronyist features of pribumi political culture. Indonesia’s giant state oil company, Pertamina, played a central role in this industrialization drive. Flush with oil revenues in the mid-1970s, it allocated billions of dollars to an array of industrial projects, none of them subject to public accountability. These programs proved to be so massively mismanaged that Pertamina accumulated an operating deficit of U.S. $10.5 billion and, in just three years, defaulted on its loans. The bulk of these funds was lost to kickbacks, corruption, and investment in poorly managed state enterprises.19 Rather than scaling up market-oriented social capital, the government had strengthened the native community’s dismal tradition of patrimonial corruption and managerial ineptitude. Surprisingly, however, the Pertamina crisis did not compel the government to change its policy on state enterprise. Economic


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nationalists continued to enjoy government favor, and subsidies to state industries continued. Maintained throughout the 1970s, economic nationalist policies created an economy with a state sector larger than any other ASEAN country. Indeed, until the 1997 to 1998 economic crisis, the state had dominant shares in oil refining, steel, cement, fertilizers, and shipbuilding. In the late 1980s, one-sixth of the work force was in government service.20 Events would soon make this patrimonial developmental tack increasingly unfeasible. Having risen dramatically in the 1970s, oil prices fell in the 1980s, from a high of $36 per barrel to just over $10 in 1986. Government revenues from oil and gas plunged accordingly, from almost $19 billion to $12.4 billion and, by 1986 to 1987, to just under $7 billion. To make matters worse, during this same period earnings from nonoil primary exports also declined.21 Meanwhile, payments due on loans assumed during the first years of the New Order grew, consuming almost half of routine government expenditures.22 In short, the resources on which the government had relied to finance its ambitious programs had become scarce. This was reflected in the economy, as GDP growth fell from 6 percent in 1985 to 1.9 percent in 1986. In this context of declining export earnings, a deteriorating balance of payments, and growing debt, government leaders were forced to devise new strategies for economic growth. Once again, as they had done twenty years earlier, they turned to a small group of Western-educated technocrats to craft economic reforms. The first of the technocrats’ reforms was a substantial reduction in state industrial projects in 1983. This was followed by the devaluation of the country’s currency and, in 1984, by tax reforms designed to increase revenues from the nonoil sector.23 Banking and financial services were also deregulated24 as state banks were given greater autonomy in allocating credit and determining deposit and lending rates. Additional reforms were introduced in 1986.25 Licensing for investment and production was liberalized. Authority to collect customs on international trade was moved out of the Department of Finance into the hands of a private Swiss-based firm, in a bold move to eliminate corruption. Tariffs were reduced on import inputs for manufacturers exporting 85 percent of their output. And in late 1988, finance was liberalized even further as the country was opened to foreign banks for the first time since independence. These measures represented the most far-reaching program of economic liberalization in Indonesia’s history. As the figures cited at the


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beginning of this chapter indicate, their impact on export-oriented manufacturing was nothing less than revolutionary. At the same time, it is important to note that most of the new measures were concentrated in trade, finance, and export-oriented industries. They had only an indirect impact on state-owned manufacturing and private firms producing for the domestic market. Only as a result of the economic crisis of 1997 to 1998 was the government finally forced to seriously restructure state industries. Many nontariff barriers remained solidly in place until then, protecting inefficient state industries and private enterprises owned by politically well-connected individuals.26 Rival Islamic Cultures During these years many saw the liberalizing reforms as primarily benefiting the already dominant Chinese minority while hurting pribumi business. From the late 1980s on, this was a recurring theme in Indonesia’s Muslim press. The economic evidence does indeed indicate that the deregulatory reforms of the mid-1980s had strengthened the economic dominance of the Chinese.27 (As was particularly clear in the newly deregulated banking sector, the opening of the playing field to private firms allowed Chinese entrance into sectors where pribumi once commanded influence through state enterprises.) Writing about developments at this time, the economist Hal Hill28 observed that, from a purely economic perspective, the rise of Chinese-dominated megacorporations did not matter all that much. In fact, the economies of scale they provided in finance, marketing, and technology probably prepared them better for international competition. From a political–cultural perspective, however, the rise of the Chinese conglomerates was fraught with danger. It exacerbated antiChinese sentiments among the general public, increased the likelihood that opportunistic politicians would “play the Chinese card” for their own political advantage, and only deepened the public perception that business and enterprise themselves were corrupting and un-Islamic. The economic boom of the early 1970s to the 1990s ushered in other changes as well. Although they originally lagged behind the Chinese and Christian minorities in Indonesia, from the late 1970s on there was an enormous expansion in Muslim and pribumi higher education.29 The first consequence of this development was an influx of well-educated Muslims into government service.30 A few Muslims


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also made their way into private enterprise, but they were still no match for Chinese Indonesians. A related and even more dramatic development during the 1980s and early 1990s was what has come to be known as the Islamic resurgence: a spectacular increase in public religiosity and association across the whole of Indonesian society. A similar resurgence of piety and public religiosity was taking place across the whole of the Muslim world during these years. The Indonesian variant had much in common with that in other countries. More women began to veil; mosques and religious schools were constructed at a dizzying pace; a far larger percentage of the Muslim population began to observe the annual fast. Islamic newspapers, books, and magazines became the hottest-selling items in the publishing industry. Before the 1980s, Indonesia’s Muslim middle class seemed poised to adopt many of the lifestyle elements of capitalist East Asia and the West, but by the late 1980s public culture in Indonesia was increasingly Islamic. Although the resurgence showed these more-or-less familiar features, it was also distinctly Indonesian in several ways. First and most notable, the main streams in the Indonesian resurgence were not conservative or fundamentalist, but moderate or even liberal. Many among the younger generation of resurgents became vocal proponents of the idea that Islam was compatible with democracy and modern human rights.31 Second, however, as the Suharto regime caught wind of the new religious ways, it launched a series of policies to co-opt the Muslim populace and obstruct the efforts of the Muslim liberals. Its cooptation began innocently enough, with programs to expand Muslim education, legalize women’s wearing of head scarves (jilbab, hijab) in schools, establish an Islamic bank, and otherwise buttress Islamic organizations. Behind the scenes, however, the regime was also moving to diminish the influence of Christian officers in the armed forces and government. It also sponsored the formation of an elite association of Muslim professionals, known by its acronym as ICMI, whose goal it was to create a proregime Muslim leadership.32 When, in the mid-1990s, even these measures proved insufficient to contain the prodemocracy opposition, Suharto played the Islamic card more fiercely. He and his aides provided lavish support to conservative Islamists radically opposed to both democracy and the Christian minority.33 As Indonesia descended into economic crisis in 1997 and 1998, some Suhartoists in the armed forces increased this


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assistance, providing funding and tactical support to Islamist and criminal gangs willing to launch physical attacks on democracy activists. As the political crisis worsened, some among Suharto’s more conservative Islamic supporters referred openly to the Chinese as “rats” and traitors to the nation, blaming them, rather than Suharto’s cronyist policies, for the raging economic crisis. Although the full background to the May 1998 riots remains unclear, these regimesponsored criminal groupings are thought to have been responsible for many of the attacks on Chinese. In the years since Suharto’s overthrow, Indonesia has passed from one political crisis to another. Although only some of the religious violence that has ravaged the nation since 1998 has been carried out by Islamist groups with ties to the ancien régime,34 the fact remains that, in the heat of political battle, many among Indonesia’s conservative elite have not hesitated to play the religious card by escalating religious tensions and then attempting to mobilize support among Islamist conservatives. Since Suharto’s downfall, this tactic has been used not only by hard-line members of the Jakartan political establishment but also by regional bosses in the provinces. The result has been great damage to Indonesia’s transition to democracy and to its legacy of moderate Islam. The problem is not that the majority of Indonesian Muslims are no longer moderate; most evidence indicates they are. The problem is instead that the elite patronage of radical Islamists has scaled up the uncivil and antidemocratic social capital of the latter, allowing them to exercise an influence greatly out of proportion to their numbers in society. Although the political influence of radical Islamists has declined since the United States began its war on terrorism and the Bali bombings of October 2002, foreign and Chinese investors remain wary, and the political scene as a whole remains deeply unsettled. Although most of the national leadership now rejects Islamist extremism, there is still an only vague consensus among the political elite as to the precise terms for managing Indonesia’s pluralism or reviving its damaged economy. Conclusion In 1967 Indonesia was one of the poorest and most tightly controlled countries in Asia. It was still just beginning its recovery from the


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devastation of the Great Depression, Japanese occupation, war of independence, and the chaos of the late Sukarno era. The legacy of these earlier periods was an ethnically fragmented and politically ineffectual private sector, a bloated and inefficient state sector, and a government that, despite some liberal ideals, was inclined to anything but real liberalization. The zigzags of state policy nonetheless managed to bring about a measure of economic development; given the context, this stands as a hopeful reminder that further progress may yet be possible. The Indonesian example also reminds us, however, that economic growth does not inevitably bring about political liberalization. Like Nigeria, Lebanon, South Africa, and many other countries, Indonesia is a deeply divided plural society. The impact of this pluralism on economic development can be seen in the absence of anything like a unified business community endowed with a shared economic culture. The business community remains divided by race, ethnicity, and religion, with the line between Chinese and Muslims the most severe. This agonistic pluralism has in turn fostered an often unhealthy variety of political opinions and actions. Although for a while it looked as if the Suharto regime had laid the foundation for a stable consensus over the country’s future, the regime ultimately undermined its own efforts. Nowhere was this more apparent than in its final years when, facing a growing prodemocracy movement, it played the Islamist and anti-Chinese card. The country has yet to recover from that reckless political adventure. Indonesia remains a country of great social potential. Although armed Islamists have recently captured international attention, the country has a large and courageous moderate Muslim leadership. It is also blessed with an abundance of natural resources and a population that, although not highly educated, is sufficiently skilled to respond to globalization. For these cultural resources to serve as social capital for progress, however, more will be required than their simple presence in society. If they are at last to realize their promise, the resources must be more effectively managed by leaders in state and society committed to a vision of a civic, pluralist, and democratic Indonesia. An earlier generation of colonial and Indonesian leaders missed a critical chance when, rather than forging programs that would bring Chinese and Muslim businesspeople together, they marginalized the Muslims and locked the Chinese in a cronyist and patrimonial cell.


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More recently, the Suharto regime raided the country’s great reserves of Islamic moderation and tolerance, scaling up the social capital of illiberal Muslims rather than Muslim democrats. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing Indonesia, then, lies in the realm of political culture. The challenge can only be met through an alliance of actors in state and society committed once and for all to working with rather than against the cultural endowments for civility and progress available in this great but troubled country. Notes 1. Anne Booth and P. McCawley, “The Indonesian Economy Since the Mid-Sixties,” in The Indonesian Economy during the Suharto Era (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1–22, at 4. 2. Hal Hill, “Manufacturing Industry,” in The Oil Boom and After: Indonesian Economic Policy and Performance in the Suharto Era, ed. Anne Booth (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1992), 204–57, at 209. 3. Hal Hill, Foreign Investment and Industrialization in Indonesia (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988). 4. Denys Lombard, Le Carrefour Javanais: Essai d’histoire globale, vol. 2, Les reseaux asiatiques (Paris: EHESS, 1990), 2:31–75; Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 2, Expansion and Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 10–43. 5. Hill, Foreign Investment, 3. 6. S. Gordon Redding, The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1990). 7. Lombard, Le Carrefour Javanais; Reid, Southeast Asia. 8. Hill, Foreign Investment, 4; Richard Robison, Indonesia: The Rise of Capital (Singapore: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 38. 9. B. Glassburner, “Economic Policy Making in Indonesia,” in The Economy of Indonesia: Selected Readings, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 22–46. 10. Ruth McVey, “The Materialization of the Southeast Asian Entrepreneur,” in Southeast Asian Capitalists, ed. Ruth McVey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asian Program, 1992), 7–33, at 11. 11. Lance Castles, Religion, Politics, and Economic Behavior in Java: The Kudus Cigarette Industry, Cultural Report Series No. 15 (New Haven, CT: Yale University, Southeast Asian Studies, 1967), 11–13; Robison, Indonesia, 42–50. 12. McVey, “Materialization,” 20. 13. Robert Cribb, The Indonesian Killings, 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali (Clayton, Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1990); Robert W. Hefner, The Political Economy of Mountain Java: An Interpretive History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),193–227. 14. Ken E. Ward, The Foundation of the Partai Muslimin Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Modern Indonesia Project, 1970). 15. Hill, Foreign Investment, 28; Robison, Indonesia,138. 16. Hill, Ibid., 26; Robison, Ibid., 192.


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17. Anne Booth, “Introduction,” in The Oil Boom and After, 1–38, at 33–34. 18. Richard Robison 1992, “Industrialization and the Economic and Political Development of Capital,” 72. 19. Peter McCawley, “Some Consequences of the Pertamina Crisis in Indonesia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 9, no. 1 (1978): 37–55; Robison, Indonesia, 152–58. 20. Hill, Foreign Investment, 20. 21. Andrew MacIntyre, “Politics and the Reorientation of Economic Policy in Indonesia,” in The Dynamics of Economic Policy Reform in Southeast Asia and the South-West Pacific, eds., A. MacIntyre and K. Jayasuriya (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1992), 138–57, at 144. 22. Sjahrir, Refleksi Pembangunan: Ekonomi Indonesia, 1968–1992 (Reflections on Development: The Indonesian Economy, 1968–1992) (Jakarta: Gramedia, 1992a), 45. 23. Ibid., 56–65. 24. Anne Booth, “Survey of Recent Developments,” Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 20, no. 3 (1984):1–25, at 12–15. 25. Hill, Foreign Investment, 32; Sjahrir with Colin Brown, “Indonesian Financial and Trade Policy Deregulation: Reform and Response,” in The Dynamics of Economic Policy Reform in Southeast Asia and the South-West Pacific, eds., MacIntyre and Jayasuriya, 124–37, at 126–31. 26. Hill, “Manufacturing Industry,” 250; Robison, “Industrialization,” 74–76. 27. Booth, “Introduction,” 34; Hill, “Manufacturing Industry,” 234. 28. Hill, Ibid., 234. 29. Gavin W. Jones and Chris Manning, “Labour Force and Employment during the 1980s,” in The Oil Boom and After , ed. Anne Booth, 363–407 at 364–66. 30. Robert W. Hefner, “Islam, State, and Civil Society: ICMI and the Struggle for the Indonesian Middle Class,” Indonesia 36 (1993): 1–35. 31. Masykuri Abdillah, Responses of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals to the Concept of Democracy (1966–1993) (Hamburg: Abera Verlag Meyer, 1997); Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000);. 32. Hefner, “Islam, State, and Civil Society”; Hefner, Civil Islam. 33. Hefner, Civil Islam. 34. For example, the extremists blamed for the October 2002 Bali bombings, the Jemaah Islamiyah, are a group that appears to have never enjoyed close ties to either the Suharto regime or hardline members of the armed forces. For a summary overview of some of the jihadi groupings, see Hefner 2003.


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11 Two Halves Did Not Make a Whole Pakistan Before and After Bangladesh F. S. AIJAZUDDIN With a Response by Adil Najam

In retrospect, the creation of Pakistan as a nation-state on August 14, 1947 was a bizarre political aberration. It brought into being one country with two disparate wings, located a thousand miles apart with a hostile country, India, in between. Never in recent history had there been a decision to conjoin two such unlikely parts into one national corpus. Nor had there been so conscious an act of foolhardiness by a departing colonial power in a desperate bid to shed itself of the burden of empire. It took twenty-four years of prickly coexistence between the two wings of Pakistan and a bloody war of liberation in December 1971 to rectify that costly error. To refer to Pakistan during the period from 1947 until 1971 as if it were one nation is to perpetuate the idea that its two wings enjoyed something in common beyond a name and a religion. No two geographical areas on the subcontinent could have been more different. West Pakistan ran from the northern Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, and East Pakistan served as the sodden outfall of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers debouching into the Bay of Bengal. No two communities could have been more dissimilar, ethnically, linguistically, and culturally. They were in fact two different races, the western and

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eastern extremities of the former Mughal empire, forced to coexist centuries later under the roof of the same nationality. Seen together as they were for those twenty-seven years of shared nationhood, their differences appeared stark and irreconcilable. Viewed apart, as they have been since December 1971, when East Pakistan became the new state of Bangladesh, their similarities have become more pronounced. Both remain underdeveloped. Each has too large a population for comfort; both are predominantly Muslim; both struggle to come to terms with a dominant neighbor. But each, since 1971, has learned to function as a self-contained, self-sufficient whole, a sovereign independent country. The two wings of Pakistan came into existence in 1947 as one nation-state less by design than by default. The demand for a separate homeland for the Muslims of India had not been a seminal force in the independence movement when agitation against the ruling British first began.1 The initial objective had been simply to expel the British. Gradually, fissures began to appear as the policies of the Indian Congress Party marginalized the Muslim community, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah shrewdly enlarged these cracks to his own political advantage. As Alqama describes it, “during the election campaign of 1937, he realised the hidden potential of the Muslim League” and “exploited to the maximum the nascent Muslim fear of Hindu Raj during the Congress rule.” To help the Muslim League develop “an identity” and “status among the Muslim population of India,” he emphasized “the Hindu element in Congress.”2 In one particular speech, Jinnah spoke of “four forces at play in this country. . . . the British Government . . . the rulers and people of the Indian States . . . the Hindus; and . . . the Muslims.” But he stressed the lack of representation for Muslims: “The Congress Party may . . . . bring out their morning, afternoon, evening and night edition” and “shout as much as they like that Congress is a national body. But I say it is not true. The Congress is nothing but a Hindu body. . . . I ask, does the Congress represent the Muslim?”3 It was India’s misfortune that it had two British-trained lawyers to advocate its case for independence. One was a Muslim, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and the other a Hindu, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. They happened to be from the same region, Gujarat in western India, and perhaps because of this, they understood each other only too well, agreeing only to disagree.


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It was Pakistan’s misfortune that when the division of British India took place, two critical provinces, Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east, were divided on religious lines, not neatly and cleanly but in an ethnic bloodbath, as communities of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus went on a rampage and slaughtered one another without remorse. By the end of 1947, the realities, implications, and human cost of independence had become all too apparent. The mass exodus of Sikhs and Hindus from West Punjab into Indian East Punjab within days depleted West Pakistan of its non-Muslim population, while the cross-migration from various parts of India into Pakistan led to a concentration of Muslims on this side, and an accentuation of its monoreligious complexion. West Pakistan was populated almost entirely by Muslims, the majority of whom were Sunnis; and East Pakistan, a thousand miles away, by a mixture of Hindus and Muslims,4 with the latter forming a majority. Jinnah had expected that after independence, all communities, regardless of creed or faith, would coexist under the umbrella of a protective, secular-minded state, his Pakistan. In hindsight, this seems a utopian dream rather than a viable policy of governance that could be applied to a multiethnic, multireligious country. It ignored the realities prevalent in both wings, and those realities were to become sharper and more brittle as time went by. The most basic difference between the two wings was their mix. West Pakistan consisted of four distinct provinces: the Punjab, Sindh, the North-Western Frontier Province, and Balochistan. Each had its own geography: the Punjab, a fertile tract; Sindh, primarily desert; the NWFP, largely mountainous; and Balochistan, dry and desolate. Each province had its own regional dialect and subdialects, not always understood even within each province or by its neighbors. Each adhered protectively to its own distinguishing customs, which were derived from introverted tribal rules or archaic feudal traditions. The population in East Pakistan, by comparison, was much more homogenous. The stratification was less geographic than vertical. The upper-class Muslim Bengalis differentiated themselves from other Muslims (many of whom were regarded as converts from Hinduism) by speaking Urdu, while the masses preferred their own Bengali that had over the centuries become Sanskritized, just as Urdu had over the years become more Persianized.5 Only two languages were truly common to both wings: English, the language of civil and


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legal administration, and Arabic, the language of religious injunction. Significantly, all three—Urdu, English, and Arabic—were imported tongues. If language could be regarded as a key element of cultural bonding, English or Arabic might have served for interwing communication. English was an obvious first choice. It was the language of law, commerce, and civic administration. Arabic, despite its limited utility outside the confines of religious studies, could have been an arguable second one. The need in postindependence Pakistan to agree quickly upon an official language as the voice of the new nation indicated the heightening sensitivity felt by Bengali-speaking East Pakistanis, who resented having yet another foreign language inflicted on them. The initial language controversy was triggered on February 25, 1948, during the second session of the Constitution Assembly of Pakistan when Dhirendra Nath Dutta, a Hindu member from East Pakistan, proposed an amendment allowing members to address the house in English as well as Urdu. Dutta pointed out that “of sixtynine million people in Pakistan, forty-four million speak the Bengali language,” not Urdu. The reply of Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister, was more revealing than convincing: “Pakistan has been created because of the demand of a hundred million Muslims in this subcontinent, and the language of a hundred million Muslims is Urdu . . . Pakistan is a Muslim state and it must have as its lingua franca the language of the Muslim nation.”6 Liaquat Ali Khan’s assertion might have been less specious had he opted for Arabic as the lingua franca of the new theocratic state, but like MP Dutta he knew that few people could read Arabic, even fewer could understand it, and fewer still could write it or converse in it. Urdu was chosen as the official language of Pakistan; English was given second place. The language crisis that beset the country from its very inception demonstrates how vital a language is as a component of culture and identity, and conversely how the inability of one community to understand another can, and did, lead to an irreparable fracture. Instead of balancing the need for Urdu with the demand for Bengali, every administration between 1947 and 1971 tried various other methods to achieve national integration. Induction into the civil service was encouraged from the east wing. Bureaucrats could not expect promotion unless they had served in the opposite wing. A Pakistan Council for National Integration was established to foster


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amity between east and west. Cultural troupes gave dance and musical performances. Singers like the Bengali Runa Laila became popular in the west—provided she sang in Urdu. Whatever efforts were made to promote a sense of national unity—and countless Pakistanis, from both East and West, did try with genuine zeal and in good faith—the test of their success was the national elections of December 1970, in which the Awami League achieved a landslide victory in the East. Its leader Mujibur Rahman demanded acceptance of his Six Points. These were interpreted in the West as tantamount to a call for secession. President Yahya Khan, egged on by Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had won a national majority, arrested Mujibur Rahman and thereby precipitated the war of independence for Bangladesh. The epitaph on a united Pakistan should be left to the pen of the man who first conceived of the idea of a homeland for the Muslims. In a paragraph analyzing Hindu–Muslim suspicions long before 1947, yet strangely prescient on the attitude of West and East Pakistanis to each other after 1947, Allama Iqbal wrote: We suspect each other’s intentions and inwardly aim at dominating each other. Perhaps, in the higher interests of mutual cooperation, we cannot afford to part with the monopolies which circumstances have placed in our hands, and conceal our egoism under the cloak of nationalism, outwardly simulating a large-hearted patriotism, but inwardly as narrow-minded as a caste or a tribe. Perhaps, we are unwilling to recognize that each group has a right to free development according to its own cultural traditions.7

The war in December 1971 liberated the two wings of Pakistan from each other. It gave each the “right to free development according to its own cultural traditions.” From that time, any development of Pakistan has to be considered as a separate flow, like the very Indus River itself, in a north–south axis, rather than arching over India in an east–west direction. Pakistan Since 1971 Present-day Pakistan could be defined as a five-thousand-year-old culture trapped in the body of a fifty-six-year old. In The Indus Saga


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and the Making of Pakistan, Aitzaz Ahsan has drawn an innovative distinction between the Indus and India.8 Aitzaz Ahsan examines the divide between the two “more or less along geographical lines,” and introduces an “Indus” persona, a local nurtured by the Indus Valley civilization and its successors, a forerunner in his opinion of the modern Pakistani. He differentiates this Indus person from the “Gangetic” person, a product of the inhabitants who derived their identity from the other great river of ancient India, the Ganges. By using the river in this way, Aitzaz Ahsan reiterates that geography is one of the most significant elements in the determination of culture, identity being derived as much from territory as from upbringing.9 Aitzaz Ahsan used the river as one basis, but there are many other definitions of culture. A simple one could be: “The culture of a group consists of shared, socially learned knowledge and patterns of behaviour.”10 Anyone who applied that definition to modern Pakistan would immediately become aware of inconsistencies in its ideology, the tensions this has caused within the country, and the potential it possesses for accommodating change. Pakistan is a monoreligious theocratic state. It would be tempting to compare it to Israel, which came into existence a year later, in 1948. But Pakistan was not grafted onto territory belonging to an existing incumbent. The only migrants into Pakistan were from other parts of the same subcontinent, not Jewish refugees migrating from other parts of the world (the Pakistani Diaspora was a later phenomenon). Unlike the Jews, who carried their faith with them in whichever country they happened to be living and then brought it home to Israel, Pakistanis adopted as their state religion a faith brought into the subcontinent first by an Arab soldier, Muhammad Bin Qasim. He had landed in Sindh as part of an expeditionary force in 712 ce and established the first foothold for Islam in the subcontinent within a century of the death of its founder. Over the centuries, through conversion and migration from Persia and Central Asia, Islam gradually spread across India until the Muslims in undivided India far exceeded the Muslims in Arabia itself. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope was infallible. In Islam, infallibility could be claimed only by God, and on earth applied only to the Holy Quran, because it was accepted unquestioningly as the divine word of God revealed to the Holy Prophet Muhammad. To propose change in it was to challenge its divine authorship. Among Muslims,


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there was no need to collect brushwood to kindle a stake; the charge of apostasy was deterrent enough. The equivalent bipolar divide between the Sunnis and the Shi’as is different. It was not born of a conflict between allegiances to a foreign master as opposed to a local one; both Shi’as and Sunnis had foreign sources of dogma, the Sunnis looking to Arabia and the Shi’as toward Iran. An added buttress against change was the conviction shared by all believing Muslims that the Holy Quran was more than a testament; it was a definitive code by which they should conduct their lives. Out of the 350 surahs of the Holy Koran, for example, 140 deal with such matters as dogma and doctrinal subjects such as fasting during Ramadan, the obligation and frequency of prayers; seventy deal with family laws, especially marriage, divorce, paternity, inheritance, and bequests; seventy stipulate the conduct of commercial transactions; thirty deal with crimes and applicable punishments; thirty deal with the rights of citizens; and ten deal mainly with economic issues.11 Inevitably, when considering the possible scope of change in Pakistan, one would need to assess how far Islam has permeated the everyday life of Pakistanis and how keen the community would be to bring about that change. In the mid-1970s, piety and education might have been considered antithetical. The better educated you were, the greater the likelihood of your being an open-minded liberal. Today, the number of educated Muslims who ritually practice their faith is on the increase, just as for different reasons (primarily economic), less educated or illiterate Muslims are turning to Islam as a spiritual refuge from the purgatory of unemployment and lack of economic opportunity. The increase in the number and enrollment of madrasas is one indication of a perceptible shift toward orthodoxy. It is at the same time, an indictment of the failure of insensitive economic planners who see poverty (the rate is just over 30 percent) and unemployment (the rate in urban cities is dangerously high) as statistics rather than as social cancers. Another deterrent to change is the identification of liberalism with Westernism. This is compounded by the alienation within society caused by an educational system that mirrors social hierarchies. The urbanized classes send their children to schools that teach an Oxford or Cambridge Board curriculum and exam system. The second tier put their children into government schools that follow a local


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curriculum, and the lower level uses village schools or deeni, Islamic madrasas that offer derelict shelter and an unusable education. “Why am I the only Kinnock in a thousand years who could afford to go university?” the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock once remonstrated. The modern Indus man or woman in today’s Pakistan might well complain: “Why am I not able even after five thousand years to go to university?”—though it may take another century or more before there are sufficient universities to meet the country’s needs. Education, therefore, must always be the prime engine of change. An illiterate Martin Luther could never have ignited the Reformation in Europe, for he would not have felt the need to read the Bible in the vernacular. It will not be a Salman Rushdie, protected by a British passport and writing in English, who will precipitate a revolution in Islam. His novels may provoke outrage, but his condescension can never command a following because it is not understood at the local level, which is where any change in Islam must occur for it to succeed. For the foreseeable future, the role of religion in Pakistan’s society will remain a critical determinant of the pace of change. At present, change can only be promoted through education, advocated by the clergy, or ordered by a government. According to one report, 1.5 million Pakistani children, one third of all those attending school, are going to one of the ten thousand madrasas. They “are being trained, in theory, for service in the religious sector. But their constrained world view, lack of modern civic education and poverty make them a destabilising factor in Pakistani society.”12 Islam does not have a formal priestly order through which change could be engineered. The Mughals and their satraps, for example, used the weekly khutba or sermon delivered before the Friday congregation to convey their policies. Sermons may move or agitate or even incite people; they rarely stimulate change. Change in Pakistan is likely to be sporadic. Had Pakistan inherited an aristocracy, it might have been able to maintain a tradition of local self-governance in which authority flowed from an apex of concerned paternalism. But feudalism, however well organized, is not benign governance; nor is its twentieth-century substitute, a military dictatorship. Since 1958 Pakistan has been subjected to governance by four self-anointed Cromwells: General Ayub Khan, succeeded by General Yahya Khan, General Zia Ul Haq, and more recently General Pervez Musharraf. Each has assumed control “in the supreme national inter-


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est” and in the process of governing has increased the army’s intrusion into the country’s civil, administrative, legal, and commercial life. Through the Fauji Foundation the army runs fertilizer plants, petroleum pipelines, and gas companies, has interests in a bank and an insurance company, and manages real estate. Retired generals head almost all the critical public sector organizations. Through the National Accountability Bureau, the military became the arbiter of financial turpitude. Through the National Reconstruction Bureau, they initiated a restructuring of the administrative framework at the district and tehsil level. Military governments are like tanks; they move mechanically. They can go forward or retreat. They are well insulated against small arms fire. But should they become bogged down (as they can do in unfamiliar terrain), extricating themselves can be extremely tricky, if not hazardous. Every military dictator in Pakistan in the end has shared the fate of a disabled tank. He has been brought to a standstill by the soft sands of public opinion and expectations. Third-world countries like Pakistan are inured to such mechanical failures. Developed countries are not, which may explain why Western powers like the United States continue to support dictatorships (presidential or monarchical) even at the cost of democratic values. One can understand their line of reasoning. Dictators are easier to talk to and do business with. But dictators do not produce the sort of development Western countries want to see. Pakistan’s Development The present head of state, President General Pervez Musharraf, is an avowed secularist. He has surrounded himself with like-minded persons, with Western perceptions, Western affiliations, and Western horizons. Thus the change they would like to see occur must be in imitation of contemporary Western values. This poses a problem. How do countries that have not yet developed coexist with nations that perceive their present stage of development as the desirable norm? And what is the validity of that norm? Certain criteria have been commonly accepted as constituting that norm: a lower birth rate, lower infant mortality, better health care, more accessible education, an improvement in the quality of life per se. Other criteria have been ignored: the family unit, social support


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structures, the solidarity a commonly shared belief provides to members of the same religious persuasion, an acknowledgment of the ultimate supremacy of a God (by whatever name). Often it is the latter criteria that are sacrificed to attain the former. The Reformation brought about the development revolution in Christian countries, but its aim could not have been to have developed Western societies reject the Church and Christ himself half a millennium later. To reform is not to abjure. To anyone who has witnessed the giant leap China made over the past fifty years, or India over the past twenty-five, it must be clear that the future lies in the East, that the twenty-first century belongs to people of color. Fifty years from now, China will have achieved the sort of global significance their introvert emperors thought it had; the Chinese presence everywhere across the globe will owe nothing to its diaspora. As one determined Chinese diplomat put it: “It is important that we learn English. Then we can spread ourselves throughout the world and teach everyone Chinese.” Pakistan’s friendship with China may be less than permanent. Durable relationships are based on an enduring commonality of interests, usually at least in some measure local and regional as well international. The recent rapprochement with India, however, is dramatic, far-reaching in its implications, and irreversible. The decision by the Indian leadership to come to a nonmilitary settlement with Pakistan was not merely the personal wish of an aging Indian prime minister. It was a deliberate, considered, sagacious act of diplomacy, a peace offensive intended to induce a change within Pakistan’s polity, with—but if necessary without—the present Pakistan government’s cooperation. That change will not need to be dictated. India is too large a country to pursue a policy of hegemony; it will not be by conquest. India does not require 150 million more Muslims swelling the ranks of its Muslim voters—it already has a Muslim population larger than Pakistan’s. It will be by example, by demonstrating that democracy is not a winter animal; it can flourish in a hot and humid climate. The conditions that will bring about change in Pakistan will not be the ones traditionally regarded as causative factors. Were climate alone the cause of prosperity, northern Europe would never have endured the Dark Ages. If it were population size alone, Holland would never have been a significant maritime power. If it were land mass and mineral wealth alone, Russia would never have needed a Lenin or a Bolshevik revolution.


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Pakistan’s geophysical and geopolitical location places it at the crossroads of future history. It is too large to be insignificant (at its present rate of growth, the population will be 217 million by the year 2020). It is at the same time too small economically to affect the course of others. It is a traditional society that has acquired, rather than itself developed, a nuclear capability. It is a nation that was granted an unfought-for freedom. It is an uneven federation of four unequal provinces. It is a democracy cloaked under a tarpaulin of khaki. It is a Muslim state in an age when the international perception of Islam focuses on its militant lunatic fringe rather than on its humanist mainstream. Can Pakistan change? The answer must be an equally terse counterquestion: Can it afford not to? Change in Pakistan will occur as a result of four factors: civilianization, consumerism, concretization, and confidence. By civilianization I mean a return to a more representative form of government. A country’s armed forces cannot simultaneously be both masters and servants of the state. The histories of Pakistan and Bangladesh before and after their split have shown that military rule cannot be a permanent solution to the problems of democratic self-governance. Every military ruler since 1958 has arrogated to himself the responsibility for modernizing Islam, and President General Pervez Musharraf is no exception. He faces the additional pressure of having to reverse the legislative experiments of his predecessor, General Zia Ul Haq, whose constitutional amendments include blasphemy laws, punishment by amputation, curtailed rights for women, and control of the administration and curriculum of religious madrasas. Since 2000, the financial system in Pakistan has seen a perceptible shift from entrepreneurial investment to widespread consumer financing. Large commercial banks are now chasing smaller borrowers. Even development finance institutions that once provided long-term seed capital for major industrial projects have converted themselves into commercial banks in order to tap this growing market. Financing of small and medium enterprises is now the catchword. While in Pakistan this has not assumed the proportions of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh,13 the thrust is clear. Credit cards are gaining popularity. One commercial bank that has begun offering Visa cards, for example, within a year of launching its scheme has not only outstripped local targets but also exceeded Visa’s regional targets. Similarly car and appliance financing is on the increase. The middle class in the cities is perceptibly on the move.


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By concretization I mean the crystallization of ideas and values, the documentation of oral traditions, and even the documentation of the economy (in a nation of 140 million persons, Pakistan has only 1.5 million direct taxpayers). Music, dance, and theater rely too heavily on informal oral traditions, handed down from master to pupil, instead of being written or codified. Efforts are being made to preserve these vernacular traditions through private art schools and state cultural organizations like Lok Virsa (literally Folk Heritage). Significantly, the stigma attached to professional singers and dancers is being eroded gradually as performers gain national and international recognition, demonstrating that creative innovation has a place in a Muslim country. However, while the two larger provinces, Punjab and Sindh, and even the underpopulated Balochistan, sustain a lively tradition of folk music and performing arts, the North-Western Frontier Province (close to Afghanistan and governed by a coalition of six religious parties) has banned live performances, films, and even music cassettes. It is the cultural equivalent of the Prohibition years in the United States. Increased confidence is common. The first generation of Pakistanis shared a nostalgia with their Indian counterparts for an undivided subcontinent. That generation has almost died out. Those in the second generation inherited some of these loyalties but struggled to delineate their own identity as Pakistanis. They would have been in their twenties in 1971 and are in their late fifties today. They have seen a second birth of Pakistan and are now citizens of a smaller, more compact community. The third generation, born after 1971, are those under thirty, some married, more studying, and still more in the cradle.14 They share an awareness of themselves as a generation. In some parts of Africa, the first word whispered in the ear of a newborn infant is his or her name. The unassailable logic for this is that the child should be the first to know who he or she is. Among Muslims, the first words recited into the ear of a newborn are the azan, or call for prayer, to insinuate into the child’s subconscious that he or she is a Muslim. Today’s Pakistanis do not need to have someone whisper into their ears (as the first generation did) that they are no longer Indians. They do not need to hear that first call to prayer to be reminded that they are Muslims. They no longer need to wonder why their compatriots a thousand miles away speak a different language. They share a ter-


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ritory, an ethnic affinity, a recognizably common culture, and a belief in Islam. They belong to one of the newest countries and newest religions in the world. The time for further growth and change has not yet passed. The sap exists; it is waiting for the spring of popular expression. Pakistan and Bangladesh In 1971, when half the country broke away, West Pakistan made a decision not to accept the demand for change. The later and separate development of Pakistan and Bangladesh provides interesting comparisons of how two predominantly Muslim countries with economies once mutually and heavily interdependent have fared. There are many parallels. The estimated population of Pakistan is 146 million and of Bangladesh 141 million, with population growth rates of 2.7 and 2.2 percent respectively. Public expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP during the years 1998 to 2000 has been lower in Pakistan at 1.8 percent than Bangladesh’s 2.5 percent. Interestingly, the average schooling for students over fifteen during the decade after 1990 increased in Bangladesh from 2.2 to 2.6 years but decreased in Pakistan from 4.2 to 3.9 years. Adult literacy in Pakistan is slightly higher than in Bangladesh (44 vs. 41 percent). The critical comparisons are the directions in which Bangladesh is moving. Bangladesh has been able to improve its GNP from $80 per capita in 1973 to $360 in 2001, while Pakistan’s growth over the same period from $130 to $420 has been less spectacular. Female literacy since 1970 has increased in Pakistan from 5 to 28.8 percent and in Bangladesh from 9 to 30.8 percent. Perhaps the most telling statistic is the level of self-employment among women in the nonagricultural sector. Regionally, Pakistan is the lowest at 34 percent; India is higher at 41 percent; Bangladesh is highest at 83 percent.15 Much of this can be attributed to the smallborrower initiatives, the most prominent of which has been Grameen Bank, 94 percent of whose borrowers are women. Grameen Bank has a presence in almost 39,000 villages and targets the small borrower. Its average loans are $160 per borrower, with a 95 percent success rate in repayment.16 Bangladesh’s compact geography and high density, especially in rural areas, are contributory factors that may not be replicable in Pakistan, where the population density is one fifth that of Bangladesh (173 vs. 952 per km).


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Pakistan simply must change. Nations as important as Pakistan cannot be allowed to regress, nor can they afford the sterile comfort of standing still. The only way is forward. A Response to F. S. Aijazuddin Adil Najam A standard way for many outsiders to simplify the layered cultural complexities of the Muslim world is to make religion the predominant, sometimes sole, determinant of “culture” in the Islamic world. This tendency has become even more pronounced—and is arguably more dangerous—since September 11, 2001. In Pakistan’s case, it is not only outsiders who have used religion as a surrogate for culture, it is insiders—often, indeed, at the behest of the state—who have moved to impose a religious straitjacket over national culture. Thankfully, Mr. Aijazuddin’s chapter does not do so. This chapter demonstrates that even in a country which has been as consciously driven in the name of religion as Pakistan, it has remained just one of the many determinants of national culture. Indeed, if Islam were as potent a force in shaping culture and national identity as so many Western analysts seem to believe and many Pakistani ideologues had hoped, then East Pakistan might never have become Bangladesh. Here I will pick up on only one aspect of how historical, rather than religious, forces left deep (and deeply different) marks on the national cultures of what is now Pakistan and now Bangladesh. Although both countries were part of the British Empire, the experiences of the two in the British colonial period and under Mughal rule were vastly different and may even help explain why they failed to coexist between 1947 and 1971. Bengal was one of the first places where the British arrived, and Calcutta (not in Bangladesh, but in the same regional orbit) was not only the capital but also the jewel of British India in its early days—the days of the British East India Company. In short, Bengal was colonized and ruled by the company, while what became Pakistan was not. Pakistan came under British control very late in the game and mostly after the company had left or was withering away under the British Crown Raj. The British influence in these two periods was much different: for one thing, company rule tended to be far more blunt and


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often brutal than the raj’s rule. Thus Bengal experienced a longer cultural imprint from Britain than did what is now Pakistan. Actually, what is now Bangladesh was very much the backwater of company rule. The core was Calcutta, and everything around it was to serve the city’s appetites. The company planted its culture viciously in Calcutta but was not greatly interested in the region east of it.17 Looking briefly at pre-British rule by the Mughals, one sees again that areas that became Pakistan were generally not too badly off under the Mughals. Not so the areas which are now Bangladesh. This meant that the history of forced servitude was very different in the two, something that showed clearly in the independence movement of the 1940s. It also meant that Pakistan has taken on itself to be the custodian of the Mughal cultural traditions in which the Bangladeshis had little interest. Hence Pakistanis had no problem with Urdu, the Mughal language, even though it was not the language of its component areas, while Bengalis did. Overall, then, the nonreligious cultural traditions of the two areas are very different. For Pakistan, it is Mughal, a somewhat artificial nostalgia, and for Bangladesh, it is colonial, though more rebellious than acquiescent. Pakistanis have known the discourse of subjugation for only about 150 years; Bangladeshis have known it for at least four hundred years. Moreover, Pakistanis have some fond memories and desirable cultural legacies (e.g., architecture) from the British; the East Bengalis saw an uglier side of British colonialism, and for longer. This is important for several reasons. The land-holding system on the two sides was very different. Under the British, and earlier under the Mughals, those holding power on the Pakistan side were local, and rule was decentralized. A bad system, but less bad than in Bengal, where the lands were turned over to outsiders. Thus it was something like British landlords in Britain two hundred years ago compared with British landlords in Ireland. The former were bad enough, but the latter were worse, because they were outsiders to boot. Pakistan was born out of a politics of the landed aristocracy, which was seen to be feudal but was nonetheless legitimate because it was local. Bangladesh, on the other hand, was born not only out of a cultural struggle against Pakistan but also from a class struggle led by peasants.18 Another important difference is the type of civil society that has developed in the two countries. If you mention Bangladesh to most


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people working in development, the first thing they will probably think of are the immensely successful Bangladeshi NGOs, like Grameen. Not so with Pakistan. Democracy in both countries has stumbled, but why are community development initiatives in Bangladesh such a great success, and those in Pakistan a rather dismal failure? Perhaps we can find causes in the culture of community self-help, for which Bangladesh has a long history and deep cultural affinity, and Pakistan does not. Yet another difference is population. While both are overpopulated, Bangladesh is currently going through a major and surprising demographic transition: its fertility rate is falling dramatically without any concurrent increases in caloric intake, the usual correlate in Western industrialized economies. Not so in Pakistan, where the transition is not happening, despite an increase in caloric intake. Maybe there is a cultural explanation, cultural not in the sense that both are Islamic, but in the sense that the culture at the community level has created very different grounds for development action in the two polities. In short, a comparison of Pakistan and Bangladesh is instructive precisely because their common religious bonds could not keep them together. The breakup of the two countries in 1971 might not have come as a complete surprise to the original creators of Pakistan, but it should give pause to those who exaggerate the potency of pan-Islamic cultural affinities. This is not to deny that religion is a major source of cultural identity in both societies; it is. But it is not the only one, and the others are not insignificant. Response to Adil Najam F. S. Aijazuddin Obviously religion cannot be the only determinant of cultural development in any society. But to the extent that Pakistan was created in 1947 on the grounds of a religious distinction between the communities living in the Indian subcontinent, given that almost 98 percent of the population of the present residual Pakistan is Muslim by faith, and recognizing that a ritualistic observance of Islamic injunctions (in law, education, commerce, and in social customs) permeates almost every aspect of the ordinary Pakistani’s life, it seems justifiable to regard Islam as the key propellant or retardant to cultural change within Pakistan.


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The differences between the eastern and western wings of Pakistan were far too deep to be papered over by the simplicity of a common national name or the intangible unity of a common religion. I have made that point clear. These disparities were exacerbated by centuries of domination, by marauding foreigners such as the Tughlaqs, the Mughals, the Europeans, and then latterly by the British, and within India throughout its history by classes of local Indians over each other. (Incidentally, it was the East India Company and not the British government that annexed the areas that make up Pakistan: Sindh in 1843 and the Punjab in 1849. Balochistan and the NorthWestern Province later came Britain’s way by default.) Perhaps the supple subservience of West Pakistanis to various forms of dictatorial rule may have something to do with a long history of taking orders rather than giving them. Similarly, its inability to develop structures of community self-help may have much to do with the fact that its local community structures—panchayats in the Punjab, jirgas in the NWFP, and the waderaism encountered in Sindh—were designed for community self-regulation rather than for economic self-help. The identity of modern Pakistanis is undeniably an amalgam of past influences, honed by centuries of cultural indoctrination. How it will evolve no one can tell. The critical issue is population growth: its claims on resources, on education, on social infrastructure, and on the national economy. I will end by reminding the reader that the right measure of success for both countries is not a comparison with each other but with their previous selves, of the centuries of their separate growth rather than the years they spent together temporarily as one nation.

Notes 1. P. Hardy, The Muslims in British India (Cambridge, 1972), 3. “The feeling of being a distinct nation developed among Indian Muslims only in the late 1940s, when it became clear that the British would soon leave India. Prior to that, the Muslim nobility had little in common with the peasantry and artisan castes.” 2. Khawaja Alqama, Bengali Elites’ Perceptions of Pakistan (Karachi: 1997), 56– 57. 3. Quoted in Alqama, Bengali Elites, 56–57. 4. In Pakistan, the Muslim population is 78 percent Sunni and about 20 percent Shi’a, while in Bangladesh the 88 percent Muslim component of its population is almost entirely Sunni.


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5. “During the late 19th and early 20th centuries Muslim writers en masse followed the Hindu style, but with the gradual emergence of cultural individuality the question arose: should the Muslims, while accepting Bengali as the mother tongue, follow the Hindu pattern or introduce more Arabic, Persian and Urdu words to give expression to an Islamic spirit to their language.” Dhurjati Prasad De, Bengal Muslims in Search of Social Identity, 1905–1947 (Dhaka: 1998), 107–108. 6. See Khawaja Alqama, Bengali Elites, 124–25. 7. Statements of Iqbal (Lahore, 1948), 10. 8. Aitzaz Ahsan, The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan (Karachi, 1996). 9. Applying this to Bengalis, Prasad De wrote, “A Bengali Muslim may have seen himself primarily as a ‘Muslim’ the other day, as a ‘Bengali’ yesterday, and a ‘Bengali Muslim’ today, depending on objective conditions, but on none of these occasions did his thoughts and his idea of destiny become separated from his territorial identity. Whether he likes it or not, his entire personality bears marks of this socio-territorial imprint.” Dhurjati Prasad De, Muslims in Search of Social Identity, 1905–1947 (Dhaka, 1998), 107. 10. James Peoples and Garrick Bailey, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Wadsworth, 1999), 17. 11. M. Hashim Kamali, “Law and Society: The Interplay of Revelation and Reason in the Shariah,” in The Oxford History of Islam (Oxford, 1999), 120. 12. Pakistan: Madrasas, Extremism and the Military, International Crisis Group (Islamabad, Brussels), Asia Report No. 36, July 29, 2002. 13. The Kashf Foundation does similar work, providing small loans to female entrepreneurs. 14. According to the 1998 Census, Pakistan’s population mix is as follows: ages 0–4, 19.1 million; ages 5–9, 20.2 million; ages 10–14, 16.7 million; ages 15–19, 13.4 million; ages 20–64, 55.1 million; and ages 64 and over, 4.4 million. Perhaps more significantly, one third of Pakistan’s total population of almost 150 million lives below the poverty line. 15. Source: Human Development in South Asia 2003: The Employment Challenge. The Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Centre, Islamabad (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004). 16. Microcredit programs, despite their apparent success, are stained employment opportunities. 17. John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (New York: Macmillan, 1991); Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History. (London: Longman, 1987). 18. Badruddin Umar, The Emergence of Bangladesh: Class Struggles in East Pakistan (1947–1958) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).


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12 Turkey Torn Between Two Civilizations YILMAZ ESMER

Samuel Huntington, in his widely known “clash of civilizations” thesis, argues that in the period after the Cold War, the new fault line of conflict runs not between ideologies but rather between civilizations. Based on predominant religion, Huntington classifies societies into civilizations, and he specifically draws our attention to the potentially conflict-generating cultural differences between Western and Islamic civilizations.1 Whether the fact that different civilizations emphasize different values, beliefs, and norms will result in “clashes” is not my concern in this chapter. The point I would like to highlight here is that, in addition to the major fault lines between groups of societies that Huntington refers to as civilizations, other, minor, fault lines often run within the same society, broadly corresponding to the generally accepted global classifications of civilizations. I will argue that Turkey is one such society, where two civilizations (Western and Islamic) have existed together for a long time and continue to do so. This has not been a painless cohabitation, however; far from it. The situation has been uneasy at best and has resulted in open conflict on many occasions. The struggle for domination between Western and Islamic values has been a major defining characteristic of Turkish and, earlier, Ottoman society for at least two centuries. To be sure, these two 217


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cultures do overlap within Turkish society. However, the existence of some common ground does not mean that a happy harmonization of the two cultures has taken place. Europe’s encounter with Turkic tribes predates Islam by many centuries, and the relationship was certainly more hate than love. Although some of the early European texts describing the Turks (not always using that name) contained some praise and even admiration, these were a minority. More typical was the barbaric warrior image of horsemen storming through villages and destroying all elements of civilization in their path. Yerasimos notes that as early as 380 ce, Saint Ephrem of Syria drew a parallel between the Huns and Gog and Magog.2 Turkish conversion to Islam is thought to have started around the middle of the 7th century and was completed by around 950. What was hitherto an “Arab” religion entered Asia Minor in the eleventh century with the Seljuk Turks. The Ottoman era, which was to last for more than six centuries, began in 1299 and developed into an empire and a world power in a relatively short time. Although the Ottoman Empire had in its territories many ethnic and religious groups, the ruling state ideology was Islam and the ruling elites were Muslim; some were born into Islam and many others accepted the faith. Ottoman sultans ruled in the name of Allah and Mohammed, and the founding element of the state was Muslim Turks. Islam, as is well known, is a religion that extends beyond the individual to cover the political, civil, criminal, and economic spheres. Much more than a code of ethics and a set of guidelines for “good behavior,” it is the original source for a very broad set of values extending from gender relations to interest on loans, from penalties for stealing to rules of inheritance. There is hardly any aspect of human existence about which Islam has nothing to say. Thus, it is only natural that, over time, devout Islamic communities develop a distinct culture. Islam and Islamic values served the Ottoman Empire very well during its first three centuries, when territorial expansion was fast and vast. In 1453, Constantinople, a city of great strategic as well as symbolic importance, became the capital of the glorious empire. History textbooks for Turkish schoolchildren proudly note that during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), the boundaries of the empire included much of Northern Africa, the Arabian peninsula, the Balkans, and Europe all the way to the outskirts of Vienna and


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the southern borders of Poland. For the Muslim world this Islamic expansion was “Allah’s will” and proof that their faith and way of life were superior, while Christendom viewed the developments with horror and fear. In addition to territorial gains, Sultan Selim’s military campaigns of 1516 resulted in two very significant developments that consolidated the Ottoman Empire’s position as the undisputed leader of the Islamic world. As a result of these campaigns, Ottomans gained control of the holiest cities of Islam (Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem) and thus became the “trustee” of the faith. Furthermore, Selim deposed the caliph in Cairo in 1517 and declared himself the new caliph: the spiritual and political leader of all believers. The centuries of Ottoman–Islamic conquests and expansion did not help much to bridge the gap between Islamic and Christian civilizations. In addition to belonging to different faiths, the two sides had wildly differing worldviews. Their lifestyles, their values, their social relations, their political structures all demonstrated that these were two different worlds. It is no surprise that both sides viewed the other with suspicion at best and not infrequently with disdain, contempt, condescension, or outright hatred. Yerasimos argues that starting in the late 1500s, Europeans concentrated “more on the faults than the virtues of Turks and criticized their Eastern mores.”3 Even someone as sympathetic to Turks as Cyrus Hamlin starts his book, Among the Turks, by drawing a line between the Turks and “civilization.” He writes: “The origin and growth of the Ottoman empire have attracted the attention and wonder of the civilized world.”4 (italics mine) From the Ottoman viewpoint, the feelings were mutual. Particularly during the victorious centuries of the empire, Ottomans referred to Europeans as “infidels” belonging to an inferior religion and an inferior civilization. “For many centuries the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement. In the Muslims’ own perception, Islam itself was coterminous with civilization, and beyond its borders there were only barbarians and infidels,” writes Bernard Lewis, a prominent student of Ottoman–Turkish history.5 Lewis notes that this belief in their own superiority contributed to the decline of the empire. “Masked by the still military might of the Ottoman Empire, the peoples of Islam continued to cherish the dangerous but comfortable illusion of the immeasurable and immutable superiority of their own civilization to all others—an illusion from


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which they were slowly shaken by a series of humiliating military defeats.”6 I have briefly traced the first cultural component, one could even say pillar, of present-day Turkish society. “The Ottomans were a people of faith. Their worldviews were based on the Koran, Hadith, and the text that sought to interpret these. For all their history, they viewed nations that did not share their faith as Dar-ul Kufr and Darul Harb.”7 Indeed, Islam has had and continues to have a profound impact on Turkish values. However, this is only half the story. Equally important, Turks have been engaged in a process of Westernization for many centuries. Modernization, viewed as synonymous with Westernization, was the main project of those who founded the Turkish Republic. But the seeds were sown long before that. It is impossible to point to a specific date as the start of the empire’s efforts at Westernization/modernization. Two things are clear, however. First, it was the military setbacks suffered by the army and the navy that led to a serious questioning of the hitherto “self-evident truth” that the Ottoman way was superior. Second, the Westernization process continues, as recently manifested in Turkey’s strong desire for full membership in the European Union. The first siege of Vienna by the Ottoman armies ended in disappointment in 1529. In retrospect, this was perhaps the first sign that the empire had reached a turning point in its expansion into non-Islamic territories and that things were not as perfect as everyone had been assuming. But it is impossible to say that the ruling elites got the message. After all, this was the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, and one unfortunate incident could not be expected to alter the deeply rooted feeling of self-confidence. As it turned out, a steep and steady decline was about to begin for the Ottoman Turks and hence for the Islamic world. In a state based on religion, the Ottoman rulers were concerned with protecting their citizens and particularly their Muslim subjects from the harmful influence of outsiders, mostly the “infidels” of Europe. Anything new from the West was viewed with deep suspicion. An “infidel invention” was any innovation not of Islamic origin—and thus potentially detrimental to the great faith. So sure were the Ottomans of themselves that for many centuries they neither saw a need to keep permanent diplomatic missions in European capitals—the first were established during the reign of Selim III (1789–1807)—nor to study their cultures or languages. This is especially interesting in a


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truly multiethnic, multireligious empire which, for its time, could even be considered tolerant and respectful of other faiths. Nevertheless, knowledge of European languages, for example, among OttomanTurkish elites, was so rare that Ortayli, a prominent contemporary Ottoman historian, could actually name the handful of people with that ability.8 The empire did have a group of intellectuals who were opening up to the world. But it is also legitimate to ask why that had to wait until the late 1600s and why, even then, there were so few. The answer must lie at least partially in the dominant interpretation of Islam and the knee-jerk reaction to any proposed modifications as subversive threats. This overriding policy of protecting the faith from foreign influence was not much of a problem while military victories and territorial expansion continued. Once these came to an end and economic problems intensified, self-questioning became inevitable. Many historians mention the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), through which the Ottomans ceded the Balkans to the Habsburgs, as the beginning of the end in Ottoman diplomatic and military history. With this treaty, the Ottomans tasted the great humiliation of withdrawing from conquered lands and losing vast territories—permanently, it turned out—to the Christian forces of Europe. The series of military defeats, with only one or two exceptions, continued up to and through World War I. It became undeniable that Christian Europe had achieved definite technological superiority over the Islamic world. The Ottomans could not have ignored this fact indefinitely, although denial did prevail for a long while. The question of what caused the Ottomans to fall so far behind is still unresolved. Whatever the reason, at a minimum, the modernization of the army had become urgent. This was easier said than done, however, since it presented at least two important dilemmas. First, that modernization had to be planned and executed by Europeans, against whom the Ottomans had fought throughout their history. Second, and perhaps more important, there was the serious threat that Western (Christian) customs would penetrate and change the Islamic lifestyle. But as the Turkish proverb says, “fear is no cure for predestined death.” Although it was a long and a painful process, the West did come with its technology as well as many social and legal institutions. Some welcomed it and others resisted bitterly. Guvenc notes that modernizing the army was seen as the only hope for preventing decline.9 However, the ulema (Islamic scholars)


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were opposed to any attempt at change or reform. (One cannot help noticing the parallel with present-day Iran.) Change is an agonizing process in any traditional society. But it is much harder for peoples whose prophet is assumed to have said “Don’t leave your customs; don’t adopt new customs.”10 One has to agree with Inalcik that “the limitations imposed on the government by the shari’ah and by religious authority in the period of decline made the application of reforms all the more difficult. The all-embracing shari’ah became the stronghold of traditionalism in Ottoman government and society.”11 Johann Gutenberg invented the first printing press in the 1430s. The delay in importing this new and revolutionary technology and allowing Muslims to use it is usually cited as a major factor in widening the scientific and technological gap between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, the first printing press for the Muslim community was established only in 1727—three centuries after it was first used in Europe—and even then by a Hungarian convert to Islam. Although preventing the easy spread of literacy and knowledge is no doubt important, one wonders how popular printing and reading would have been had the technology been imported centuries earlier. Judging by the reading habits of contemporary Turks, one can infer that technology is a necessary but not a sufficient condition and that without cultural values that support a given innovation, it is not likely to gain widespread acceptance. After the efforts of Selim III and Mahmoud II to modernize the army, which included the extremely bold act of abolishing the elite Janissaries in 1839, the Ottomans began the first large-scale reorganization and Westernization of the empire’s legal-political structure. It was known as Tanzimat, literally putting in order or reorganizing. The declaration was a clear and public admission that the Ottoman system had lost to the West and had to adapt itself to the new rules of the game that had evolved in Europe. It is not hard to imagine the loss of face this caused among people who, for centuries, had not the slightest doubt about the superiority of their civilization and the inferiority of the European way of life and government. Nevertheless, the wheels of Westernization had started turning; they squealed and screeched, and the coefficient of friction was very high, but the process proved irreversible. The second cultural pillar of contemporary Turkish society was being erected.


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Analyzing the Proclamation of 1839, Inalcik comments that although it seemed at first sight to be in complete agreement with Ottoman traditions, it introduced truly radical changes in government.12 In brief, its core idea was granting and guaranteeing certain rights and liberties (protection of life and security, private property rights, rules for taxing and military service) to all subjects. This was an unmistakable step in the direction of Europe. In fact, the pressures that led to the Proclamation were more European than domestic. Even then, the document clearly included praise of Shari’a (though some would call it lip service) and requests for Allah’s help and the Prophet’s spirit in implementing the new rules. What I have called the first cultural pillar was still the basis of legal discourse. The Westernization process continued at a “two steps forward, one step back” pace throughout what Ortayli called “The Longest Century of the Empire”: the nineteenth.13 The struggle between reformers and conservatives frequently resulted in violence, assassinations, and rebellions, while the empire continued to lose ground on all fronts. The final victory, albeit only at the political level, for the forces of Westernization had to wait for the Kemalist revolution and the subsequent founding of the Turkish Republic. The Ottoman Empire was among the losers of World War I, and it was defeated badly indeed. The resulting revolution under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha led to the founding of a parliament (Grand National Assembly) in 1920 and the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. This was an unambiguous turning point in the centuries-old adventure of modernization. The founders of the Republic were adamant about Westernizing the country in a swift and sweeping way. Merely reviewing the list of the radical reforms, some of which would be too daring even today, demonstrates the determination of the Republic’s leaders, notably Ataturk and Inonu. Major reforms during the first three decades of the new regime are shown in Table 12.1. By any account, this is a bold and impressive list whose direction is clear: a secular, Western-style state and a modern society. It is also clear that conservative Islam was seen as an impediment to this. These early republican reforms have been analyzed extensively both in Turkey and abroad. I would like to highlight a few points that will help us better understand Turkey’s contemporary cultural map.


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Table 12.1 Republican Reforms: A Partial List 1920 1921 1922 1922 1923 1924 1924 1924 1924 1925 1925 1925 1926 1926 1928 1928 1928 1930 1934 1945 1950

Grand National Assembly opened. Constitution declared Monarchy abolished; last sultan left Istanbul. New caliph elected by the Grand National Assembly; head of the state is no longer the spiritual leader. Republic proclaimed. Caliphate abolished; last caliph exiled. Religious schools closed; a common curriculum became mandatory for all schools. New constitution passed by the Grand National Assembly. Article 3 declared that “sovereignty unconditionally belongs to people.” A very short-lived experiment with multiparty system; an opposition party founded; party abolished in 1925. Law school opened in Ankara. Religious orders banned. Western attire (particularly hat instead of the turban) made mandatory by law; the veil was not outlawed. Switch to Western calendar and GMT. New civil code, mostly a translation of the Swiss civil code, enacted. Article stating that the “religion of the state is Islam” removed from the Constitution. “In the name of Allah” removed from the text of the oath of office required of president and parliamentarians. A nonreligious text accepted. Switch to Latin alphabet announced; Arabic alphabet banned. Second very short-lived experiment with a multiparty system. Universal suffrage accepted; women gain full rights to vote and be elected to political office. First elections with the participation of an opposition party. Government changes hands through elections; Republican People’s Party voted out of office.

In 1930, Turkish women gained the right to vote and to run in local elections, and in 1934 women’s suffrage was extended to include all elected offices, ahead of many Western nations. French women had to wait for ten, Belgian women for fourteen, Greek women for eighteen, and Canadian women for twenty-six more years to gain unrestricted access to electoral politics. The process of Westernization in this Islamic society was, in a way, proceeding faster than in the West itself. And it is all the more significant that this particular reform concerned women, a topic of utmost sensitivity for the Muslim religion. In fact, the new regime went far beyond universal suffrage in its campaign for gender equality and had to overcome strong opposition from conservatives at each step. Equally important was


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the adoption of secularism as a cardinal principle of the regime. And when the progeny of the greatest Islamic empire in history eliminated the word Islam from its constitution only one year after it established the Republic, that was a revolution in itself. Turkish secularism is considered somewhat extreme by some. At least in the beginning, it had two aims: to keep religion at a distance from government and politics and thus ensure that it did not get in the way of reforms; and to keep religion under state control and thus ensure that it “behaved properly.” (This unique breed of secularism is rather foreign to the Anglo-Saxon world but is akin to the French system.) The second aim has been widely criticized, not only by religious conservatives but also by liberals, who saw this variety of secularism as state infringement on individual religious freedoms. In evaluating these criticisms, one must consider that, from the very beginning, the Republic has had two major fears: a Kurdish secessionist movement and an Islamic backlash. Even today, many feel that these two threats still pose a danger, while others believe they are imagined—the anxieties of a paranoid state of mind. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the young Republic had to deal with a major Kurdish rebellion only two years after its founding. It is equally true that every opposition movement or party sought to exploit antisecularist sentiments and Islamic aspirations. The Republican People’s Party followed this uncompromising version of secularism until the late 1940s. But with the transition to a multiparty system came a softening of secular principles, since it was clear that religious feelings could easily be translated into votes. The secular camp regards the 1950 elections, which brought the opposition Democrat Party to power, as the end of the era of Kemalist reforms and the beginning of a reversal process. The Democrat Party indeed made certain concessions to Islam. The most symbolic among them was going back to Arabic in the daily call for prayers. With ethnic rebellion and Islamism seen as the two major threats to the republican regime, it is no surprise that political parties based on ethnic or religious identity have not been and are not allowed in Turkey. At least, parties cannot openly identify themselves with an ethnic group or religion (in the Turkish context, ethnic means Kurdish and religion refers to Islam). Article 68 of the 1982 Constitution stipulates that the programs, bylaws, and actions of political parties cannot violate the principles of “a democratic and secular Republic.” This is what is stated in law. However, observers of Turkish politics


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know very well that Islamist parties led by Necmettin Erbakan have been playing hide-and-seek with the system for many years. Although some parties were especially eager to play to Islamic sensitivities since the transition to the multiparty system in the 1950s, the most blatant attempt was the Milli Nizam Partisi (National Order Party) founded in 1970 and banned by the Constitutional Court a year later. It was replaced by a number of other parties with the same leadership and ideology: as the Constitutional Court banned one, another was launched with a different name. Tracing the electoral trajectory of Islamist parties will shed some light on the current political situation in Turkey. In the 1973 election, Milli Selamet Partisi (National Salvation Party), the successor to the National Order Party, got 11.8 percent of the votes nationwide and won forty-eight parliamentary seats. This enabled it to become a partner in a coalition government. Its leader, Erbakan, became vice premier. For the first time in the Republic’s fifty-year history, Islamists occupied positions at the national level. Although the coalition was short-lived, it was a clear indication of what was to come. Some interpreted this as a serious warning about the future of secularism and called for an end to complacency; to others it was a triumph and a first step on the road to inevitable victory. But one thing was indisputable: the differences between the two sides of the cultural fault line were more in the open than ever before. The 1990s witnessed a significant rise in popular support for the Islamist party. In 1991, this time competing under the name Refah Partisi or Virtue Party, it won 16.9 percent of the vote. The results of the 1995 election came as a profound shock to the secular camp and a big surprise for many observers of Turkish politics: the Islamist Virtue Party won a plurality of votes (21.4 percent) and was in government once again. What lay behind this electoral success? What motivated one Turkish voter in five to vote in favor of an unmistakably Islamist party that seemed to have an account to settle with Ataturk’s reforms? The explanations offered by social scientists are basically variants of one of two hypotheses: the economic hypothesis and the cultural hypothesis. The economic hypothesis, by far the more popular, argues that these voters were motivated much more by material concerns and relative deprivation than by religious ideology. Largely slum dwellers in larger cities, they were poorly integrated into the system, alienated, and oppressed. Most had extremely low incomes and felt powerless


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and rejected by the “center.” This feeling of estrangement and relative deprivation was responsible for their support of a marginal party. In other words, it was a protest vote and not an ideological one. The cultural hypothesis, on the other hand, argues that religiosity and ideology were the factors mainly responsible for the outcome. Why, it was asked, did the electorate choose an Islamist party to register their protest? Why did they not prefer other marginal parties such as those on the far left, whose rhetoric certainly had much more to promise to the poor and the oppressed? I carried out an extensive analysis of the 1999 election, when popular support for the Islamist party dropped to 15.4 percent, using data from a postelection survey. I concluded that by and large, the many indicators of relative deprivation, subjective class, efficacy, and economic well-being failed to produce any tangible effects on the vote for either the FP, the Islamist Virtue Party, or the MHP, the nationalist National Action Party. Instead, ideology seemed to steal the show. In addition to the left–right position, religious values for the FP and nationalist values for the MHP proved much more important than relative deprivation, income, or wealth. Moreover, secularist values were crucial for predicting the center-left vote. The secularism index had a positive significant impact in the equations for both the CHP, the staunchly secularist Republican People’s Party, and the DSP, the Democratic Left Party, which adheres to a “softer” version of secularism.14 The last parliamentary elections, held in November 2002, proved to be a disaster for all parties represented in the Grand National Assembly. None of the five parties that had passed the 10 percent national threshold and gained seats in 1999 succeeded in getting into the parliament in 2002. At the individual level, a stunning 90 percent of parliamentarians lost their seats. The winner of the election was the so-called Justice and Development Party, recently founded by a splinter group from the Islamist Virtue Party and led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former mayor of Istanbul. The leadership of the new party, almost without exception, had been leading figures in the Virtue Party. However, during the campaign (and even more after they assumed power) they emphasized that they were not “political Islamists” and were at peace with secularism as well as the other founding principles of the Republic. On every occasion, they announced that they “had changed.” Were they to be believed or were they simply trying to appease the army, the traditional vanguard of


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secularism in the country? Whatever the answer to this question is, they succeeded in getting 34 percent of the valid votes and won a two-thirds majority in the Parliament, enough to even amend the Constitution. In fact, after decades of coalitions, they were able to form a single-party government for the first time in recent history. An analysis of postelection survey data15 indicates that attitudes toward religion and secularism are the most important factors in distinguishing Justice and Development voters from Republican People’s Party voters. Once again, cultural variables were more important than economic variables in predicting voting preferences. More specifically, from a long list of factors—demographic, economic, relative deprivation, subjective class, and ideological (both political and religious)—five proved to be statistically significant. They were: performing daily prayers, approving of Koran courses outside of the school system, fatalism, position on the left–right scale, and opinion on the fairness of elections. On the other hand, for the Republican People’s Party, a quite different list of five variables was significant. These were: age, position on the left–right scale, opinion on the fairness of elections, opinion on whether or not it is a sin for women to wear swimsuits on the beach, and score on the secularism index, a summation of eight items indicating secular/nonsecular attitudes. Of the ten variables that proved to have significant effects for one or both parties, nine are related to attitude and value questions, age being the only exception. This is very strong evidence that what matters for the electoral preferences of Turkish voters is culture. This hypothesis has been confirmed in two consecutive elections. Furthermore, at least in the last election, what distinguished the constituencies of the two major parties was, above all, religious–secular values and left–right ideology. The latter, of course, is correlated with the level of religiosity. This, in turn, supports the argument I made at the outset: Turkey is a society of two major civilizations: Islamic and Western. The Justice and Development Party leadership argues that their government presents a golden opportunity to create a harmonious society with the two sides respecting one another’s ways of life. But this in itself confirms that there are two ways of life (two cultures, if you will) that must understand and respect each other. The headscarf (or turban) issue has been one of the most feverishly debated topics for at least a decade. There are laws, upheld by both the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human


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Rights, banning headscarves for women on university campuses and in government offices. Those who oppose the ban (political Islamists, devout Muslims, and a number of liberal intellectuals) do so mostly on the basis of democratic rights and freedoms. On the other hand, those who favor the ban (armed forces, Kemalists, secularists, various elites) argue that the headscarf is a political–religious symbol and that a secular state cannot allow religious symbols in government offices and universities. Regardless of who is right and who is wrong, it is evident that the headscarf has become a symbol for defining one’s position in the controversy between the two lifestyles and cultures. After the election of 2002, the headscarf issue assumed new dimensions. The wives of most members of the new administration, including the wives of the prime minister, speaker of the house, foreign minister, and most other cabinet members, cover their heads. On the other hand, the President of the Republic, elected by the previous Parliament, is a secular former chief justice. He seems determined to keep covered women off the state protocol. So much so that, to the anniversary reception of the Republic, he invited opposition party deputies with their spouses, but not the wives of Justice and Development deputies. By issuing two different kinds of invitations, he and his advisors found a way to keep covered women out of the presidential residence. Obviously, this was a very controversial decision; some deputies boycotted the reception in protest. Protocol officers now have to deal with this complicated issue at many other state functions, such as dinners and receptions for foreign dignitaries. How Turkey will resolve this controversy and create an atmosphere of peaceful coexistence remains to be seen. But can one find a better example to demonstrate that culture indeed matters? A frequently asked question is whether Turkey can serve as an example for other Islamic societies in the transformation to a democratic and secular form of government. The question is especially pertinent in view of the commonly voiced argument that Islam is not compatible with democracy. If there is truth in this argument, then the ramifications are clear for both traditional Islamic societies and the global system as a whole. To refute the argument that Islam is incompatible with democracy, many point to Turkey. If Turkey, a predominantly Islamic society, has been successful on the path to democratization and secularization, why can’t the others follow this example?


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It is not impossible that a number of Islamic societies will in time undergo democratization. After all, despotic regimes are becoming increasingly difficult and costly to sustain in the contemporary world. However, the Turkish experience does not seem to be very relevant to these societies and is unlikely to be relived. First of all, the Turkish revolution was made by a radical modernizing elite that came to power under exceptional circumstances. Led by a charismatic war hero determined to steer the country’s course toward the West, these elites imposed their reforms on the society. Theirs was not a piecemeal approach but rather a project of radical and fundamental change. It is unlikely that these unusual circumstances will repeat themselves and that such a leadership could come to power in any present-day Islamic country. Second, the Turkish revolution was entirely uncompromising on two issues about which Islamic publics and even elites are currently very sensitive: secularization and gender equality. The Turkish version of secularization, more akin to the French approach, enjoys little support among Islamic publics or elites. It may be argued that this version, which to some seems extreme, is not a prerequisite for establishing democratic regimes. This may or may not be the case. What is certain is that such a modification would constitute a departure from the Turkish example. On the other hand, if there is one value dimension that sets Islamic populations apart from others, it is the attitudes toward sex and women. In the words of Norris and Inglehart, “the most basic cultural fault line between the West and Islam, . . . concerns issues of gender equality and sexual liberalization. The cultural gulf separating Islam from the West involves Eros far more than Demos.”16 Having analyzed the values of both the Islamic and non-Islamic public, I reached a similar conclusion.17 Finally, the Turkish army has played a pivotal role as the vanguard of the republican reforms and particularly of secularism. The modernization and Westernization project of the Republic found its most powerful and loyal ally in the armed forces. This feature also makes the Turkish experience unique, considering that armies in other Islamic societies have very different characteristics. In conclusion, if Arab societies, for example, succeed in establishing relatively democratic and mildly secular regimes, this will not come about by repeating the Turkish experience. The route they take will have to be a very different one.


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Notes 1. Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations.” (Foreign Affairs 1993, 75(6): 28–34) and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (London: Touchstone Books, 1998). 2. Stephane Yerasimos, “Bir Toplumun Soyagaci,” in Turkler: Dogu ve Bati, Islam ve Laiklik, ed. Stephane Yerasimos; trans. from French Temel Kesoglu (Ankara: Doruk, 2002), 15–56, at 17. 3. Yerasimos, “Bir Toplumun Soyagaci,” 30. 4. Cyrus Hamlin, Among the Turks (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1878), 13. Hamlin was an American Protestant missionary in Istanbul and founded, in 1863, the first American institute of higher learning outside the United States, with a financier named Mr. Robert. Robert College, as it was known, became Bogazici University in the 1970s, a public university financed by the Turkish government. 5. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3. 6. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press,1968), 35. 7. Taner Timur, Osmanli Kimligi, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Hil Yayin, 1994), 16. 8. Ilber Ortayli, Imparatorlugun En Uzun Yuzyili, 3rd ed. (Istanbul: Hil Yayin, 1995), 11–12. 9. Bozkurt Güvenç, Türk Kimli g˘ i. Kultur Tarihinin Kaynaklari (Ankara: Kultur Bakanligi, 1993), 195. 10. Ibid., 228. As Güvenç notes, the Prophet himself may never had said this. From our point of view, however, what is important is not whether or not the saying belongs to him but rather that it can become the dominant view in a society. 11. Halil Inalcik, “The Nature of Traditional Society: Turkey,” in Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, eds., Robert E. Ward and Dankwart Rustow (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 42–63, at 44. 12. Halil Inalcik, “Sened-i Ittifak ve Gulhane Hatt-i Humayunu” in Osmanli Imparatorlugu: Toplum ve Ekonom (Istanbul: Eren Yayincilik, 1996), 343–60. 13. Ortayli, Imparatorlugun. 14. Yilmaz Esmer, “At the Ballot Box: Determinants of Voting Behavior” in Politics, Parties and Elections in Turkey, eds. Sabri Sayari and Yilmaz Esmer (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002b), 91–114. 15. The survey was conducted immediately after the election. Data were collected from a nationally representative sample of 2,024 respondents with the present author as the principal investigator. Fieldwork was done by Birim Arastirma. The author is grateful to Bogazici University Research Fund, the daily newspaper Milliyet, and CNN-Turk for funding the project. 16. Pippa Norris and R. Inglehart, “Islamic Culture and Democracy: Testing the Clash of Civilizations Thesis,” in Human Values and Social Change: Findings from the values Surveys, ed. Ronald Inglehart (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 5–34, at 5–6. 17. Yilmaz Esmer, “Is There an Islamic Civilization?” in Human Values and Social Change, 35–68.


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Part V Latin America


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13 The Political Values of Development The Case of Argentina MARIANO GRONDONA Translated by MARILU DEL TORO

My goal in this chapter is to develop a better understanding of the relationship between culture, in particular political values, and political development. In this analysis I frequently refer to Argentina, a country whose history of “de-development” (it was rich around 1900, relatively poor around 2000) presents a rich laboratory of relevant experience. In the analysis, I will address six political values related to democratic development: tolerance, the republican spirit, law vs. power, the state above the government, overcoming “cultural restriction,” and the primacy of “vespertine” culture over “matutinal” culture. Tolerance, the Child of Intolerance Political philosopher Carl Schmitt has argued that political life revolves around the friend–enemy relationship. In all political regimes, including democracy, each actor installs himself in the struggle for power with his friends and against his enemies. Schmitt took this observation a step further: ultimately, what defines a political actor is his enemy, for “I need him to know where I stand.” 235


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The disquieting presence of the enemy is as necessary in an autocracy as in a democracy. Both regimes organize themselves around relationships of enmity. But while enmity exists and matters in both types of regime, it does not take the same shape in each. In an autocracy, the enemy is absolute: if I do not destroy him, he will destroy me. In a democracy, the enemy is relative: I want to defeat him, not destroy him. I want to conquer my enemy because otherwise he will conquer me; but I do not need to destroy him because, if he wins, he will not destroy me. Besides, it is possible that we will one day join against a common enemy. This is why the enemy in a democracy is designated a “competitor” or “rival.” The confrontation loses the tragic quality it has in an autocracy. In time, there will be other confrontations; the loser may become the winner, the winner the loser; the rival an ally. Absolute enmity in an autocracy results in an internal war of annihilation that, in extreme cases, is called a civil war. In a democracy, the internal war becomes a kind of match, a bloodless struggle to conquer a prize that, as in sports competitions, changes hands periodically. The passion that feeds absolute enmity is hatred. The passion that feeds rivalry is emulation. In the former, intolerance predominates; in the latter, tolerance predominates. The choice between intolerance and tolerance is the first issue that defines the cultural typology of democracy. While intolerance is a central political value of autocracies, tolerance is a central value of democracies. From the beginning, warrior societies organized themselves behind a chief. If he was intolerant externally in order to survive, how could the warrior chief be tolerant internally? Primitive societies were necessarily intolerant, not only outwardly but also inwardly, because questioning the chief with the enemy in view was treason. Primitive societies internalized the value of external intolerance, converting it into the value of internal intolerance and thus becoming authoritarian. Autocracy was the first type of political organization. We all descend from autocracy and intolerance, which left its mark not only on the primitive world but also on the ancient world, on the Greeks and Romans. From Intolerance to Tolerance When intolerance is practiced for a long period of time, however, it winds up destroying itself. Politics understood as an internal war


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sooner or later reaches an extreme that alarms not only society but also the rivals themselves. It then becomes evident that internal war is a greater evil than the uncertain good of victory. Enemies begin by fighting to the death. In time they realize that they have not managed to eliminate each other and may never manage to do so. May they not be paying too high a price for a victory that is ultimately unattainable? May it not be better, after all, to resign oneself to sharing a common political space with the enemy? Resignation when faced with the obstinate survival of the enemy is, for this reason, the starting point of tolerance, conceived as a lesser evil in relation to a war that has become unbearable. In a war of absolute enmity, there are no rules of engagement. Everything, from torture to murder, is considered acceptable. Every injury generates the necessity of responding to it with a greater injury because, while the offended may see the injury he imparts as equal to the one received from the offender, the latter judges that it is greater, and the chain of injuries continues interminably. After a time, the sentiment that comes to govern the war of one group against another becomes vengeance instead of the original cause. Brother avenges brother, no longer knowing or caring what began the feud. Every avenger multiplies his fire. The first known law, the lex talionis (an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth), today may seem very harsh, but in reality, it was intended to limit the reaction of the offended so that it would equal that of the offender. The disasters of war ultimately engender the creation of rules for coexistence between exhausted enemies. Law supplants the brutal act of endless confrontation. From that moment, former enemies subject their antagonism to a system of rules that governs them. The supremacy of law expresses the simultaneous surrender of former rivals to the supremacy of the agreed-upon rules. Violence no longer rules. Now what rules are the regulations accepted by former enemies who have been transformed into competitors or rivals. In political competition, as in sports, the rules of the game are respected even when they legitimize the rival’s victory. A Brief History of Tolerance Tolerance shone for a while in the ancient world only to wane later. In the modern world, its origins lay in the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.


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After ruthless massacres during the last of these wars, the Thirty Years’ War, the Peace of Westphalia established the principle Cuis regio, eius religio (“In each kingdom, the king’s religion”), which required Catholics and Protestants to abandon attempts to impose a universal religion. He who tolerates does not concede that his rival is right. He believes he is the one in possession of the truth, but he no longer insists on defending it to the death, because war has proved to be a greater evil than the existence of untruth. Only later would humanity pass from tolerance to pluralism. With this value, not only do I tolerate my rival; I welcome him, so that through dialogue we may seek the truth together. Pluralism is the characteristic value of democracy. Today, after this long evolution, intolerance is no longer considered a value. It has become a disvalue. The only value that contemporary democracies allow in relation to the friend–enemy relationship is tolerance, the precursor of pluralism. The Republican Spirit: Mother of Democracy Democracy has now become the only form of government considered legitimate, and even dictatorships try to pass themselves off as democracies. There are two different mothers of democracies: the republic and the autocracy. Democracies of the first type are called democratic republics; of the second, authoritarian democracies. But only the first group is authentically democratic. Tolerance is the dominant value of republics. Let us define the republic as a regime protected by the division of power against authoritarian abuse. In republican governments, the political powers of the state, the legislature, and the executive limit each other reciprocally. The rules of limitation are based on a law that is above ordinary laws: the constitution, the supremacy of which is based on a third power, the judiciary. This is why democratic republics are also called “constitutional democracies.” Republics can be aristocratic or democratic, depending on whether the popular vote is restricted. Aristocratic republics were predominant in the West during the nineteenth century until the vote was gradually extended to all adult citizens, turning them into democratic republics. The process of expanding the vote culminated in 1920 in the United States and in 1928 in the United Kingdom with female suffrage.


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The more advanced democratic republics today experienced the historic sequence of autocracy to aristocratic republic to democratic republic. When the transition is made directly from an autocracy to a “democracy,” one possible outcome is an authoritarian (also called illiberal) democracy, a type of government that still prevails in countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran. When the majority or those who speak on its behalf are given unlimited power, democracy runs the risk of destroying itself, because the person who speaks in the name of the people may become an autocrat. The system that prevails in the advanced democratic republics of our time is, in short, mixed: democratic and republican. The republic can be aristocratic or democratic, but in it, tolerance between the political players always reigns. Democracy can be republican or authoritarian, depending on whether it is ruled by tolerance or significant vestiges of intolerance. In the latter case, it is not an authentic democracy. (In)tolerance in Argentina Argentina’s government alternated among several forms: autocracy, aristocratic republic, democratic republic, and authoritarian democracy. In 1816, having just achieved independence from Spain, Argentina was devastated by a hurricane of intolerance. The hatred between federales (federalists) and unitarios (centralists) was extreme. Murder, torture, and devastation were widespread until 1853, when the nation’s institutional life began with the approval of the National Constitution that still governs it today. The “Generation of 1837,” Juan Bautista Alberdi among them, flourished halfway through this turbulent time, warning that the struggle must be fratricidal, since neither side could achieve absolute victory. Just as in the Europe of religious wars, the horrifying experience of indiscriminate killing between unitarios and federales led Argentines to discover tolerance, the first expression of which was the slogan that Justo José de Urquiza coined in 1851: “Neither vanquishers nor vanquished.” In the Pact of San Nicolás in 1852, federales and unitarios sealed their reconciliation, laying the foundation for the new constitution. The republic had been born. It was an aristocratic republic because suffrage was severely restricted, just as in the advanced republics of the time in Europe and North America.


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The aristocratic republic developed from a reconciliation between the elites of Buenos Aires and the provinces. If the generation of 1837 foresaw the benefits of tolerance, and the generation of 1853 captured this tolerance in the constitution that still governs us today, it was the generation of 1880 that completed the reconciliation by federalizing the city of Buenos Aires and initiating a period of economic growth that would last five decades. What the aristocratic agreement did not provide for, however, was the influx of European immigration, which reached its peak between 1880 and 1914. Once it had gained republican stability, Argentina became one of the richest countries in the world, attracting masses of European immigrants who were quickly transformed into a vast middle class. The country then saw a confrontation similar to that between the patricians and plebeians of the Roman Republic. The patricians in this case were the fathers of modern Argentina, who had achieved reconciliation in San Nicolás in 1852. The plebians were the immigrants who demanded a place in the system with growing insistence. Their banner was universal suffrage: the transition from an aristocratic republic to a democratic one. The bearer of this banner was a new party, the Unión Cívica Radical (Radical Civic Union), founded in 1890. In 1890, 1893, and 1905, the radicals unsuccessfully attempted revolutions against the ruling elite. In the meantime, economic progress continued at full speed. In 1912, the patricians finally gave the plebeians access to the political system through universal suffrage, and Argentina went from an aristocratic republic to a democratic republic. For eighteen years, it joined the small group of politically and economically developed countries of that period. But this impressive progress was at risk from the beginning. Between 1912 and 1930, the democratic republic was whipped by the winds of a new intolerance, this time between conservatives and radicals. On September 6, 1930, following the golden rule of intolerance, which holds that it is preferable to violate the constitution if doing so will defeat the adversary (who has now become the enemy), the conservatives called on the army to end the term of radical President Hipólito Yrigoyen. For the next five decades, Argentina endured institutional instability, accompanied by economic stagnation, because of this military involvement in politics. Both in political and economic terms, it gradually became a dedeveloped nation; unlike


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other underdeveloped nations, Argentina had experienced development and lost it. Sometimes (for roughly twenty years) military officials governed directly; sometimes (for roughly thirty years) they set the conditions for constitutional presidents. In 1945, with the emergence of Colonel Juan Perón, radical-conservative intolerance was replaced by an even more intense Peronism and anti-Peronism. The radicals and conservatives would reconcile belatedly as anti-Peronists. Following the “golden rule” of intolerance, both the Peronists and the anti-Peronists violated the constitution once in power to prevent the return of the other. The confrontation between Peronists and anti-Peronists wound up generating an even more violent conflict: on one side the leftist guerrillas or Montoneros and the Castroite People’s Revolutionary Army and on the other the armed forces, backed by anti-Peronists and the Peronist right. The result was the blood-letting of the 1970s. After the military victory against the guerrillas and the reconciliation between Peronists and Anti-Peronists, in 1983 it was again possible to get back on the path of the democratic republic that had been interrupted in 1930. After its humiliating defeat during the War of the Malvinas against the United Kingdom in 1982, the army disappeared from the political scene. The advanced aristocratic republic between 1853 and 1912 gave rise to the democratic republic of 1912. But between 1932 and 1943 a reactionary aristocratic republic reversed this progress. Between 1943 and 1955, Argentina was an authoritarian democracy in Peronist hands. Between 1958 and 1966, it was an aristocratic republic, but a reactionary one because of the anti-Peronists’ proscription of the Peronist majority. In the brief interval of 1973 to 1976, again under Perón, it was a fragile democratic republic because of the intolerance between the guerrillas and their military enemies. The conservatives of the 1932 to 1943 period and the anti-Peronists of 1958 to 1966 presided over reactionary aristocratic republics because the dominant groups oppressed the Peronist majority; the Peronism of 1946 to 1955 was an authoritarian democracy because the Peronists oppressed the anti-Peronist minority. Thus, during periods of tolerance (roughly a hundred years), Argentina was an advanced aristocratic republic (1853–1912) or a democratic republic (1912–30 and 1983–2003). When intolerance reigned (also roughly a century), there was civil war and either


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authoritarian democracy or a regression to reactionary aristocratic republics (1816–1853 and 1930–83). If the dividing line between democratization and antidemocratization is the value of tolerance in the ruling political climate, the decisive factor is the republican spirit as an institutional value. Without tolerance, there is no authentic republic. Without an authentic republic, there is no authentic democracy. Power and Law Let us turn to conceptions of power. The authoritarian conception always speaks about power in the singular. Autocracies have a single power that is absolute, indivisible, and inalienable, and someone holds it. The republican conception is plural. Someone in a republic has one of the several powers defined in the republic’s institutions. What matters in autocracies is the will and ability of one person to exercise power. What matters in republics is the division of power into several powers, each of which lies in the hands of a different protagonist. But who guarantees this plurality of power? Institutions. The autocrat’s power is not contained by institutions because he is, by definition, above them. The political actors in a republic cannot alter or expand their powers because they are established and regulated by institutions. Powers in a republic could also be called “subpowers,” that is, those powers that are “under” the institutions. What Are Institutions? The word institution comes from the Indo-European root sta, whose original meaning is “to stay standing.” The many words that derive from it—stable, state, status—suggest continuity, permanence, strength. On one side there is political life, in perpetual movement, with its passions and surprises. But this succession of unexpected events would be chaotic if they did not occur within institutions. Like a riverbed, institutions contain the rushing waters of political life. In a stable country like the United States, a president will not serve for more than eight years because the institutions, which are strong and difficult to change, do not allow it. Argentineans never know whether a successful president or ruler will attempt to remain


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in office, because our institutions are weak and easy to change. The vicissitudes of political life persist; but the institutions that contain them, when they are vigorous, are simply there. Political stability is a matter of unchanging institutions. The passions and actions of political life tend to anarchy. There are only two ways to contain anarchy: absolute rule or institutions. The latter only truly exist in republics, and the climate of political and judicial security they create allows for the accumulation of long-term investments, the only kind that can lead to economic development. Institutions, therefore, are rules that limit the exercise of a republic’s political powers, guaranteed by an apolitical structure: the judicial power. The Good and the Right In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls asks himself if the highest value in a well-ordered society is the good or the right. It would seem that ethical rulers should seek what is good for society. But who determines what is good? Rulers would have to be not only ethical but also infallible to guarantee the attainment of the common good. Since no one is infallible, the proper regulative principle of democracies is right, the collection of rules upon which the members of a society have agreed, articulated in that collective and permanent contract we call the constitution. The choice is unavoidable: we either delegate the search for the good to those who have power or we submit rulers to stable and inviolate rules guaranteed by impartial judges. The work of these judges will not be unpredictable, originating from subjective viewpoints, but will result from the straightforward application of the rules laid out in the constitution. The search for the common good, which continues to be the goal of political life, is not developed through the discretionary decisions of the powerful but rather within institutions. The highest value in an autocracy, therefore, is the good, which is proclaimed from on high. The highest value in a republic is the law, even when it may appear, as occurs frequently, that its application is inconvenient. In 1994 President Menem of Argentina enjoyed a high level of popularity. Instead of abiding by the constitution, he managed to change it in order to be reelected. At the time, the majority supported the


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primacy of what they considered the good over the law. The political turmoil following Menem’s departure was in part a consequence of this disrespect for the law. That, in turn, contributed to the economic crisis that followed. In other words, the river is most benign at its normal level: above it, the result is inundation. State and Government In democracies, we use the word government to refer to the executive branch. In parliamentary democracies, which predominate in Europe, the chief executive is the prime minister; in presidential democracies, which predominate in the Americas, it is the president. Parliament appoints the prime minister; the people elect the president. We use the word state for the collection of officials that do not need to be regularly reappointed. We also call them bureaucrats or civil service employees. While the composition of the government is, by definition, transitory, the composition of the state is, by definition, permanent. Governments pass; the state stays. Governments represent the mood of the people at a given moment; the state embodies the political continuity of the nation. When we speak of state policies, we refer to those political stances that persist despite variation in governments. From Cardoso to Lula, for example, Brazil’s international politics have changed little, thanks to the constant presence of a professional diplomatic corps and civil service. What is important is how many bureaucrats are affected by a change in government. In less advanced democracies, every change in government disrupts bureaucratic continuity. In more advanced ones, the state and the government are complementary but different organizations: the government makes the big decisions and state officials, after advising the government, implement them. The Supreme Court is unaffected by elections, though each government fills vacancies as they arise. In authoritarian democracies, the government regularly invades the sphere of the state. The BBC, a radio and TV station established by Royal Charter in 1927, and required under the terms of the charter to present news impartially, follows its own path regardless of whether the Labour or the Conservative party is in power. Argentina’s state channel varies with every change of government.


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The Origins of the State The state was born in the modern period. In the Middle Ages, the dominant system was familism. Rulers not only inherited their offices but also frequently appointed their relatives to head armies or ministries. The hereditary nobles who ruled the territorial divisions of kingdoms would do the same. Beginning in the fifteenth century and for long afterward, European monarchs gained power over the territorial nobility. As they became absolute rulers, they turned increasingly to a new class of auxiliaries: bureaucrats of bourgeois extraction. This alliance of monarchs with the bureaucracy at the expense of the nobility, which culminated in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, was the origin of the modern state. During the reign of Prussia’s Frederick II, who ruled from 1740 to 1786, competitions were first held to fill bureaucratic posts. Thus was born the idea of the modern state as an impersonal structure in which any citizen, regardless of kinship with the powerful, could serve with no other qualification than his ability. From that moment, familism was discredited as a type of corruption and nepotism. An equivalent evolution characterized the change of family-run companies to the professional corporations of today. The Common Good, the “Distant Good” According to Mancur Olson, it is easier for people to perceive the common good in the case of small groups, such as the family or a circle of friends, than in that of the nation. In the latter case the common good appears distant, doubtful, and unclear. Every parent readily sees the need of a sacrifice for his or her children. Would every citizen do the same for his nation? While the “near” good of family and friends is usually self-evident and needs no intermediaries or demonstration, the definition of the nation’s common good needs the mediation of the government or the state. In advanced democracies, the definition of the common good is in the state’s charge and varies little in response to voters’ changing moods. In authoritarian democracies, it is only the most recent election that serves as a mandate. While the democratic state and republican state attempt to achieve the all-encompassing common good, that of majorities and minori-


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ties both, the government of authoritarian democracies only attempts to achieve that of its own majority, as if the people had a uniform voice without nuances or valid dissent. In the name of “the people,” the majority marginalizes the minority; for the government in authoritarian democracies “the people” means their supporters. Such governments are prone to invade the state, subjecting it to a crowd of new bureaucrats who are loyal to the government but have no recognized experience or fitness for their positions. Then another majority achieves power and reverses the process. It is this rebellion of the government against the state that makes long-term state policies impossible. Cultural Restriction Wherever the majority’s values are insufficiently democratic, they tend to support candidates who cater to their appetites for immediate social and economic progress, representing them as collective ideals and expressing them in emotional slogans, without much thought for whether they are reachable objectives. Supposedly these ideals have not been attained before because some powerful negative force—oligarchy or imperialism—has blocked them. Rather than formulating viable development objectives, what is most urgent, from this perspective, is struggling against these negative forces. For this, will is more necessary than rationality, proclaimed patriotism more than knowledge. One slogan of this type was “Braden or Perón,” heard during Argentina’s 1946 presidential elections. American ambassador Spruille Braden was a symbol of imperialism allied with the local oligarchy. Perón represented a liberating energy. Perón won thanks to the slogan, but he did not produce the economic and social development he had promised, since he had not proposed reachable objectives but had merely mobilized popular ideals and emotions. When charismatic leaders fail because their economic proposals are irrational, the majority does not interpret this as a failure but rather as a betrayal or as proof of the power of the negative forces that keep the country underdeveloped. A new leader will raise the banner of liberation again. Rationality, according to Max Weber, consists of proposing feasible goals and choosing methods that could lead to their realization.


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If the majority is rational, they will recognize that shaking off underdevelopment demands a persistent, decades-long effort and will resign themselves to achieving what is possible step by step. If they are not, then in each election they will prefer the candidate who promises instant results, however often such promises disappoint. In Search of Shortcuts When a majority chooses vague ideals over precise and feasible objectives, we say that it suffers from cultural restriction on the road to economic and social development. Under these conditions, the task of political leaders grows so complicated as to be unachievable. It may also be that leaders share the majority’s cultural restriction. In such a case, sooner or later they will fail. But it may also be that, before the elections or once in power, they perceive the difference between ideals and objectives. They will also be aware, however, that the majority continues to confuse the two. In this case, they have two options. One is to deceive. Leaders, like polo players, often mount the horse on the left but hit the ball on the right. Eventually the majority notice the change in direction and feel cheated, and the politician who resorted to deception loses popular support. The other option is to teach rather than deceive—to speak the truth about the requirements of development and resign oneself to losing elections repeatedly until the majority eventually learn their lesson. When they do, then democracy will have defeated cultural restriction. There are two ways, one authoritarian and the other democratic, to reach that point. The authoritarian method is to implement correct economic policies by force, hoping that the majority will reconcile itself to rationality when it notices that development is being achieved. This path, which several dictators, like Chilean Augusto Pinochet and Korean Chung-Hee Park took, is also the one that Deng XiaoPing embarked upon in China. As in Chile and Korea, and perhaps eventually, China, the authoritarian path to development may result in democracy once the majority overcomes cultural restriction, but it is not in itself democratic. The other path consists of a long process of learning from within democracy. When people have experienced one frustration after another, the minority of sincere leaders who proposed rational


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development goals may finally be heard. On that day, democracy matures. India, after its half-century of democracy of cultural restriction, may be an example of this slow learning. Today, India is matching China in its rates of economic growth without having sacrificed democracy. The Two Rationalities While cultural restriction persists, political leaders will be torn. Economic rationality dictates unpopular measures, but economically rational leaders often lose votes, as happened to Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle in 2003 when he attempted to partially privatize oil. Only when the majority finally accepts the presuppositions of economic rationality will proclaiming them and implementing them finally lead to political power. Vespertine and Matutinal Culture What are the horizons of a democracy? Do the people and their representatives aim for the short or long term? Do they want everything at once or are they willing to embark on a long journey? In democracies with authoritarian tendencies, popular expectations reflect a short-term or “morning” culture, while in advanced democracies they unfold within a long-term or “vespertine” culture. Matutinal societies love beginnings. Nothing is more exciting for them than the powerful promise of an awakening. This is why revolutions attract them, because with a revolution, after a long night, everything seems to begin anew. Even when they are not militarists, they are liable to believe that with a new leader and new slogans, their problems will resolve themselves suddenly, with the swiftness of a coup. Among Argentines, these beliefs encouraged military coups d’etat. But the matutinal culture also accompanied the advent of new democratic leaders, such as Alfonsín, Menem, or Kirchner. When they emerged, everything also seemed to begin again. Focusing their expectations on a change of regime, a matutinal people do not have the long term within their field of vision. They look for revolutionary change, a new dawn, instantaneous effects. The political cycles of a matutinal people are minicycles of a few


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short years: soon the rosy illusion of dawn fades with the afternoon sun. For societies still resistant to democratic development, intentions count more than results. In the democratic Argentina of 1983 to 2003, the country underwent four minicycles: two ascending and two descending. From 1983 to 1987, the country was overwhelmed by the magic of Alfonsín. From 1987 to 1991, the first descending minicycle included the decline of Alfonsín and the uncertain initial steps of Menem. From 1991 to 1997, during the second ascending minicycle, the country was taken over by the magic of the Menem–Cavallo team, with their plan of convertibility and strong economic growth, which was nevertheless accompanied in its “midday” by acute social regression. From 1997 to 2001, Argentina suffered the failure of De la Rúa and the defeat of the convertibility plan, with its deep recession and the catastrophic growth of poverty. In 2002 and 2003, a fifth stage began, the third ascending stage, when President Duhalde, after putting out the fire of the previous minicycle, passed the reins over to Kirchner. Will this third ascending stage be a new minicycle or a true cycle, one no longer measured in years but in decades? This is a crucial question, because the transition from underdevelopment to development cannot be made in a few years. It took thirty years for the democracy born in 1975 to complete Spain’s journey from underdevelopment to development. After all Argentina’s political and economic turns, as intense as they were brief, Argentines had the same GDP per capita in 2003 that they had in 1983. During this period, Argentina experienced pronounced highs and lows but did not grow. It had several minicycles but no cycle. This is why it continues to be an underdeveloped country. Vespertine Culture Just as societies with a matutinal culture are enthusiastic in the morning only to become depressed in the afternoon, after the disillusionment of midday, societies with a vespertine culture set modest objectives for themselves at the day’s start so that they can later see, with sober satisfaction, what they have achieved. They may harbor grandiose visions of progress, but they fix them on a remote horizon, several decades into the future, attempting to reach them through a long succession of small steps. As with matutinal nations, their


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intentions are ambitious; but they expect to achieve them, like those who would build a solid mansion, with the modest bricks of everyday results. Each brick is almost insignificant. The sum of them is colossal. Perhaps there is no more eloquent example of vespertine culture in our times than the creation of the European Union. In 1950, six nations—France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg— began traveling in the direction of a horizon that was as distant as it was demanding: the economic and political integration of Europe. One by one, other European nations started to join the venture. Today the European Union includes twenty-five countries, has reached a high level of economic integration, has a common currency, and is creating a federal constitution. But it reached this point through countless negotiations and agreements shaped throughout more than half a century. Moncloa, After San Nicolás Covering the short distances of matutinal culture can be the work of a government. Covering the long distances of vespertine culture is only possible for the state. When a leader takes office, he has four or maybe eight years. If his base is only those who voted for him, he will barely inaugurate a minicycle because when he grows stale, those who did not support him will have prepared a new leadership, whose first task upon arriving in power will be to undo his predecessor’s legacy. In a matutinal culture, one never lays lasting foundations for development but merely experiences successive ascending and descending mini-cycles. The minicycle phenomenon can only be avoided if a leader, instead of concentrating on monopolizing his minicycle, calls on opponents to cooperate in formulating a longterm development plan. Placing the long-term plan above partisan politics elevates the plan to state policy, which all successive governments will continue. There will, of course, be political and ideological debates and changes in the collective mood, the result of which will lead the opposition of today to become, when the moment arrives, the ruling leadership, and vice versa. But the ship of state will continue to navigate toward the port of development, using the map that both groups drew up in a moment of institutional lucidity.


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This is what happened when Spanish president Adolfo Suárez called on his partisans and his opponents to draft and approve the Moncloa Pacts of 1977, giving Spain a direction that, through all subsequent changes of government, it never abandoned. Today Spain is a developed country. The same happened in Chile when the Christian Democratic-Socialist center-left of the Concertación Democrática inherited Pinochet’s economic policies in 1990 without making any fundamental changes. This is why, although it has not yet arrived, Chile is heading toward development at a good pace. Something similar occurred in Argentina in 1852 when Urquiza, after defeating the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, called on all factions to share in the Pact of San Nicolás. From this agreement came the Constitution of 1853, the state policy that gave Argentina nearly eighty years of development until the intolerance between conservatives and radicals resulted in the military coup d’etat of 1930, launching Argentina into the abyss of “dedevelopment” through a series of minicycles, from the perverse logic of which we have still not liberated ourselves. The Argentine Pact of San Nicolás after four decades of civil wars; the European pact of France and Germany in 1950 after eighty years of fratricidal wars; and the Spanish Moncloa Pacts of 1977 after almost half a century of civil war and dictatorship: together they show, both internally and internationally, how the cycle of development is launched in a vespertine culture. In conclusion, then, I hold that values matter, in both economics and politics. I have examined the influence of values on economic development in Las Condiciones Culturales del Desarrollo Económico (1999), and in a chapter of Culture Matters. In this chapter, which I hope to expand into a new book, I have examined only a few of the many values that influence democratic political development. Culture’s influence on both economic and political development is very large indeed. We are just beginning to explore it.


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14 The Importance of Culture The Brazilian Case MARIA LUCIA VICTOR BARBOSA

Why are some countries rich and others poor? Researchers have identified many possible causes, among them demographics (a quickly growing population without enough resources), geography (poor soil, few mineral resources, climate), and both economic factors (limited capital, inequitable income distribution) and social factors (lack of entrepreneurship, illiteracy, ineffective education and public health systems). Though all these and many others offer valuable insights, they are not always enough. Recently, cultural explanations have helped to fill the gap. In Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case, Lawrence Harrison defines culture as “values and attitudes that a society inculcates into its members through various social mechanisms such as family, school, and the church.”1 I take this as my starting point, as I briefly examine the Brazilian case, emphasizing two fundamental institutions: the state and the Catholic Church. Emergence of a Patron-Client Society Martim Afonso de Souza was the first of the Portuguese to establish a permanent colony in Brazil, in 1530. Over time, the Brazilian colony 253


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was divided into capitanias hereditarias (hereditary captaincies), presided over by a governor-general, along with a provedor-mor and ouvidor-mor, in charge respectively of the royal treasury and of justice. By 1600, sugar production dominated the Brazilian economy, and fourteen captaincies had been established. The population totaled about 100,000, of which about 30,000 were whites; Indians, blacks, and people of mixed blood formed the majority. Around each landlord—often referred to as “colonel”—or captain a complex clan formed. The clan was composed of families related by blood or more loosely defined forms of kinship. In addition to the clan itself, a massive group of hangers-on—slaves, workers, Indians, craftspeople, traders, and small business owners—depended on the landlord for protection and survival. This is how the personalized character of power in Brazil originated. Even today, people usually vote for an individual rather than a party and regard the state above all as a source of patronage. Slavery and Underdevelopment Slavery had a powerful influence on the formation of Brazilian culture. Although black culture contributed in many ways to Brazil’s language, cuisine, music, and dance, slavery’s negative consequences for Brazil’s political, social, and economic development far offset them. Slavery pushed the economy backward. With no motivation to work and no system of rewards, slaves valued neither workmanship nor productivity. Slaves had little notion of time and no idea of accumulating assets to improve their lives. Given no opportunity to participate in the ruling social structure, slaves never thought of themselves as potential citizens. Originating from African cultures that were dismissed by the slaveholders as semibarbarian, relegated to the lowest level of Brazilian society, and with no access to education, blacks did not even have support from the Church. Priests, many of them slaveholders, baptized them, taught them the rudiments of Catholicism, and forced them to go to church—where they would stand at the rear of the building during services. Thus Catholicism was superimposed mechanically on their original beliefs, with effects more social than spiritual. The result was a religious syncretism, a superficial mixing of Catholic and African religions. Slavery continued to be legal in Brazil until 1888—later than any other country in the Western Hemisphere.


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Many descendents of slaves, who make up the majority of Brazilian society, continue to suffer. Often destitute, their lives are violent and often immersed in mysticism. In today’s economy, they are usually unskilled laborers, rarely receiving adequate wages, continuing the cycle of lack of interest and little effort in their daily work. Politically, they are rarely active. They still remember the voices of their ancestors, the slaveholders, and landlords, and they seek through the vote a protective father who will give them what they cannot obtain by themselves. This is the legacy of slavery, which made slave traders and slaveholders rich even as the nation paid the high economic and human price of underdevelopment. The Formation of the State The Portuguese court arrived in Brazil in 1808, and Brazil achieved independence on September 7, 1822. The governments of Don Joao VI, Don Pedro I, and Don Pedro II were the third force that shaped the essence of Brazil and remain part of its heritage. The arrival of the royal family helped to maintain a degree of political unity over the enormous territory, but it had its costs: the royal court became such a powerful, centralized force that patriotic feelings were soon converted into the pursuit of individual interest. The landowners began to gravitate around the king, seeking special privileges. The court also imported the Portuguese machinery of state, with all its bureaucracy, countless noblemen, and hangers-on. Starting in 1808, the court created in Brazil what Joaquim Nabuco has called empregomania (the practice of the state whereby jobs were distributed to people with no real qualifications). This system re-created the old Portuguese court in the new colony, continuing the centralized patrimonial tradition. Independence did not alter the substance of the Portuguese state. In 1823, Don Pedro I dissolved the National Constitutional Assembly, substituting a council. In 1824 this council created the constitution that provided for executive, legislative, and judicial powers and a moderador who gave the emperor the ultimate power. Through this highly centralized system, the search for job opportunities and titles, which had always fascinated Brazilians and Portuguese, continued without interruption. When Don Pedro II entered the political scene in 1840, he continued to centralize the state. Everything was concentrated around the political power installed in Rio de Janeiro.


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Solidly anchored in his power, Pedro II ruled arbitrarily; the populace had no influence. Elections involved only the party of the “colonels,” and intimidation by hired bully-boys was common. Nor did election results have any meaning: Brazilians felt no sense of common destiny or purpose. Personal interests and isolation limited most people’s perceptions of the broader society. Moreover, the Constitution of 1824 excluded the majority of the population from voting through a series of discriminating criteria, including income. With minimal citizen participation, the state offered favored entrepreneurs concessions and subsidies in a highly corrupted environment. The centralized state did feel the impact of republican sentiments. Especially after 1880, the North American example nurtured federal aspirations and republican ideology. The proclamation of the republic on November 15, 1889, should have inaugurated a new era and a new mentality. But as always, as history moves forward, a people’s mentality is still attached to the old social structure, values, and attitudes. Behavioral patterns and traditions change only slowly. Thus the coup d’état that ended the monarchy had little impact on the population, even in Rio, and even less in the rest of a vast country. In the Name of Catholicism To understand Brazil, one must understand the strong influence of Catholicism since Portuguese colonization began. Missionaries first brought Christianity; then popes gave the kings royal patronage, with an array of powers. Among other powers, they could control revenues, collect tithes, and organize missions to Christianize the Indians. They also had jurisdiction over designation of Church dignitaries. Royal patronage allowed the state and the Church to coordinate their powers and influence one another. The king became a surrogate in decisions that included theological and liturgical matters. He was compelled to consider all political actions in the light of Christian moral principles on pain of “mortal sin.” The state and the Church formed an all-powerful partnership with few distinctions between the Church’s missionary purposes and the Inquisition and CounterReformation on the one hand, and other more mundane issues of colonization and governance on the other. The Church-state partnership in Brazil functioned in the lax moral environment that existed in Portugal. And this partnership was the


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source of the corrupting values that have so powerfully influenced Brazil’s history. The Brazilian Mentality Portugal’s legacy to Brazil was its culture. Of course, traits inherited from parents do not stop children from developing their own personality. The Brazilians have their own cultural personality, shaped by their particular circumstances. Still, we cannot ignore the strong Iberian influence on the Brazilians. From our “defective embryo,” to borrow a phrase from Jose Ortega y Gasset, emerged a mentality, a vision of the world; its particular values, attitudes, and behavioral patterns constitute Brazil’s culture. Cultural Characteristics Some of the salient cultural characteristics are the following: 1. Poor people (and sometimes also the rich) generally hope to see their needs satisfied with esperteza (shrewdness, cleverness) or help from some paternal authority, rather than developing their own methodical and disciplined efforts. This is most evident in Brazil’s poorest regions, the north and northeast—less in the southeast and south, where immigrants, many of them Italian, German, and Japanese, brought progressive European and Confucian values. Today the state capital is cosmopolitan, and the state of Sao Paulo is known as the locomotive of Brazil. 2. The government, at both federal and municipal levels, is primarily patrimonial (Weber defined patrimonialism as “an extension of the ruler’s household”)2 and paternalistic, and clientelism (dependence on a powerful patron) is widespread. 3. Political power (with some exceptions) is exercised to benefit the powerful, who rarely have a vision of a commonwealth. 4. Most Brazilian politicians see populism as the most effective posture to win elections. 5. Nepotism is widespread: the most efficient way to get a job is to seek a referral from an influential government official. With little emphasis on merit, public administration is weak, and private sector people seek favors from those in power, often at a price.


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6. The country needs a more highly-developed civic culture, including precise notions of rights and duties and respect for institutions. Neither government nor society is currently involved in developing such a culture. 7. In Brazil, popular attitudes with respect to the law are much like those in Spanish America: “La ley se acata, pero no se cumple.” (The law is respected, but not obeyed.) In addition, many laws are obscure or outdated, justice is slow, and people act with impunity. To make matters worse, under the so-called Alternative Right, some judges rule according to their own personal criteria and ideology, disregarding what is established by precedent. 8. Corruption reigns, not only in government but in all segments of society. 9. In a context where citizenship has not been clearly defined, people confuse impunity with human rights and licentiousness with liberty, as if these were part of the democratic ideal. 10. Behind the cordial and happy Brazilian informality exists a society with the potential for great violence, which is evident in high levels of crime, drug trafficking, and reckless driving that produces many traffic accidents. 11. Brazilians tend to blame institutions or the country for their own mistakes and flaws. Government attitudes toward the United States, and lack of trust in the market and the democratic model, are currently stimulating strong anti-American feelings. 12. Mistrust is a strong characteristic of Brazilians. In a 2003 study, Latinobarometro found that Brazil has the lowest level of interpersonal trust among seventeen countries in Latin America: only 4 percent of the Brazilians interviewed said they trust people in general, against the regional average of 17 percent. 13. In Brazil, people vote for an individual, not a party. Brazilian political parties rarely perform their function as an interface between the population and the government. Lacking in discipline, principles, and ideology, most political parties are little more than a club or association for special interests. The Religious Factor: Blessed Prosperity A century ago, in The Protestant Ethic and the Capitalist Spirit, Max Weber observed that Protestants were more successful than Catholics


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(and Jews more successful than Protestants). To explain this phenomenon he linked the Protestant ethic—with its values like austerity, frugality, work ethic, honesty, and rationality—with the Calvinist concept of “election”: the chosen and blessed are those whose works prosper. Moreover, because God wants people to work but not covet the fruit of their labor, they must continuously reinvest their profits in order to generate more wealth. This concept helps explain why Protestants are more prosperous than Catholics or the faithful of other fatalistic religions. In other works, Weber focused on the United States, returning to religion to understand why certain attitudes prevailed as the North American culture was forming. The Protestant denominations demanded ethical behavior from their members if they were to be accepted in the congregation. It was thus necessary to test some moral qualities in practice, enforcing a constant discipline. In addition, the Christian communities reinforced the unity of the religious group through the obligation of mutual aid. As a result, belonging to one of these congregations meant not only enjoying the sensation of being with peers who share one’s beliefs, but also being proud of the group, and gaining admiration, respect, and credibility through a “circle of brotherhood.” Thus, Weber held, people would commonly use these congregations to rise in society; the congregations themselves would spread the capitalist ethos and keep it alive within the large middle class. In such a society, established on the principles of freedom and prosperity, religious practices ensured that people would think about the ethics of their economic practices. Land of Santa Cruz: Brazil On March 9, 1500, thirteen vessels departed from Restelo beach in Portugal under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral. On these vessels were experienced sailors, missionaries, and noblemen. In both mind and heart, all were ready for the adventure of the New World. Such an undertaking required enormous courage and ambition. These men went looking to bring more than glory to Portugal; they also sought commercial benefits. The Portuguese project of expansion aimed to reach the East Indies or West Indies.


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Storms pushed the ships off course, bringing Cabral and his crew south of the Caribbean, where they made landfall. In that wilderness, so far from Portugal, the first thing they erected was a cross. They named the place Isle of Vera Cruz (true or faithful cross), and soon discovered it was part of an enormous land mass, with plentiful natural resources that nurtured both laziness and greed. In time they changed the name to Land of Santa Cruz and later to Brazil. The name came from a tree, the Caesalpina Echinata, better known as pau-brasil, which produces a reddish dye used by textile manufacturers. The name reaffirmed the commercial nature of the Portuguese undertaking. Together with the Portuguese state, the Church would rule not only the spiritual kingdom that was imposed on the natives, but also in economic and political circles. Thus the Brazilians were forged by the Cross and the sword, the roots of their culture. The Church had a strong influence on families, through education in religious schools and seminaries, and on future constitutions and political campaigns. In addition to retaining spiritual hegemony, the Catholic Church continued to be a leading mechanism of socialization. From Anti-Capitalism to Mystical Communism Though it was one of the wealthiest institutions, the Church was averse to wealth, generating an anti-capitalist mentality that even today is a trademark of Brazilians. That ecclesiastical attitude would later contribute to the emergence, within the Church, of a “progressive” sector in opposition to the Church’s traditional conservatism. Long before Liberation Theology emerged among the progressives, the Church had been intensely involved in politics. Under President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–61), it began to adjust to the urban and industrialized society that emerged during the administration of Getulio Vargas (1930–45). The Church leadership began to emphasize support for “victims of injustice.” Capitalism was viewed with growing mistrust, and anticommunism was discouraged. The Church pointed toward a “third way” for Catholicism, in which a socially responsible Church would be in charge of organizing society. Thus the National Confederation of Brazilian Bishops began to steer toward the left, and today moderates and progressives alternate as presidents of the Confederation.


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Following the strategy of appealing to the many Brazilians who were “victims of injustice” and members of other groups, including leftist political parties, priests began to participate in social campaigns, especially in the rural areas, reflected in the rise of the Ligas Camponesas (Peasant Leagues) starting in 1958. In the 1960s, Catholic activists positioned themselves in important social groups, including youth, students, and workers. From the Juventude Universitaria Catolica (Catholic University Youth) evolved the Catholic left party Acao Popular (Popular Action). In the 1970s, this highly political process crystallized in Liberation Theology. Liberation Theology, incorporating Marxist theory into religion, stressed that the final utopia of the Kingdom of God could occur here on earth. This kingdom should be reached not exclusively through the sacraments or the spirit, but if necessary with violence, because the theory is grounded in the clash of social classes. For the progressives who adopted this thinking, this was the beginning of a new evangelical mission by the Church, in which the hierarchy would no longer be needed. This controversial initiative to bring together Jesus and Marx was labeled a “preferential option for the poor.” The emphasis on its foundation in the people, and on rejecting hierarchy—a clerical adaptation of the idea of a classless society— originated in the Christian-base communities, small groups or cells in which everything was evaluated for its political content. The base communities were seen as substitutes for traditional churches. Imbued with Liberation Theology, progressives played an important role in electoral campaigns, supporting candidates from the left and joining movements such as Sem Terra (The Landless). This social movement became increasingly political and used violence in its invasion of rural properties. According to its principal mentor, Joao Pedro Stedile, it no longer has sweeping agrarian reform as a goal, but does hope to see the left in power. The progressives continued their political action, but their religious activities had less effect, and the base communities have attracted less attention than before. When the progressive priests replaced religious messages with political speeches, sometimes in the pulpit, many Catholics left the Church, looking elsewhere for the spiritual and emotional support that their priests were no longer providing. Often they found what they wanted in Protestant/ Evangelical churches, and occasionally in other religions, including the animist Santeria.


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Three other factors led people to leave the Church. First, starting around 1940, urbanization increased: cities provided individuals with more freedom and options, in religion as in everything else. In the rural areas, by contrast, opportunities were restricted, and the Church had complete power. Moreover, the number of priests dropped as the population expanded, and the Protestant churches, both traditional and evangelical, were reaching out for members. In order to win its members back, the Catholic Church developed the “Charismatic Renovation,” adopting some rituals and practices from the Pentecostals. But it failed to grow, and the Protestant churches continued to expand. Protestant Churches and Their Value Systems A religious census in the early twenty-first century shows the results of these trends. In 1980, 89.2 percent of Brazilians were Catholic; in 1991 this fell to 83.3 percent and by 2002 to 73.7 percent. Meanwhile, Protestants rose from 6.6 percent in 1980 to 9.0 percent in 1991 and 15.4 percent in 2002, while those “without religion” rose from 1.6 percent in 1980 to 4.8 percent in 1991 and 7.3 percent in 2002.3 Protestant churches in Brazil include the traditional “mainstream” denominations, such as Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, and Methodists, all with origins in the 1600s. The evangelical churches include the Pentecostals and the neo-Pentecostals. Also, there are the sects. From the perspective of the historic churches, the sects are those that have another sacred book in addition to the Bible. The history of evangelical churches in Brazil goes back to 1910 and the district of Bras in São Paulo, where the Italian Luigi Francescon, having been converted in the United States, created the Congregation Crista do Brasil or Christian Congregation of Brazil, which the traditional churches saw as a sect. The congregation expanded rapidly; Francescon later installed himself in Santo Antonio de Platina, in the State of Paraná. The source of Pentecostalism in Brazil was the Assembly of God, established in 1911 in Belém do Pará by Swedish priests, who had also worked in the United States. The Pentecostals multiplied, founding temples all over Brazil. Composed of relatively autonomous churches, the Assembly of God is the largest evangelical church in Brazil. In 2000, in São Paulo alone it had around 400,000 members.


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In 1977, so-called neo-Pentecostal churches began to appear, as Pastor Edir Macedo founded the Universal Reino de Deus (Universal Kingdom of God) in Rio de Janeiro and then in the rest of the country. Now it has more parishes, money, and political strength than any other neo-Pentecostal organization. And unlike the Assembly of God, it has a strong central organization. Both the traditional churches and the Pentecostals stress the values of the Protestant ethic, encouraging austerity, with no alcoholic beverages, promiscuity, or drugs. However, the practices considered immoral or sinful differ from church to church. The more humble the churchgoers, the more rigorous are likely to be the prohibitions, probably because the poor feel they need others to show them the way. The members of the traditional churches, with higher levels of education, exercise more free will. Among the Pentecostals, rigorous demands, especially on women, like not cutting their hair or using makeup, are being eased in response to current social customs. The Pentecostal churches developed in poor areas on the outskirts of cities, later expanding toward the center. Thus Pentecostal pastors have been gaining access to social sectors that earlier were a monopoly of the Catholic Church. Instead of the political speeches of progressive priests, they preach about faith, personal affirmation, and prosperity. In the cults, people seek cures, not only for their health but also for other social misfortunes, and some practice exorcism. The neo-Pentecostals associate religion with material success. The fast-growing Universal Church uses colloquial language and communication tools borrowed from marketing and the media. A subtle difference can be seen here: the Catholic and Reformed churches also emphasize material prosperity and believe that God provides, extending the notion of prosperity into the spiritual. But the Universal Church specifically emphasizes “Business with God”: each person gives God something in order to ensure that they receive what they ask for. The intensive collection of money from followers inculcates the idea of incentives for personal growth. This differs from the paternalistic practices so common in Brazil and still practiced by the Catholic Church through charity. Among evangelical groups, the Universal Church has the most seats in the National Congress. On the Universal Web site, under the heading “Men of God in Politics,” is a statement that Brazilians are hesitant about national politics and disenchanted with politicians involved in scandals who fail to show a serious commitment to the


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people. But people who believe in God’s word, it says, will act ethically and resist corruption. A Land of Contrasts Many observers have pointed out the deep disparities between Brazil’s various regions and social classes. Not everything in this country is backward, however; some of it is very modern. Modernity, both urban and industrial, began with the process of industrialization and urbanization initiated during the administrations of Getulio Vargas and Juscelino Kubitscheck. The urban expansion nurtured the modern entrepreneur, a specialized work force, and a new university-educated middle class. Such people are concentrated in the more developed urban centers, especially in São Paulo, which are also the source of special-interest and pressure groups including unions. Other important organizations that emerged through this process include the nation’s bar and press associations and federations of labor unions. Amid Brazil’s progress in developing a disciplined, specialized work force, some of its social groups have pursued revolutionary change. Elements connected with the Catholic Church, the universities, and the unions have become models of what Carlos Rangel calls the “noble revolutionary.”4 Such people are committed to the tenets of Dependency Theory. They view Brazil as a victim of “imperialism” and dream of utopias based in leftist ideology, including an omniscient state that provides and directs everything and assures general happiness and equality to the people. And the mass of Brazilians continue to seek the protection of a savior, an all-powerful, all-knowing leader. But poverty does not automatically generate revolutionary attitudes, unless leaders move the crowd in that direction. Just as powerful is the mix of skepticism and low expectations toward those with political power, along with a readiness to accept any dose of charisma that will reignite the flame of hope for better days ahead. Though this attitude is strongest among the poorest, it exists in other social classes, too. In Brazil, because few believe that the political parties will represent the people effectively, what emerges during election campaigns is the same highly personalized power that originated in the patriarchal behavior of the colonels and priests of colonial times.


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As corruption scandals swirl around the administration of Luis Inácio da Silva, one hears increasingly widespread criticism of the government’s performance—particularly in the light of campaign promises of “spectacular growth” and honesty in government—and growing dissatisfaction from special interest groups, including the private sector. If Brazil does not achieve transforming rates of economic growth, the democratic experiment could be in jeopardy, as it is in a number of other Latin American countries. The roots of the problem of governance lie deep in our culture. On January 28, 1999, Senator Roberto Campos gave a plaintive farewell speech in Parliament highly critical of Brazilian politics, which he described as mesmice or “same old, same old.” I conclude with Campos’s cataloguing of our “cultural deformities.” The cultural deformities can be encapsulated in . . . [the] “disease of isms”: temperamental nationalism, which reduces our ability to absorb technology and investments; populism, the art of distributing riches before they are produced; structuralism, which underestimates the role that monetary disorder plays in inflation; statism, which leads the state to do more than it can economically and less than it should socially; and protectionism, which punishes the consumer without requiring efficiency from the producer.

Notes 1. Lawrence Harrison, Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Center for International Affairs; and Lanham, MD: Madison Books. 1985), p. xvi. 2. Quoted by Simon Schwartzman in “Regional Cleavages and Political Patriminialism in Brazil,” http://www.schwartzman.org.br/simon/tese/contents.htm 3. Reginaldo Prandi, “As Religioes Afro-brasileiras e seus Seguidores,” in “Civitas,” special issue, Revista de Ciencias Sociais, 3: 1, June (2003). 4. Carlos Rangel, Du bon sauvage au bon revolutionnaire (From the Noble Savage to the Noble Revolutionary) (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, S. A., 1976).


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15 Economic Development and the Evolution of National Culture The Case of Chile DAVID E. HOJMAN

This paper asks whether and how, in the Chilean case, culture matters. What has been culture’s contribution to economic development? How, if at all, did economic performance affect national culture? What are the relationships between economy and culture today? To examine possible links between national culture and economic development, I explore essential aspects of Chile’s culture at several key historical moments. Culture has been changing, and I try to identify the determinants of this change. I propose a simple theoretical model that seems to address most of the above questions. There is no shortage of useful definitions of “culture.” For my purposes, “culture” is equivalent to “values.” National culture is seen as strongly related to national identity. Douglass North defines culture as the “transmission from one generation to the next, via teaching and imitation, of knowledge, values, and other factors that influence behavior.”1 This seems perfectly adequate. One problem is deciding to what extent the discussion should become a comparison between Chile and other Latin American countries, since comparisons risk being accused of partiality and unfairness. Sometimes what one author identifies as typical of his or her 267


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own country is seen by nationals of other countries as equally typical of their own nations. Problems with the Concept of a Chilean National Culture Several recent books have attempted to identify and describe a contemporary Chilean identity or national culture.2 For all their many merits, these books have failed to emphasize three points sufficiently: that contemporary Chilean national culture is plagued by ambiguities, inconsistencies, and contradictions; that, however defined, it changes over time, and has become substantially different in recent decades; and that it has been “adopted,” “accepted,” “owned,” or “shared” to different degrees by different social classes, sectors, and groups. I see serious difficulties in defining and identifying those elements that contribute to the concept of a Chilean national culture. Chile is a complex society, riddled with cleavages, heterogeneities, and dramatic income and other inequalities. In the words of Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, before 1973 Chile was “a country of parallel subcultures that never touched.”3 If groups and sectors are very different in key respects, why should they share the same culture? Moreover, in an increasingly globalized world it would be natural to expect that a group in one country may have more in common with similar groups in other countries than with different groups in its own country. For centuries, the Catholic Church has substantially affected many aspects of Chile’s national culture. Yet ambiguities, inconsistencies, and contradictions surround the roles played by the church. It defended the Indians against the human rights abuses of Spanish conquistadores and encomenderos. But it also participated willingly in a massive rent-seeking and rent-extracting operation in which Indians were pushed into servitude, and literally worked to death, in order to pay the salaries of priests whose job it was to take care of these Indians’ souls. Centuries later, the Church defended the victims of human rights abuses under the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90), after having sided with society’s most authoritarian tendencies in the nineteenth century. Today, the Church is doing all it can to prevent the liberalization and modernization of national life, including, for example, fighting against a proposed divorce law and attempting to minimize the legal role of civil marriage, as opposed to its religious counterpart.


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Not surprisingly, ordinary Chileans have responded to these ambiguities with equally contradictory attitudes and myths, or simply with cynicism. Among nominally Catholic countries, Chile has one of the largest shares of the population who declare themselves Catholic, but one of the lowest rates of Church attendance. A possible explanation is that for a Chilean to declare himself or herself a Catholic may be an expression of political correctness or of ethnic and class snobbery. Another interesting contradiction in Chile’s contemporary national culture is that, by international standards, the country has a very low level of corruption but also an extremely low level of trust. The 2003 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), produced by the highly respected Transparency International (2003), gives Chile a CPI value of 7.5 on a scale ranging between 10 (highly clean) and 0 (highly corrupt). Chile does better than several Western European countries including France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, as well as other Latin American countries. In contrast to these countries, a lower percentage of Chileans answer “almost always yes,” or “generally yes” to the standard question in social capital surveys, “Can people be trusted?” In 1998 this share (or “trust index”) was only 17 percent in Chile, against 38 percent in Spain, 37 percent in Hungary, and 27 percent even in the Philippines, which is among the most corrupt countries in the world. Historical Origins and Long-Term, Stable Characteristics Despite these contradictions in Chile’s contemporary national culture, some relatively stable aspects of national culture have been present for centuries. To begin with the earliest historical evidence, one of the most outstanding characteristics of Chile in the Spanish colonial empire was the huge physical distance between colony and metropolis. Given the technologies of transport and communications available in those days, Chile was simply too far away from Madrid for effective control, and too poor for the crown to invest in improving these links. Isolation affected everything, from the volume and character of immigration to the Spanish crown’s power to have its orders obeyed locally. Contrary to crown policy, politically powerful conquistadores managed to become both large-scale landowners and


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the beneficiaries of Indian servitude at the same time. Crown officials in Chile also felt free to ignore the prohibition on marrying locally. And in 1816, brutal punishment was inflicted upon the supporters of political independence from Spain, despite explicit orders from the crown to the contrary. Thus from very early on, the Spanish roots of the local culture were weaker than and different from those elsewhere in colonial America. And geographical isolation continued to be an issue after national independence: the large waves of European immigration to Argentina around 1900 were not matched by similar demographic movements to Chile. Some long-term, relatively stable features of Chile’s national culture may be identified almost from the beginning of the Spanish conquest. This continuity makes it possible for a casual observer to identify a “Chilean” culture, regardless of the historical period. A more careful observer would be able to see how this culture has evolved in subtle ways. These aspects of the national culture can be described in both positive and negative ways. Here I will mention three important examples: the “verticalism” of social relations, the brutality of sporadic bursts of repression, and the generational or cyclical nature of conflict. Let us start with the negative description. Verticalism means that the ruling class (largely the same before and after Independence in 1810) could not be challenged with impunity. Another term for verticalism is the sacralization of order, elevating order to the category of something sacred. Inequality, perpetuated from generation to generation and century after century, was (or is) another manifestation of this verticalism. Serious challenges to the ruling class, or to the established order, would be met with an explosion of brutal repression. However, the repression would not be permanent, because the challenge was typically generational. It would come from younger members of the ruling class, who would eventually take their place at the top of society, actively supporting the system themselves. When young, the older generation had also challenged the established order. Aging in the young and romantic memories in the old would conspire to bring about reconciliation and complete the cycle. How can the previous two paragraphs be presented, or interpreted, in a positive light? Order, sacralized or not, brought with it the rule of law, strong institutions, and respect for private property. Cyclicality could be another, more benign way of describing compromise.


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(In Spanish, the meaning of compromiso is closer to “commitment” or “obligation” in English than the give-and-take mutuality of the English word compromise.) Between the 1930s and the 1970s, Chile even had its own estado de compromiso. This social and political system was a disappointing experience in terms of economic dynamism. On the other hand, it contributed to substantial political progress and the development of a highly educated and politically articulate middle class, together with progress for organized labor. Possibly there are also positive, and not only negative, aspects to moving forward carefully4 (or cyclically), as opposed to moving forward in a careless, or reckless, or ruthless way. Nowhere in Latin America is the meaning of the word compromise so close to that of the English word as in Chile. Manuel de Salas and Upper-Class Views and Values in 1796 Chile’s contemporary national culture is full of contradictions because it includes elements that originated in different historical periods and in different social classes, sectors, or groups. In 1810, when Chile gained independence from Spain, the first explicit manifestation of a Chilean national culture was not really different from the culture of the criollo (Spaniards born in Chile) upper class, as represented by, for example, Manuel de Salas. Manuel de Salas was one of Chile’s leading intellectuals during the Independence War. Politically a moderate, he had trained as a colonial administrator and played a key role as treasurer to the Consulado, a corporatist body with government and private sector representation. His 1796 Report to the Minister of Hacienda on the State of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce in the Kingdom of Chile is possibly the best exposition of his social class’s views and values on economic matters. De Salas describes Chile as a country with immense economic potential, which is held back by imperial Spain’s monopoly policies on production, transport, and warehousing. He sees unemployment creating massive poverty, as the country desperately needs international trade. Domestic demand will never be sufficient to generate economic expansion, especially since the country is underpopulated (again, a consequence of misguided imperial policies). De Salas argues that “freer” trade (rather than completely free trade) is essential for Chile,


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even if it damages the interests of monopolists, bureaucrats, and other rent seekers in both Spain and other South American colonies. As for Chile’s skilled workers, De Salas has few good things to say: “Crude metalworkers, tasteless silversmiths, carpenters without ideas, masons ignorant of architecture, painters oblivious of design, tailors who can only imitate, vulgar tinsmiths, dishonest shoemakers, this is the rabble who pass for artisans here.”5 On drinking, de Salas is equally forceful: “Wine is the only expanding product in the countryside, . . . gaining ground at the expense of public health and morals.”6 He is also ruthless about unsuccessful members of his own social class: “Once their wealth is exhausted, owners keep up a pretence, trying to hide their decline, without fooling anyone and only making matters worse.”7 His Report makes it clear that the Chilean criollo upper class in 1796 did not approve of rent seeking, at least in the form of artificial monopolies that damaged Chile’s international trade. This made the class both revolutionary and supportive of fast economic growth. On the other hand, this class was also conservative in social customs and not a stranger to deceit, pretension, and snobbery. It is interesting to note that the terms in which de Salas opposed imperial Spain’s artificial monopolies are similar to the widespread criticisms of the protectionist policies of 1966 and 1971, 175 years later. Moreover, conservatism in social customs still seems to be widespread today. Alberto Blest Gana and Female Literacy after 1850 By 1850 a new middle class was becoming more visible and assertive. Aspects of its culture were starting to become incorporated into the Chilean national culture. We can explore this process further in the work of novelist Alberto Blest Gana. The author of Martín Rivas and other important Chilean novels of the second half of the nineteenth century, he was not only a prolific writer, but also an army officer, politician, and diplomat. Blest Gana provides us with an illuminating example of how economic, social, and cultural change interacted in that period. Between the 1850s and the 1890s, Chilean upper-class women learned to read and write. Female literacy increased from 9.7 percent in 1854 to 29.2 percent in 1895. From an initial situation of severe


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disadvantage, women became as literate as men were. This cultural change may have been related to new European fashions, especially in France and Britain. A new market was being created, providing opportunities for writers and publishers who could offer something of interest to women. As the most successful of these cultural entrepreneurs, Blest Gana gave his readers what they wanted: novel experiences, interpretations, attitudes, and ideologies, mostly middleclass. This new market of female readers not only raised the incomes of some writers and publishers; it also conveyed or transmitted new views and values that would eventually affect many of the new readers’ perceptions. A very similar process of dynamic interaction between culture and economics is taking place in Chile today. Television has become widespread, with several free-access television channels plus cable and satellite television for a higher-income minority. But viewers are opting for, and accordingly rewarding, those channels and producers that focus on new social trends. The only differences from the later nineteenth century are that now the initial shock is economic and technological (as opposed to cultural), and the transmission vehicle is soap operas (rather than Blest Gana novels). And some of the experiences on television today reflect the experiences of classes below the middle class. A Model of Change in the Chilean National Culture In developing a theoretical model for Chile, we note dynamic interactions relating culture to economy to culture, or economy to culture to economy. Many economic and cultural (and social, political, institutional, etc.) changes are endogenous, but a few are exogenous. Cultural change takes place in circles, cycles, or loops. For a cultural change to become incorporated into the national culture, it must be accepted by different social classes and by successive generations. Otherwise it would remain an unstable, temporary imposition or fashion. Once an exogenous change (or fortunate or unfortunate “historical accident,” “event,” or “random perturbation”) occurs, path dependence becomes important. Fortunate and unfortunate historical accidents are always exogenous to our model, but not all exogenous changes are historical accidents, either fortunate or unfortunate. For


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example, such a change could be a deliberate act of cultural (or economic) policy, but still be exogenous in the framework of our theoretical model. Closing or completing a cultural-economic-cultural loop (or an economic-cultural-economic one) may or may not involve the political process or institutional change. In the last half-century or so, important changes have been taking place in Chilean national culture. Several attempts at major cultural change were rejected, including populist, right-wing nationalist, pro-Latin-Americanist, and anti-American ideologies, and Salvador Allende’s “Chilean-style” transition to socialism. But other proposed changes to the Chilean national culture, some of them major, were accepted. For example, the Christian Democratic Party displaced the Radical Party as the major political party representing the middle class. Chile faced, and eventually accepted, non-European immigration—which also involved dealing with a shameful inheritance of racism. And it recovered the attitudes of the early 1800s that had supported free trade and opposed rent seeking. After Pinochet’s military coup in 1973, important exogenous cultural changes took place. Possibly the best example is the role played by pro-free-market economic technocrats, the so-called “Chicago boys” (many of whom had studied at the University of Chicago). As we know now from colonial and nineteenth-century Chilean history, the Chicago boys’ contribution was not fully exogenous, since its historical roots went back two or three centuries, but it was largely exogenous in a medium- or short-term perspective. The Chicago boys’ intervention brought endogenous economic and institutional change, which favorably affected many sectors and groups, some of them in ways they had never expected. At the same time, technological change, largely or fully exogenous, was also occurring. As a consequence of all of the above, preferences and cultural attitudes changed, this time endogenously. For example, new economic policies altered the traditional way women participated in the labor market, which itself eventually changed many of women’s cultural attitudes. Other (or the same) new economic policies conveyed information, helped with learning, and changed expectations about the relative advantages of free trade and trade-related rent seeking, thus eventually altering cultural attitudes toward rent seeking and free trade. And again, other (or the same) new economic policies brought inflation under control, made the financial sector modern and reliable, and encouraged savings and investment beyond


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families’ traditional investment in educating their children, which eventually helped to generate new cultural attitudes. Then, all of these endogenous cultural changes contributed to make the previous (and also largely endogenous) economic changes permanent. Free-market, open-economy policies survived the demise of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990. But this was a gradual process, with contradictions and compromises. Progress has been undermined by reactionaries on both the left and the right, but either a right-wing opposition victory or a female victory in the December 2005 presidential election will consolidate the cycle started in 1973. And, as always, some stable, long-term features of the national culture will remain in place. What made a key difference to Chilean national culture during the Pinochet dictatorship was not brutal repression (although this was surely present, as it had been, sporadically, for centuries) but technological, economic, and institutional changes. These changes were at least partly a consequence of exogenous or quasi-exogenous cultural changes, which many Chileans accepted only after seeing their positive effects. Developments Since 1990 Chile’s national culture has experienced further substantial change since 1985 (when the most recent period of sustained economic growth started) and then 1990 (when the elected left-of-center government came to power). As mentioned before, significant cultural change is always likely to occur with fast economic growth. Dramatic cultural change is likely to be both cause and consequence in any process of fast and sustained economic growth. Chile since 1990 is no exception. During the 1990s, average real household expenditure increased by 170 percent. But this does not mean that all consumption increased at the same rate. We must also consider the impact of technological change. For example, the number of automatic teller machines increased from 374 in 1991 to 2,588 in 2001. The national total of long-distance telephone calls increased from 571 million minutes to 2,762 million minutes between 1990 and 1999, and of international calls from 36 million to 259 million minutes between 1989 and 1999. Internet use increased by more than 500 percent between


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1997 and 2000 and by another 600 percent between 2000 and 2001.8 Expenditures on publicity more than doubled between 1993 and 1995.9 Admissions to private universities rose from 5,000 in 1985 to 101,000 in 2000. Cable television grew from 71 channels in 1994 to 198 channels in 2000.10 It would be very difficult to claim that all of this has not generated any cultural change, that national culture has remained the same. Cultural innovation can be illustrated with recent examples. Rachel Schurman has observed a new attitude among Chilean owners of small businesses (in her case, in the fishing and fish processing sector).11 Unlike the situation in the 1960s, these new entrepreneurs are proud of being precisely that, empresarios. In the 1960s small entrepreneurs felt no special pride, and many would have willingly taken jobs in the public sector. The change in attitude, Schurman says, is the result of probusiness education campaigns carried out in the mass media and through other channels, by progovernment journalists, opinion leaders, and spokesmen during Pinochet’s dictatorship. These probusiness messages were particularly effective because economic policies generating overall stability and local support were also present. These probusiness propaganda campaigns would have had little effect on public opinion without simultaneous economic growth. In the context of our model, however, they were mostly examples of exogenous cultural change. In other recent cases, significant economic change has occurred but we have no overwhelming evidence that it has led to endogenous cultural change. However, it could be that this is exactly what has happened. For example, in 2003 the economy expanded by less than 4 percent, while new car registrations increased by over 16 percent.12 We should expect that people who bought their first car in 2003 have experienced at least some changes in their cultural attitudes and preferences, resulting from the new opportunities and constraints that car ownership brings. But new car registrations were not the only booming activity. In book publishing, in 2003, new titles increased by more than 20 percent, and actual numbers or units of books published by over 50 percent.13 The cultural implications of this editorial boom are obvious. Another example of uncertainty about the extent of cultural change is film censorship. In the last six years of the Pinochet dictatorship (1984 to 1989), eighty films were censored. The reasons were rarely political. Under the dictatorship, films were usually rejected either be-


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cause they were sexually explicit (e.g., Emmanuelle) or clashed with Catholic Church teachings (e.g., Monty Python’s Life of Brian) or a combination of both (e.g., Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask). In the next six years, immediately after democratic civilian rule was restored (1990 to 1995), only twenty-eight films were censored. It is not clear what caused the apparent decrease; perhaps the censors were more liberal (a cultural/institutional change) or demand for films fell because people preferred television and the Internet (an economic/technological change). Most important is that change has indeed occurred, whatever its nature. More ambiguities, inconsistencies, and contradictions can be seen in connection with government oversight of television programs and advertising. The owners of television channels clearly engage in censorship and self-censorship; the government and Santiago’s Catholic University own the two major channels. Some channels systematically refuse to cooperate with HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns. In annual published assessments, Chileans can learn how much violence was presented on television, and how much of it was physical, verbal or threatened, sexual, and so on. This suggests an uneasy coexistence between the conviction that Chile must respect freedom of expression, a paternalistic need to protect the public, and pressure to accept whatever the church wants. Not all politicians and state officials behave identically. Overall, however, we could describe the situation in 2004 as one in which the state, many politicians, and the church were fighting against and gradually losing to television, the Internet, and globalization. The situation is possibly best reflected by the Chilean expression “la libertad es libre” (“freedom is free”), which libertarians use to challenge conservatives. That is, we cannot have it both ways. Economic freedom brought accelerated economic growth but it also brought social and cultural change—and a new social and cultural freedom. Neither of these freedoms can operate without the other. In a 1997 survey, Chileans were asked whether they thought the country had improved economically; 54 percent said yes and 46 percent said no. They were also asked whether they thought that people felt happier now, and a massive 83 percent answered no.14 This and similar results from other surveys have been interpreted by observers as demonstrating a widespread sense of unease (malestar). In their view, despite a remarkable economic performance, many Chileans


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do not feel happy.15 However, these observers may be wrong, at least partially. Maybe there is a large difference between what Chileans really think and how they respond to survey questions. Answers may reflect political correctness, class or ethnic snobbery, cynicism, or opportunism. We know that snobbery has been part of Chilean national culture for at least two hundred years. Cynicism would be relatively new. Possibly both are involved. Some extremely interesting aspects and characteristics of Chilean national culture since 1990 have surprised observers. Two prominent examples involve toy mobile phones and supermarket carts. When it became illegal to use a mobile phone while driving, the police stopped a number of people only to discover that the “mobile phone” they were using was actually a wooden toy. In supermarkets, some men load their cart with the most expensive goods only to abandon it discreetly and leave the supermarket without buying anything. Why are Chileans doing these things? We could interpret these two stories as manifestations of snobbery, attempts to impress a naive friend or neighbor. They could also be cynical or opportunistic attempts to exploit the snobbery of someone else—perhaps a business partner or a date.16 Or they could simply be pointed jokes, or urban legends with a satirical edge, or, alternatively, a form of protest. These two examples may be evidence both that attitudes are becoming more cynical and entrepreneurial and that some Chileans are starting to use this type of humor as a form of cultural protest. The cartoon character Condorito has been hailed as the perfect exponent of Chilean culture. Cynical, irreverent, insolent, poor but proud, Condorito is aware of his own rights and defends them vociferously. Opportunistic and “entrepreneurial,” he has a wry, black (or dark gray) sense of humor; he is cheeky, manipulative, unfaithful, and absurd (or “postmodern”). Sometimes naive, he is more often brutally realistic, always trying to understand the reasons for negative events. An enemy of self-deception, he has an apparently infinite capacity to be surprised by other people’s stupidity. A jack-of-all-trades, happygo-lucky, sometimes a victim of his own contradictions, he can also be cruel—and is often the target of cruelty himself. Condorito has always been apolitical, or nonpolitical. Created half a century ago to represent the typical lower-class or lower-middle-class Chilean male, today he may be more broadly representative.17


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Chilean Exceptionalism, Basques, and Protestants What makes Chile different from the rest of Latin America? Why is Chile the only Latin American country where free-market, open-economy (“neoliberal”) policies have succeeded? As I have said, Chile has been different since the Spanish conquest began in the 1500s. This was the inevitable outcome of geographical isolation, the social and political structures of the Mapuche Indians, the state of permanent frontier war, and the general poverty of early colonial society. Chile became further differentiated from the rest of Latin America after a series of exogenous shocks: fortuitous historical accidents and the emergence of certain leaders. Ambrosio and Bernardo O’Higgins, Manuel de Salas, Diego Portales, and Manuel Bulnes (and their neighbor Jose de San Martín) all left an imprint on Chilean history and culture. Of course, some exogenous shocks had adverse consequences, but they also contributed to changes in the national culture and the economy. Examples include economic stagnation, inflation, Dutch disease, and the “resource curse” provoked by victory in the War of the Pacific against Peru and Bolivia (1879–82), the 1891 Civil War, and the subsequent decline in ethical standards in public and private activities. Taken together, this centuries-old process of differentiation from the rest of Latin America has now culminated in making fast economic growth virtually inevitable. Basque emigration to Chile in the 1700s presumably responded to economic, social, and political conditions in Chile that potential migrants saw as particularly advantageous. Basque immigration was very large by Chilean standards—possibly over ten thousand people between 1701 and 1810.18 Many Basques became merchants; others became rural administrators, government officials, lawyers, politicians, teachers, priests, miners, doctors, artists, skilled artisans, ship owners, transport entrepreneurs, sailors, and army officers. Eventually they formed the bulk of Chile’s first urban middle class. Chile was perfect for the Basques, and they were a blessing for Chile. They bridged a huge gap between the extremes of a seriously polarized and antagonistic society. Most did reasonably well; a small minority did extremely well, joined the elite, and eventually became the most dynamic sector of the elite. Partly because of their favorable cultural attitudes and values, Basques contributed to economic expansion both before and after national independence, and to the


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cause of independence itself. Some of their children, or their descendants, became presidents of the republic (Errazuriz, Pinto Garmendia, Sanfuentes Andonaegui), famous winemakers (Errazuriz again, Ochagavia, Undurraga, Zavala), historians (Amunategui, Barros Arana, Eyzaguirre, Vicuna Mackenna), and even left-wing politicians (Barrenechea, Recabarren). But it is dangerous to exaggerate the positive Basque influence or incorrectly extrapolate it far beyond 1850. Of the original Basque immigrants, most never became rich, politically powerful, or intellectually distinguished—and the most successful eventually became the victims of their own success. Basque cultural attitudes did not survive; in fact, they evolved rapidly. Eventually, the descendants of the Basques became Chileans. Given the exalted positions that some Basques had reached, they played a prominent role in the national decline that started around the last third of the nineteenth century. The descendants of Basques who had immigrated to Chile before the War of Independence in 1810 had nothing to do, culturally or otherwise, with the Basques who arrived in Chile as political refugees after the Spanish Civil War. Because of intermarriage, Basque surnames in Chile today cannot be associated with particular genetic codes, let alone cultural attitudes. However, some historians, genealogists, publicists, and social commentators have converted the Chilean Basque experience of the 1700s and early 1800s into self-serving propaganda. Today, among some ordinary Chileans with Basque surnames, pretending to be Basque is popular. Two centuries ago, being Basque meant having progressive values; today, references to Basque roots are likely to be snobbish or reactionary. The growth in conversions to Protestantism is a much more recent phenomenon, starting around 1950. In Tongues of Fire, David Martin estimates that 15 to 20 percent of Chile’s population is now Protestant, mostly Evangelical and Pentecostal—perhaps 2.5 to 3 million in a population of about 16 million.19 This process has thus far affected mostly lower-income people. No doubt, conversion to Protestantism in Chile fundamentally changes both the convert and his family. For example, typical converts may use their new religious faith to help them control alcohol abuse. For poor Chileans, conversion to Protestantism may play the same role as Alcoholics Anonymous in the United States or its equivalents in Northern Europe. Converts


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also discover new self-respect and strong feelings of responsibility toward their family and children, and the local Protestant community. But conversion also brings isolation and pressures from the old peer group. Economically, converts become much better workers and are much better about investing in their families’ human capital. However, because they start poor and have limited borrowing capacity, they have not yet become successful entrepreneurs. Eventually they will do so, a prospect not relished by many fundamentalist Catholics, and cases of discrimination by public officials have been noted.20 Protestant growth is an extremely important cultural phenomenon. However, it is too recent for its full impact to be felt. Why Chile Does So Well on the Corruption Perceptions Index In Dakar, Senegal, the standard rate if you wish to bribe a traffic policeman (many or most of them stop taxi drivers and ask for it) is £1.10 (about $2.00). Some policemen even do this in front of European passengers. Refusal to pay means that you will have to retrieve your documents the next day from the local police station, which will cost several times more in cash, apart from the waste of time. In contrast, in Santiago de Chile, an attempt to bribe a traffic policeman will almost inevitably land the driver in jail. As far as I know, this has always been the case. Chile’s Carabineros are for the most part incorruptible. On the other hand, Carabineros (or some of them) are (or were, when I was a child) susceptible to the question “Do you know who I am?”, followed, in case of a negative answer, by something along the lines of “I am the brother-in-law of your commander-in-chief,” or “I am the grandson of the President of the Supreme Court.” This tells us something about Chilean society: namely, that it is (or was) extremely and rigidly hierarchical along class (and ethnic) lines. The Chilean traffic policeman knew that ignoring such a phrase could lead to trouble. But letting the guilty driver go on the strength of such a phrase, let alone asking for a bribe, or accepting one if it were offered, could be even worse, maybe leading to severe punishment or job loss. The two key forces at play here are discipline and fear. The Chilean culture, or Chilean society, or Chilean authorities, or the Chilean ruling class, would not have allowed it to happen. (In this


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Chile was different not only from Senegal but also from the rest of Latin America.) I believe that both corruption as we define it today (the abuse of public office for private gain) and Chile’s ethical rejection of it have roots deep in history. In colonial Spanish America (and in Spain itself) before around 1810, corruption was widespread (though no one would have called it “corruption” or have had the sort of ethical problems with it that we have today). In this respect, Chile was little different from the other colonies. But from the earliest days of independence, Chile’s evolution was different from much of the rest of Latin America’s, perhaps in part because of the disproportionate Basque influence. The so-called “aristocratic republic” (circa 1891– 1925) was probably fairly corrupt, but corruption was not then a major issue as it is today. The real danger of massive corruption, and our own awareness of it, arose only as the state became a large-scale owner and entrepreneur after 1925. This expansion was ushered in by a new, educated middle class, many of whom shared, or even were themselves the product of, a culture and ideology of intense pride in their own antioligarchic, antipopulist, nationalist values; contempt for those who did far too well from the “aristocratic republic”; and even contempt for traffic policemen. You can almost hear such people saying: “We may not be rich, or very rich, but we are honest, and decent, and proud of what we are, and we have the superior national interest at heart.” Or even: “We are obviously better than traffic policemen (better educated, better paid, and ethnically whiter), so, if they do not take bribes, why should we?” The attitudes I am describing here are a combination of pride, contempt, and snobbery, and they are also influenced by discipline and fear. I would argue that in this sense, Chile was and is different from the rest of Latin America. Peru’s Montesinos case, for example, would be inconceivable in Chile. For decades, the culture and ideology of Chile’s educated middle classes have included pride in respecting the authority of institutions rather than caudillos; in not bending the rules, not even in a good cause; in not being “too Latin American”; in not being “tropical” (all these even at the risk of being boring); and concomitantly, a patronizing attitude, or even mild contempt, towards the rest of Latin America.


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Conclusions I would draw three important and closely related conclusions. First, despite its contradictions, there is a clear and rigorous logic to the evolution of contemporary Chilean national culture. Cultural change can be explained in terms of a very simple model of dynamic interactions between economic and cultural aspects. Such dynamic interactions are triggered by an exogenous initial shock. Cultural innovations advance in loops, cycles, or circles, as cultural change is gradually embraced by different social classes and generations. Political and institutional changes may or may not also be present, but if and when they are, they typically reflect what has been happening previously in the economic and cultural spheres. The discussion has also made it possible to identify long-term, highly stable aspects of Chilean national culture, which have been evolving slowly for centuries. The second conclusion is that Chilean culture has been changing dramatically since the mid-1980s. Recent cultural change has favored economic growth—the two trends have reinforced each other. National culture has increasingly become mass culture, affecting popular sensibilities further down the social pyramid. Some essential aspects of the new culture include television (soap operas), shopping malls, mobile phones, the Internet, popular music, fashions, spectator sports, and greater reliance on consumer credit. Attitude changes include a much more entrepreneurial spirit in all income groups, emphasis on social mobility through education, enhanced awareness of and fear of crime, and a much more skeptical attitude toward traditional politics and politicians and toward apocalyptic social utopias of collective liberation. People are more accepting of diversity, tolerating alternative subcultures and lifestyles. They are more open toward the rest of the world, although not necessarily toward other Latin American countries, and openly acknowledge the contribution of pre-Hispanic cultures. Machismo is in decline, and a new cynicism exploits, or seeks to exploit, those who still share the old snobberies. These new ingredients of the national culture are represented, in very different ways, by names such as Isabel Allende, Pablo Halpern, Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt, and the cartoon character Condorito. Despite their ambiguities, these new aspects of the national culture should be


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seen as positive steps toward developing and reinforcing civil society. They oppose and challenge the traditional hegemony shared by the Catholic and other established churches, the republican state, and all the political parties. These recent cultural innovations could well represent the closest that Chile has ever been to a healthy Tocquevillean civil society. And, in an uneasy but by no means new coexistence with these emergent aspects of the national culture, many cultural elements from the past survive or even thrive, including snobbery, the role of the Church, and the inclination to compromise. The third conclusion is that we should perhaps interpret the current administration of President Ricardo Lagos (2000–06) as a bridge between new, different, and much more dynamic forces both before and after it. The Lagos government was necessary in order to complete several cycles, circles, or loops. Lagos and his policies faithfully represent the old Chilean spirit of compromise. Chileans needed to know, or to prove to themselves, that they could live with another president from the ranks of the Socialist Party after the Salvador Allende disaster. They also needed to test the uniquely Chilean experience of Lagos’s “socialist neoliberalism.” Now we all know that it is not much different from the experience of the 1990s (or even the second half of the 1980s), except that the rate of economic growth is several percentage points below the country’s potential. The Lagos administration has not promoted any significant cultural, economic, social, or institutional changes that diverge from the patterns established between 1985 and 2000, although the period has been marked by the uninterrupted introduction of new technologies. The comparison may be unkind, but despite the formidable personal and political qualities of Lagos himself, some features of his government are as reactionary as those of the last Spanish governor, Marco del Pont, in 1816. Both tried to stop or even reverse trends that could only be slowed down, and then only for a limited period. Chile’s recent experience of cultural change and fast economic growth offers some lessons for other countries. It makes sense to ask what has worked in practice. The answer is sound economic policies, institutional development, and education. Politicians and policy makers who wish to introduce new policies favorable to cultural change, economic growth, or institution building may need external support. This is particularly true for economic policies whose positive effects take time to become apparent.


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Democratic practices and anticorruption activities may also benefit substantially from international support. Education helps to increase the stock of human capital, to enhance entrepreneurship, and to diminish inequality. Rapid economic growth will take many people out of poverty but it will not be sufficient to improve income distribution, which will require its own specific policies. Chileans are at their best when they are not afraid of being themselves. This means being different. Chileans are not good at pretending to be Spanish, English, American, or Latin American. By the same token, there may be no point in telling non-Chileans to try to be more like Chileans. But open attitudes toward foreign trade, foreign investment, foreign views and values, and new technologies seem to have worked for Chile and should work for others. The Chilean experience over hundreds of years demonstrates that compromise may be slow, but without it true democracy cannot work. Notes 1. R. M. Stulz and R. Williamson, “Culture, Openness, and Finance,” Journal of Financial Economics 70, no. 3 (2003): 313–49 at 314. 2. See, among others, P. Constable and A.Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile under Pinochet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991; S. Montecino, Madres y Huachos: Alegorias del Mestizaje Chileno (Santiago: Sudamericana, 1991); B. Subercaseaux, Fin de Siglo: La Época de Balmaceda (Santiago: Aconcagua, 1988); A. Jocelyn-Holt, El Peso de la Noche: Nuestra Frágil Fortaleza Histórica (Santiago: Planeta, 1997); A. Jocelyn-Holt, El Chile Perplejo: Del Avanzar sin Transar al Transar sin Parar (Santiago: Planeta, 1998); A. Jocelyn-Holt, Espejo Retrovisor (Santiago: Planeta, 2000; J. Larrain, Identidad Chilena (Santiago: LOM, 2001); P. Halpern, Los Nuevos Chilenos y la Batalla por sus Preferencias (Santiago: Planeta, 2002); PNUD (Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo), Desarrollo Humano en Chile – Nosotros los Chilenos: Un Desafío Cultural (Santiago, PNUD, 2002); I. Allende, My Invented Country: A Memoir (London, Flamingo, 2003). 3. Constable. and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, 141. 4. M. De Salas, “Chile: Poverty by Default,” in Latin American Revolutions 1808– 1826: Old and New World Origins, ed. J. Lynch (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 143–49. (Orig. pub. 1796) 5. Ibid., 147. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 148. 8. The foregoing data are from Halpern, Los Nuevos Chilenos, 17, 28, 29, 32. 9. Jocelyn-Holt, Espejo Retrovisor, 218. 10. PNUD, 2002, 157.


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11. R. A. Schurman, (1996), “Chile’s New Entrepreneurs and the “Economic Miracle”: The Invisible Hand or a Hand from the State?”, Studies in Comparative International Development, 31, no. 2 (1996): 83–109. 12. El Mercurio, “En 7.8 % Crecio la Venta de Automóviles Nuevos en Diciembre,” January 16, 2004e, http://www.emol.com. 13. El Mercurio, “Producción Editorial Chilena Aumentó un 20.63% durante 2003,” January 2, 2004, http://www.emol.com. 14. PNUD (Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo), “Modernización y Malestar en Chile. Desarrollo Humano en Chile 1998: Las Paradojas de la Modernizacion,” http://www.iigov.org/pnud. 15. PNUD, 2002. 16. Judging by the huge supply of discreet motels in and around Santiago, in a very wide range of qualities and prices, marital infidelity, premarital sex—which is frowned upon by conservative parents—and casual sex seem to be widespread. 17. Although many members of the Condorito creative team are still Chilean, the brand is now owned by Mexico’s Televisa. 18. A. J. Bauer, Chilean Rural Society from the Spanish Conquest to 1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 16. 19. David Martin, Tongues of Fire (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 51. 20. El Mercurio, “Clausuran Instalaciones de Canal Evangélico Vidavisión,” February 17,2004, http://www.emol.com.


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16 Mexico The Camel and the Needle MIGUEL BASÁÑEZ

The Culture Matters Research Project seeks to answer some important questions: What role do values and culture play in economic development? Can some values be considered assets that foster development or liabilities that impede it? How have cultural values influenced the political, economic, and social evolution of societies? How have cultural values changed in recent decades? What policies, institutional innovations, and development projects have caused these changes? What are the implications for countries lagging behind? I will address these questions using Mexico, with some comparative references, as a case study. In the 1930s Mexico was a highly traditional society built on three cultural pillars: Spanish Catholicism, embattled nationalism (antiSpain and anti-United States), and a revolutionary ideology (pro-state and antibusiness). Private enterprise, competition, and initiative were unwelcome challenges to status, hierarchy, and obedience. Children were taught, in effect, that it was “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Government ownership and monopolies were acceptable but private ownership and entrepreneurship were looked on with suspicion, an attitude that still pervades the society today, particularly among lowincome workers. Fortunately, Mexican culture has changed for the 287


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better as a result of widespread movement from rural to urban, from agrarian to service, from illiterate to literate, from low- to middle income, from isolated to integrated. In the 1950s Mexico and Spain were similar in many ways, especially in per capita income. Today Mexico is the eleventh largest economy in the world and the third largest trading partner of the United States. However, if per capita income is considered, Mexico falls to sixty-ninth with a third of Spain’s income per capita. Why is this? The two countries once shared a similar pattern of values dysfunctional for prosperity and democracy. Some common features were: preference for government over private ownership, low esteem for hard work, high value on obedience, low confidence in institutions, high acceptance of authoritarianism, low levels of association in voluntary organizations (social capital), belief in governmental (rather than individual) responsibility for well-being, low trust, low tolerance, and low esteem for the rule of law. The Search for Key Values: Dissent, Trust, Hard Work, and Social Capital Interest in the impact of cultural values on economic, political, and social behavior derives from Weber’s theories. Until recently, however, lack of empirical evidence about culture made it difficult to resist the arguments of modernization theorists ranging from Marx to Bell.1 Nevertheless, the influential work of Gramsci, Inglehart, and Huntington began building bridges between the two sets of explanations.2 Without consistent and reliable data, analyzing changes in values over time used to be very difficult. The World Values Survey (WVS), conducted in four waves between 1981 and 2000, has filled the void and gives us a unique opportunity to track changes in values since 1980. The surveys grew out of a Western European study launched in 1981 and replicated in fourteen additional countries on six continents. To monitor changes, a new series of surveys was designed and carried out in 1990 and 1991, coordinated by Ronald F. Inglehart. It was further replicated in 1995 and 2000, and now includes eightyone countries. In their search for key values, some authors began by looking at the impact of religions, while others went on to mores. Dealy contrasted


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five pairs of Catholic and Protestant values or virtues to explain Latin American behavior: dignity-pragmatism, generosity-frugality, prideserviceableness, grandeur-truth, and leisure-hard work.3 Harrison distinguished between progressive and static cultures, as derived from three basic features of their worldviews: future vs. past time orientation, encouragement vs. discouragement of rationality, emphasis on equality vs. emphasis on authority.4 These features in turn strongly influence such matters as trust, ethical codes (dissent, justice, self-discipline), and attitudes toward work (creativity, planning, diligence). I myself distinguished between combative (Protestant, Confucian, and Jewish) and contemplative (Catholic, Islamic, and Hindu) cultures, corresponding to three key values: trust, dissent, and hard work.5 Putnam studied Italy and found that in the north, where civil society had been vibrant for centuries, democratic institutions functioned better than in the south, with its scant social capital.6 Fukuyama argued that trust is a key ingredient of social capital. Grondona distinguished between progressive and progress-resistant cultures, looking at five key values: austerity, hard work, innovation, competitiveness, and investment.7 A list of twenty-five values was developed for the Culture Matters Research Project, and an additional list of twelve factors is derived from an analysis of the World Values Survey.8 Below I attempt to track value change over time, particularly as a product of the modernization process, focusing on dissent, trust, hard work, and social capital. Measuring Values Four questions from the World Values Survey are used to measure key values. Dissent is measured through questions about respect for parents, on the assumption that greater acceptance of personal (i.e., traditional) than impersonal (i.e., institutional) authority lowers autonomy and independent thinking. Trust in people is a powerful indicator of breadth of social, political, and economic interactions. Hard work reflects the inculcation of positive attitudes toward work. Social capital is measured through questions about participation in voluntary organizations. The power of dissent and trust was originally explored through the differences between Catholic and Protestant values and their


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Figure 16.1 Catholics and Protestants

impact in economic development and democracy.9 Figures 16.1 and 16.2 summarize the main findings. Figure 16.1 shows Catholicism and Protestantism in opposing quadrants. The horizontal axis (obedience-autonomy) was based on this question: “With which of these two statements do you tend to agree? A. Regardless of what the qualities and faults of one’s parents are, one must always love and respect them / B. One does not have the duty to respect and love parents who have not earned it by their behavior and attitudes.” Of Catholics, 17 percent replied with B, while 37

Figure 16.2 Catholic and Protestant Countries


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percent of Protestants did so. The vertical axis was based on the question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” Of Catholics, 31 percent replied that “most people can be trusted,” while 52 percent of Protestants did so. Once we established the powerful separation between these two religions, we continued our exploration. As Figure 16.2 shows, Protestant countries cluster in the upper right quadrant (trustful and autonomous), with Catholic countries in the lower left quadrant (distrustful and obedient). Mixed-religion countries align in the center of the chart. Table 16.1 shows the percentage of people who replied affirmatively to each of the four questions asked in the World Values Surveys of 1980 and 2000. Countries are grouped by cultural zones, along the lines of Huntington’s “civilizations.” Looking at dissent (respect for parents), it is clear that the lowest scores are in the Protestant countries and that they remain at the same low level over the twenty-year period (49, then 48 percent), whereas the highest are in South Africa (85 to 91 percent), closely followed by the Spanish-speaking zone (76 to 89 percent). Both Mexico and Spain increased in obedience, Mexico only barely (88 to 90 percent), but Spain increased sharply from 72 to 88 percent, which is surprising and counterintuitive. One possible explanation for that sharp increase could be the marked social and political liberalization that followed Franco’s death in 1975, which could have temporarily reduced parental respect in 1980. The countries lowest in trust in 2000 are South Africa, Argentina, France, Hungary, and Mexico, ranging from 13 to 22 percent. All but Mexico had much higher scores twenty years earlier. However, they all contrast with the high and rising scores of Sweden and Denmark (66, 67 percent). Scores in the British Isles and Commonwealth countries declined from 1980 to 2000. Spain, like Belgium, Finland, Germany, Iceland, and Japan, remained practically unchanged. Hard work is a problematic measure. For one thing, in the Protestant countries of Sweden and Denmark the percentages are very low (4 and 2 percent respectively) and stable. The other countries of that region are slightly higher but are equally stable, except Iceland, which has almost doubled (from 24 to 44 percent). For another, response levels in all other countries increased remarkably. This kind of question can be sensitive to economic conditions. Because the global


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Table 16.1 Key Value Change in Twenty-One WVS Available Countries (Percent, 1980–2000) Respect to Parents

Hard Work: Child Qual

Trust in People

Belong to Volunteer Organizations 1980 2000

1980

2000

1980

2000

1980

2000

Finland West Germany Iceland Sweden Denmark Netherlands

46 56 60 51 39 41

62 51 61 43 39 32

NA 20 24 4 2 12

12 23 44 4 2 14

57 32 40 57 53 45

57 32 41 66 67 60

47 45 76 68 59 57

80 51 94 96 84 92

Protestant Europe

49

48

12

17

47

54

59

83

Northern Ireland Ireland Canada Britain United States

75 79 70 57 74

77 71 79 65 77

19 24 20 15 26

41 37 51 38 60

44 41 49 43 41

40 36 37 29 36

65 48 54 50 71

46 58 75 41 90

English

71

74

21

45

43

36

57

62

France Italy Belguim

78 80 80

75 79 67

33 13 32

50 36 42

25 27 29

21 33 29

23 23 39

40 43 65

Catholic Europe

79

74

26

43

27

28

28

49

Spain Argentina Mexico

72 67 88

88 88 90

41 50 19

69 57 29

35 26 18

34 16 22

34 33 38

28 44 48

Spanish

76

89

36

52

26

23

35

40

South Korea Japan

90 70

92 72

40 15

72 27

38 42

27 43

38 29

72 43

Confucian

80

82

28

49

40

35

34

58

Hungary South Africa

69 85

83 91

28 31

70 70

34 29

22 13

NA 49

33 75

economy before 1980 was good for a sustained period, people may have come to disregard hard work as a requisite for success. Conversely, if the global economy was not good before 2000, hard work may have seemed the only way to success. However, an opposite interpretation is also possible: sharp increases may mean that the economy is going so well that hard work is being rewarded clearly and rapidly. In Mexico, the first explanation applies; in Spain, the second seems more plausible.


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Social capital, measured by participation in voluntary organizations, decreased slightly in Spain (34 to 28 percent) and Britain, while it increased in Mexico (38 to 48 percent) and elsewhere. The high levels shown in 2000 by Sweden (96 percent) and Iceland (94 percent) are remarkable compared with those of Spain (28 percent) and Hungary (33 percent). A striking finding from the 2000 World Values Survey data analysis is that social capital shows a weak correlation with democracy and economic development. Structural and Value Change Finding patterns of change in values by looking at individual countries over time is problematic. Too many country-specific variables may be responsible for such changes. We developed a more systematic way of searching for causes: replicating the effects of modernization by grouping the eighty-one countries of the 1995 and 2000 World Values Survey into several distinct clusters that can mimic the process of development. We can track several indicators of the forces of modernization: (1) economic: tertiary employment (employment in postindustrial information technology and other service employment), feminization of the labor force, and levels of GNP per capita; (2) social: urbanization and literacy; (3) political: free and fair elections, professional media, professional polling. As Table 16.2 illustrates, the four variables that measure the process of modernization (economic development, urbanization, postindustrial employment, and literacy) consistently show that respect for parents decreases as their levels increase. In low-income countries, 92 percent of the population say that one must always love and respect parents; in high-income countries, only 71 percent say so. With the others, the contrast is similar: urbanization, 93 to 75 percent; type of employment, 89 to 74 percent; and literacy, 89 to 79 percent. Age, in contrast, has almost no effect on respect for parents, while by cultural zone the impact ranges from over 90 percent among African, Islamic, South Asian, and Latin American to 57 percent among Protestant European. Some may say that a weakening of respect for parents is not a good sign. Certainly, we can understand the historical roots of the tradition of unconditional respect for parents. In a primitive group, where conflict could easily evolve into violence, allowing domestic


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Table 16.2 Key Values by Levels of Development, Age, and Cultural Zone (Percent, WVS 2000) Respect to Parents

Hard Work: Child Qual

Trust in People

Belong to Volunteer Organizations

92 88 71

79 60 40

26 22 34

49 38 62

93 84 75

68 58 45

28 24 31

40 45 60

89 83 74

72 55 33

33 25 31

21 46 66

89 86 79

60 55 55

25 23 30

37 52 52

82 85 85

56 59 62

26 30 29

46 51 46

92 92 93 91 86 89 76 83 57

78 63 79 33 76 58 57 44 31

15 15 32 14 23 35 25 38 47

60 60 56 58 43 63 47 73 71

1998 GNP PC (U.S. dollars) Low (under $2,600) Medium ($2,600 to $9,999) High (over $10,000) Urban Population (percentage) Low (under 50 percent) Medium (up to 76 percent) High (over 75 percent) Population in Service (percentage) Low (under 33 percent) Medium (up to 66 percent) High (over 66 percent) Literacy Level (percentage) Low (under 85 percent) Middle (up to 96.5 percent) High (over 96.6 percent) Age Group –34 35–54 55+ Cultural Zone African Islamic South Asia Latin American Orthodox Confucionist Catholic Europe English Protestant Europe

challenges would have been too risky. In postindustrial societies, that is less true. It is also possible that human relations are increasingly based on fairness and respect. There is no reason why this assumption is not equally applicable to friendship, marriage, parenthood, or any other relationship. Why should children love and respect parents


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who do not respect them? Should a husband or wife love and respect a partner who shows no sign of love or respect? The wide variation in trust that is observed among cultural zones (from 14 percent for Latin Americans to 47 percent for Protestant Europeans) is not found for any of the modernization measures. Trust is consistently lowest at the middle levels of all four indicators: income, urbanization, service, and literacy, at 22 to 25 percent for each one. It improves at the high levels of all four indicators, ranging from 30 to 34 percent Hard work seems to be out of fashion in the postindustrial world. The intensity of decline is consistent and strong in three out of the four modernization variables shown in Table 16.2. In low-income countries, 79 percent of the population says that hard work should be taught, while in high-income countries only 40 percent says so. For urbanization, the contrast is similar: 68 to 45 percent, and for type of employment (e.g., postindustrial) even stronger (72 to 33 percent), although for literacy it is less strong (60 to 55 percent). For age it increases slightly (56 to 62 percent), and by cultural zone the impact ranges from under 33 percent in Latin Americans and Protestant Europeans to over 76 percent among Orthodox, Africans, and South Asians. This pattern seems to convey the message that in modern societies smart work is better than hard work. In low-income countries, 49 percent of the population says they belong to at least one organization, whereas in high-income countries 62 percent do. Similar contrasts appear for urbanization (40 vs. 60 percent), type of employment (21 vs. 66 percent) and literacy (37 vs. 52 percent). Aging, in contrast, has no effect on association (except a slight increase among the middle-aged), while by cultural zone the impact ranges from over 70 percent among English and Protestant Europeans to 16 percent among Muslims. Here the pattern consistently goes from personal to impersonal authority. The findings from eighty-one countries reviewed above suggest that improving social and economic structures (i.e., modernization) produces changes in culture and politics. The Role of Cultural Values in Development Taking values as units and ideologies as constructions from those units, ideologies may be displayed as clusters of values that validate


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an economic, social, or political end. The ultimate construction is a value system that aims at being holistic. Around the world, value systems are usually encapsulated in religions, which deeply pervade all dimensions of life: economic, social, political, and private. On the other hand, structural change is measured in terms of population size, geographical composition (urban-rural), level of education, economic sector of employment (agrarian, industrial, or tertiary), and level of per capita income. In this section we review the variables of structural change and track the resulting shift in the values, ideologies, and culture in Mexico. The process of constructing the current Mexican system of values from the pre-Hispanic indigenous culture took approximately four centuries. Its deconstruction is taking less than four decades. What were the traditional values that were constructed so slowly? What new ones are taking shape so rapidly? The three pillars of the traditional value system were Ibero-Catholicism, nationalism, and revolutionary ideology. The new ones are still in formation but seem more oriented toward tolerance, globalism, democracy, and the market. From 1933 to 1982, Mexico experienced rapid modernization, which led to a deep shift in values from traditional to modern. The stagnation of real GNP per capita since 1982 has, paradoxically, accelerated the trend toward modernization. This acceleration is a by-product of three changes. Increased legal and illegal migration to and trade with the United States has brought an enormous influx of revenues, a development that undermined the old anti-U.S. ideology. The feminization of the labor force has propelled gender equality, which in turn produced changes in family structure and values. And the informal economy has exploded. The rapid change in cultural values has resulted in a strong convergence of values among Mexico, Canada, and the United States. The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was framed by these conditions. In the 1920s and 1930s, trust in a strong authoritarian government, which owned most property and was responsible for individual wellbeing, was adequate for Mexican society, which was mainly agrarian, illiterate, and rural. In those days, people were not concerned about accountability, transparency, or participation in public decisions. The hierarchical, authoritarian, and monopolistic worldview of Spanish Catholicism, further reinforced by the revolutionary ideology and success and strong nationalist sentiments, facilitated such neglect.


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297

Favorable international circumstances led Mexico to five decades of rapid modernization powered by an average 6.3 percent annual GDP growth from 1932 to 1981, sometimes referred to as “the Mexican miracle.” The outcome of this growth was a twenty fold increase in the size of Mexico’s economy and almost a fivefold (4.8) increase in per capita income. Thus, the country became highly populated, mobile, urban, and literate, with good transportation and communications and many employed in the service sector—the opposite of what it had been fifty years earlier. The old system of values did not fit the new modern society well. This rapid modernization brought Mexico to the threshold of a value change that has only been increased by the economic stagnation in per capita terms since 1982. Let us review some comparative numbers that help to substantiate these arguments. Mexico and Spain were very similar around the 1950s. The similarities are shown in seven out of the nine items compared in Table 16.3: population size, urban–rural proportion, tertiary school enrollment, jobs in the service sector, women in the labor force, and per capita income. In addition, both ranked low on democracy (measured by the Freedom House Index where 1 = full democracy and 7 = dictatorship), although Spain was even worse (5.5) than Mexico (4.0). Their main differences were in the literacy rate and the quality of life, as measured by the Human Development Index. Today many differences are greater. Why is this so? Both countries experienced traumatic wars that took hundreds of thousands of lives (Mexico from 1910 to 1917 and Spain from 1936 to 1939). They both went through a long and rapid economic expansion, which changed the society from traditional to modern: Mexico from 1932 to 1981 and Spain from 1950 to the present. Spain went through very difficult economic times before its economy improved, which led many Spaniards to migrate elsewhere in Europe seeking jobs. Millions of Mexicans have migrated to the United States for employment in the twenty-two years since the economic boom ended in 1982. Today those migrants represent almost a fourth of the adult Mexican population. The migration experience exposed both populations to a very different reality from the one they had been used to in their hometowns. However, Spain kept her population almost steady during half a century (28 million in 1950 to 39 million in 1998), whereas Mexico’s population more than tripled (from 28 million to


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Table 16.3 Structural Change (From Earliest to Latest Available Comparative Data) United States Population (millions) 1950 152 1975 216 1998 270 Rate of growth 1.2% (annual growth)

Spain

Mexico Argentina Bolivia

28 28 26 59 39 96 0.7% 2.6%

Urban Population (percent of total) 1960 70 57 1980 74 73 1998 77 77

51 66 74

17 26 36 1.6%

74 83 89

Illiteracy Rate, Adult Total (percent of people age 15+) 1970 0 9 25 7 1985 0 5 15 5 1995 0 3 9 3 School Enrollment, Tertiary (percent gross) 1965 40 6 4 14 1980 56 23 14 22 1995 81 49 15 39

Chile

2.8 6 4.8 10 7.9 15 2.2% 1.9%

Costa Rica

0.9 2.0 3.5 3.0%

Guatamala

3 6 11 2.7%

39 46 61

68 81 85

37 43 47

32 37 39

42 26 16

12 7 5

12 7 5

55 43 33

5 16 24

6 12 28

6 21 33

2 8 8

Population in Service Sector (percent) 1980 68 49 54 1997 74 66 57

61 76

40 70

66 64

57 61

37 41

Women in Labor Force (percent of total) 1960 32 19 15 1975 39 26 23 1998 46 27 33

21 26 32

31 33 38

23 24 33

16 19 31

18 21 28

1,919 2,516 2,458 0.5%

3,821 4,323 9,757 2.0%

Democracy Level (1 to 7 Freedom House Index) 1972 1.0 5.5 4.0 4.5 1985 1.0 1.5 4.0 2.0 2003 1.0 1.0 2.0 2.0

4.5 2.5 3.0

Human Development Index (UNDP, HDR, 2002) 1975 0.863 0.819 0.689 0.785 1985 0.898 0.876 0.761 0.804 2000 0.939 0.913 0.796 0.844

0.514 0.573 0.653

GNP per Capital (constant 1990 dlls) 1950 9,561 2,397 2,365 1975 16,284 9,096 5,146 1998 27,331 14,227 6,655 Rate of growth 2.2% 3.8% 2.2% (annual growth)

4,987 8,142 9,219 1.3%

1,963 4,392 5,346 2.1%

2,085 3,264 3,375 1.0%

1.5 5.5 1.0

1.0 1.0 1.5

2.5 4.0 4.0

0.702 0.754 0.831

0.745 0.770 0.820

0.506 0.555 0.631

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, CD-ROM, 2000 (queries procedure). Population 1950 and GNP per capita from Madison, Angus, The Word Economy: A Millennial Perspective, OECD, 2001, 278–289.


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299

96 million). Income per capita in Spain in 1998 was more than twice ($U.S. 14,227) that of Mexico ($6,655). The fifty years of prosperity spread their beneficial impact over wide segments of the population. Oversimplifying, it could be said that the economic engine of the 1930s was agriculture; that of the 1940s, import substitution industries; of the 1950s, tourism; of the 1960s, maquiladoras – assembly plants producing chiefly for the U.S. market—and of the 1970s, oil. Now migration has also turned into an economic engine. Remittances from documented and undocumented Mexican workers in the United States are projected to equal oil revenues in 2005, at around $18 billion. Income per capita tripled in Spain in the twenty-five years from 1950 to 1975. University enrollment jumped from 6 percent in 1965 to 23 percent in 1980 and 49 percent in 1995 (Mexico’s remained practically steady at 15 percent in 1995). Women in the labor force rose from 26 percent in 1975 to 37 percent in 1998. Spanish social trends were ready to take off by 1975; hence, when Franco died in the winter of that year, the Spanish people were more than ready for the political opening offered by new leaders (see Carlos Alberto Montaner, chapter 26 in this volume). In sum, modernization processes in Spain and Mexico unleashed deep value changes in a consistent pattern and a common direction: from personal (family, tribe, or religious figures) to impersonal (law, institutions, government) forms of authority; from under- to oversubsistence levels of economic performance; from traditional (agrarian) to modern (industrial) and postmodern (service) employment; from authoritarian to democratic rule; and from closed to open market economies. Most countries seem to conform to this pattern and direction of change, with some exceptions. Urbanization is generally associated with modernization and democracy, but (as seen in Table 16.3) Costa Rica, though an established democracy (1.5 on the Freedom House score), is still 53 percent rural. Clearly more important for explaining democracy than the rural–urban balance (even more so in a small country like Costa Rica) are the prevailing form of employment (agrarian, industrial, or service) and the literacy rate. Guatemala is a case in point. In addition to still being highly rural (61 percent), its illiteracy is still very high, at 33 percent, and the population employed in service jobs is low, at 41 percent. Consequently, it gets low scores on the Human Development Index for both democracy (4.0) and quality of life (.631).


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Bolivia seems to be an intermediate case in Latin America between the advanced positions of Argentina and Chile and lagging Guatemala. Bolivia does better than Mexico on some indicators (service sector employment, women in the labor force, tertiary school enrollment) and worse on others (urban, illiteracy, per capita GNP). The inclusion of the United States in Table 16.3 serves as a benchmark for the group of countries under consideration. Although Argentina or Chile may outperform the United States on some indicators (urban and service sectors, for instance), the differences in others are remarkable (e.g., tertiary school enrollment). All these indicators are summarized on the scores in democracy and quality of life. Concluding Remarks What has been reviewed here suggests that people’s main value frame is shaped by their religious value system (identified in this chapter as culture zone). Some elements of that value system (hard work, for instance) may have been advantageous at the agrarian and industrial developmental stage to facilitate sustainable modernization. This seems to have been the case in Protestant Europe and its English-speaking offspring such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. However, modernization modifies these original values to adapt to a new postindustrial stage. The high esteem for hard work that helped them through the agrarian and industrial stages is diminished at the postindustrial threshold and replaced by smart work. Something similar happens with respect for parents, where obedience is replaced by independent thinking and autonomy. Evidently hard work and obedience are functional values in a premodern society but may be dysfunctional in a postmodern one. Similarly, common reference points for developed societies may be meaningless in less developed ones; for example, seeking economic stability, well-being, and improvement; pursuing political freedom, participation, and respect; or promoting social trust, tolerance, the rule of law, and gender equality. All these basic categories are still absent in many countries today. Religious or ethical traditions identified as combative or progressprone (Protestant, Confucian, Jewish) contain values that reward and facilitate a faster takeoff in the economic accumulation process, particularly from an agrarian or premodern state of the economy.


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Three values are most important: dissent (from the autonomy–obedience dimension), trust, and hard work. This trio in turn facilitates a highly positive and reinforcing social practice: association, which is at the heart of social capital. Religious traditions identified as contemplative or progress-resistant (Catholic, Islamic, Hindu) lack the values that reward and facilitate a faster economic takeoff. That void is filled with values that reward collectivism and resignation. Research from the World Values Survey shows that each of the nine cultural zones proposed by Huntington and surveyed by Inglehart can—at least hypothetically—facilitate premodern, modern, and postmodern values. Fully testing this hypothesis will require further research. There are no premodern Protestant countries and no postmodern Islamic ones. Only in the Catholic cultural zones can we find all three types of values (premodern, modern, and postmodern). Religion is the principal determinant of the cultural zones. However, the influence of religion is expressed more through ethics and behavior than through theology. In other words, a practicing Protestant is more like an atheist raised in a Protestant society than either of the two is like someone raised in a Catholic society, whether atheist or believer. The reason is that each society instills in its members hundreds or thousands of fine-grained norms and rules of conduct that are learned and reinforced through life experience. Those norms and rules belong to a value system developed throughout history from religion, law, and usage, and these value systems are most easily identified by the religion from which they originated (Islamic, Confucian, Protestant, Catholic, etc.). Whether a person accepts the concomitant value system as the word of God or as a secular set of rules is almost irrelevant. This explains why one can find in modern societies people that could be educationally Catholic, psychologically Protestant, and rationally atheist. Or any other combination. Prosperity is driven by dissent, trust, hard work, and social participation. That is why the Catholic emphasis on the camel passing through the eye of the needle is so harmful for economic development. It was originally formulated for a people living in extreme poverty at a time of no hope or very low expectations. Now, however, other hopes and expectations should give rise to new values. This is difficult, but not impossible. Regional differences within Catholic countries confirm the point. Monterrey and most of Mexico’s northern border states are in notable contrast to the rest of Mexico, as are the Basque and Catalonia regions with respect to the rest of Spain.


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Some answers, then, to the questions posed at the outset: What role do values and culture play in development? Values speed up or slow down structural change, though they do not substitute for it. Values can precipitate change when underlying structures are ready, but they cannot induce progress if structural conditions are not present. Hence, values are not intrinsically positive or negative for development; that depends on the values system they belong to and the society’s developmental stage. To what extent and how have cultural values influenced the political, economic, and social evolution of societies? Cultural values influence societies’ evolution greatly but subtly. Values that are functional at a certain stage of development (e.g., teaching children hard work or respect for parents in an agrarian, illiterate, rural society) may be dysfunctional at a different developmental stage. Values that may be beneficial under certain circumstances may be harmful under different ones. To what extent have cultural values changed in recent decades? Clearly, values have been changing in recent decades, as Tables 16.1 and 16.2 confirm. What factors, including policies, institutional innovations, and development projects, have brought about these changes? Education is the most powerful one, and it operates not only through formal systems but also through child rearing, the media, law, religion, and urban life. The next most powerful factor is associational experiences of any kind (e.g., healthcare, sports, religious groups, environmental protection, etc.) that build trust within the social group. What are the implications for countries lagging behind? With the recognition that culture matters, a range of interventions that promote progressive values becomes possible for political, intellectual, religious, and other leaders. Some of them are discussed in the companion volume from the Culture Matters Research Project, and in many of the case studies in this volume. There definitely is hope: the camel can go through the eye of the needle. Notes I thank Federico Estévez and Guillermo Cantú for their comments on the draft of this paper.


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1. Daniel Bell, The Coming Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976). 2. Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince (New York: International Publishers, 1957); Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993); Instituto Nacional de Estadística Geografía e Informática (INEGI), Estadísticas Históricas de México, vol. 1 (Mexico, 1986); Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles in Advanced Industrial Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Post-Modernization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 3. Glen Dealy, The Public Man: An Interpretation of Latin American and Other Catholic Countries (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 34. 4. Lawrence Harrison, Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), 7. 5. Miguel Basáñez, “Tradiciones Combativas y Contemplativas: México Mañana,” Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, 125 (1986). 6. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 7. Mariano Grondona, Las Condiciones Culturales del Desarrollo Económico, 4th ed. (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ariel-Planeta, 2000), 126. 8. Miguel Basáñez, “Typology of Values,” paper presented at the Culture Matters Research Project Seminar, The Fletcher School, Tufts University, March 26–28, 2004. 9. Miguel Basáñez, “Protestant and Catholic Ethics: An Empirical Comparison,” paper presented at the World Values Survey Conference, Complutense University of Madrid, El Paular, Spain, 1993.


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17 Productive Values and Poverty in Venezuela LUIS UGALDE Translated by MARILU DEL TORO

Culture and Poverty A group of us at the Andrés Bello Catholic University have been studying ways to overcome poverty in Venezuela,1 and in particular how to explain and reverse the puzzling increases in inequality and poverty since the mid-1980s. Clearly, Venezuela’s current social and economic policies are inadequate. At best, they may remedy some social ills on a small scale while society produces more and larger problems. Although the relationships between culture and production, and between culture and socioeconomic development, are complex, we find them vital to explore. After investigating several theories, our university team undertook an ambitious field study.2 We collected information in fourteen thousand Venezuelan homes, from a representative sample of the population in each region. We aimed to determine what Venezuelan society believes, consciously or unconsciously, about productivity and its sources. Does it see itself as the producer of quality goods and social services? Does it feel poor without them? Issues of culture and values are complicated by various perceptions, and deeply distorted by disguised racism and social prejudices.

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In general, the societies that developed first and more successfully tend to see themselves as culturally or morally superior. As we try to explain differences in various societies’ development, prejudices, especially between regions and nations, can hinder our understanding of the causes. Prejudices and supposedly scientific explanations have meant that those who were not Protestant Anglo-Saxon or even European were denied the tools of development for cultural or racial reasons, although some could save themselves by agreeing to adopt the superior culture offered by others. Having witnessed the past half decade of development in Southeast Asia, the success of Italians and Poles in the United States, the dizzying development of Ireland, Italy, and Spain, and more recently, the accelerated development in China and India, we have grounds to be guarded about the prejudiced ethnocentrism that makes hard work, honesty, and productivity into the virtues of the predestined few within a given country. Time has reinforced the belief that if societies (or poor sectors of societies) with underdeveloped economies and low productivity are to become more successful, they must experience a profound cultural change in their relationship with production. In other words, a Venezuela that overcomes poverty will necessarily have an attitude and appreciation for production and its role in development that is vastly different from the current attitude. This makes it important to ask if some among us hold views on reality, productive practices, and institutions that reinforce poverty, while others’ views would help overcome it. This reveals the importance of changing institutions or creating new ones that aim at successful modernization. The study we present below focuses not on the “culture of the poor” within lower-income sectors, but rather on the predominant culture of production in Venezuela, among people of all walks of life. In other words, what brings prestige, what is encouraged—and what is punished—that would improve productivity? We consider productivity not only in the business world, but in all dimensions of society: the doctor, the judge, the entrepreneur, the government and private sector worker, and the president are all productive in one way or another. What are their attitudes about productivity? How do they see the role of their own personal competence and performance in meeting proposed objectives? What role do their education, work, and discipline play in their achievement? How do they value material goods and the ability to obtain the vital necessities without which people live in abject poverty, discontented and ungovernable?


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What importance does society place on creating or rescuing institutions that are crucial for development? We are not interested in the complex debate on the many strategies for improving productivity, or on the question of whether changes in cultural attitudes accompany increased economic productivity or vice versa. Our interest is in defeating poverty, as we defeated malaria half a century ago, attacking it simultaneously and jointly from all possible directions. In general, countries that were poor and have succeeded in enriching themselves, like many in Europe, developed economic policies, entrepreneurial attitudes, modern institutions, worker training, and appropriate values. These factors contributed to the institutional, cultural, political, and entrepreneurial development that could overcome poverty. Some countries that have abundant natural resources of high strategic value for development elsewhere have managed to increase their own consumption without having to develop the culture and institutions of development. For example, in some oil countries a tiny proportion of the country’s population can engage in a highly productive economic activity that allows the country to import what it needs for most people to live quite well. A proprietor state that distributes the existing national wealth sees itself as responsible for the entire population’s well-being. But such nations often fail to develop adequate public institutions and democratic and productive values, and the population does not see that it can and should play a role in overcoming poverty. We are convinced that each Venezuelan already has his or her own prejudices and opinions on this complex problem. Such prejudices can impede a healthy understanding: they can also keep people from working seriously and systematically on the cultural and institutional changes Venezuela needs in order to overcome poverty. Such changes will encourage personal responsibility, training, and opportunities, so that Venezuelans can understand their role in overcoming poverty and see the incentives for doing so. Though the issue is complex, we believe our study addresses crucial unanswered questions. We emphasize the effect that Venezuela’s condition as an oilproducing country has had on its culture of production. Latin American countries seem to share cultural, religious, and institutional factors that contribute to poverty, whether or not they are oil producers. In fact, these values existed before Venezuela became a major oil producer, starting in the 1920s. This leads us to consider the opposite


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explanation: perhaps oil production and the higher incomes it brings were not used appropriately to produce sustained and balanced development because the country’s secular culture had a negative attitude toward production. The Heritage of Colonial Rentierism As Spain’s empire developed, even in the 1500s, it lost its initial impulse toward manufacturing. Its powerful position led to endless, exhausting wars in Europe, financed with gold and silver from the American colonies. This mine-based economy led Spain to neglect its productive development, reinforcing the rentier nobility rather than the nascent commercial and industrial bourgeoisie. It also helped develop a political vision that emphasized state bureaucracy and encouraged an outlook on religion and productivity that was more feudal than modern. The most prosperous American colonies, such as those in Mexico and Peru, reproduced the rigid Spanish class-stratified society based on mineral riches and ruthless subjugation of the indigenous people. During the first two centuries of this era, from approximately 1528 to 1728, poorer societies, such as Tierra Firme, now Venezuela, had a subsistence agricultural economy. Because it was poor, Venezuela was not coveted by the sons of the Spanish nobility; its earliest landowners were peasants who aimed first to escape poverty in their Spanish homeland and then to improve their status. They took their cues about success and prestige from the rentier nobility. In the 1700s the plantation economy was strategically valuable to Europeans, producing sugar, cacao, cotton, tobacco, indigo, and other crops. As the plantation economy grew, the indigenous workforce, the encomienda, became less important. Meanwhile millions of Africans were hunted, purchased, and brought over by force. In 1728 the Spanish crown created the Guipuzcoanna Company of Caracas in association with Basque traders and producers. It gave them the monopoly over Venezuela’s cacao trade, which they expanded to include other products for export. It also stimulated production and improved the infrastructure of roads and ports for exports. Soon Basque farmers, traders, and officials began to gain political control. The monopoly lasted for nearly forty years, but its effects and the Basque presence survived far longer.


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This led to two contrary phenomena in the second half of the 1700s: the belated sale of newly created noble titles and privileges to creoles with a rentier mindset; and a new type of migration from Iberia that included Basques, Catalans, and Canarians with an entrepreneurial mentality. By the early 1800s, both mentalities were visible among the Venezuelan elite. The first group disdained those who engaged directly in production, considering it unworthy of the nobility and the mantuano class, while the other included innovative producers and entrepreneurs. These contradictions were not absolute: more than a few visionary businessmen married the daughters of the creole “nobility.” The rich families that disdained hands-on work made an exception for large-scale export trade, and some became shareholders in the Guipuzcoana Company. The upper class was the roughly 10 percent of whites called mantuanos; legal and social barriers separated them from the artisans, farmers, and dealers who were considered marginal whites and grouped with the pardos (people of mixed African and European descent) who were tainted by the stigma of their ancestors’ slavery. For example, the sons of those who worked in low and servile jobs were forbidden access to the university and the seminary. The Spanish crown began selling noble titles and other privileges belatedly, in the same era when the revolutionaries in France were opposing them. At the same time, the plantation economy and external trade were experiencing tremendous growth, especially because of cacao, and with them came a certain expansion of intellectual and political awareness that would lead Venezuela to declare its independence. By 1810 liberal ideas were already penetrating both political and economic thought. Distinguished figures during the First Republic (1811–12), such as Juan Germán Roscio, were saying clearly that a nation’s wealth relied not on its quantities of gold or silver, but instead on its people’s productivity. Francisco Depons lived in Venezuela as Napoleon’s agent from 1801 to 1804; his impressions of the prevailing rentier mentality contrast it with the productive mindset of the more entrepreneurial Iberians. According to Depons, the hacienda owners usually lived in the cities, not on the land, and depended entirely on the plantation’s proceeds. They considered productive activity to be a dishonor: “The landowner who visits his hacienda once a year is satisfied that he has looked after his interests sufficiently.”3


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Since productive work was seen so negatively, many Venezuelan haciendas were managed by blacks or mulattos, and sometimes by immigrants from the Canary Islands, but never by creoles. The native Venezuelan elite sought prestige through the military, the government, or the judiciary, or were content with an honorific title. “It would be very difficult for [such] people . . . to . . . content themselves with the mere title of farmer.”4 Quite different were a “second class of Europeans resident in Caracas . . . comprised of those who came here to engage in industry or make their fortune. Almost all are from the Basque provinces or Catalonia. Both are equally industrious, but the Basques . . . manage their businesses better. Willing to take economic risks and perserverant in agriculture, they tend to be more successful.”5 “Those from the Canary Islands came more out of necessity than ambition. He turns this same appreciative gaze on people in other parts of Venezuela, where “no one presumes to be of noble lineage or grows conceited with distinction. . . . Industry, activity, and work are the foundation of their sentiments.” The Basques were especially involved in agriculture. In one particular area, he says, “one gets the impression” of being “in a different country, in a comarca inhabited by the hardest-working . . . people. . . . One . . . sees fields of colonial fruit, irrigated artfully, with water mills and superb buildings” for manufacturing and processing. This colonial economic mentality, however, does not explain the current situation in Venezuela. Over two centuries the society and its economic practices have changed, along with the Venezuelans’ worldview. But it helps to understand what happened in Venezuela’s first century as a republic. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Spanish thinker Ortega y Gasset wrote about Spain’s backwardness in terms of productivity and its inability to modernize. He observed that Spain did not experience the eighteenth century, in the sense that the Enlightenment’s cultural revolution did not take hold deeply enough to transform the country’s systems of education and production, and its mentality. Half a century later, he would have seen a productive transformation in Spain, invalidating earlier ideas about identity or an antimodern Spanish culture. Likewise, in Latin America we should ask why two centuries of republican history have not enabled us to overcome the colonial heritage and enter into sustained development. In the rest of this chapter,


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I outline our interpretation of the era before Venezuela became an oil producer, which has parallels elsewhere in Latin America. I then focus on Venezuelan society seventy-five years later. In 1811 Spain rejected Venezuela’s declaration of independence, leading to the longest (1811 to 1825) and bloodiest of all the independence wars in the Americas, one that left behind a decimated population and a ruined economy. As elsewhere in Latin America, the war introduced military establishments on a scale previously unknown during the colonial period, allowing the development of the caudillismo that was to afflict Venezuela until 1960. The caudillos manipulated liberal political thought and made republican institutions into caricatures of their earlier status. The many constitutions became meaningless paper and undercut the potential for a dynamic economy. Between 1830 and 1840 Venezuelans tried but failed to re-create their national institutions and recover economically. For another century, Venezuela had a subsistence economy, except for coffee trading in a few areas. Thus few Venezuelans developed the entrepreneurial and productive behaviors of the bourgeois revolution, or the culture and education that comes with it. Instead of a good life derived from business or production, aided by a modern education, the caudillos offered the peasants only messianic promises, prodded by the rifle. Equally important, many caudillos exercised their vision of economic development by using their government positions to sell or rent natural and mineral resources to foreigners, often agreeing on ninety-nine-year concessions. Venezuela had immense territories where they hoped to find raw materials of strategic interest in Europe. The president and his friends, the most egregious being Guzman Blanco, enriched themselves with rent and commissions on these deals. Thus, between wars, caudillos, and mining and territorial concessions, Venezuela reached the twentieth century as a poor and underpopulated country, without the economic, institutional, entrepreneurial, and educational energies that, in an appropriate combination, could lead to development. In Venezuela this situation changed with oil exploitation—perhaps less in terms of mentality than in volume of new wealth. Even before 1930, this poor rural country of only three million inhabitants had become the world’s second largest exporter of oil. The oil exploitation was a foreign initiative, using foreign capital and technology, with large returns for a succession of authoritarian Venezuelan governments headed by dictators, and those closest to them.


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By the mid-twentieth century, many already believed that Venezuela was a rich country because of oil—a natural gift that required no entrepreneurial spirit. Political activity would come to focus on the struggle over distributing this wealth, which at one point represented 90 percent of exports and 60 percent of the national budget. With democracy, which began in 1958, the distribution of this wealth gradually expanded, but the distorted mentality and economic dynamic continued. Politicians began to rely on promises—and a few successful initiatives to expand public services—to distribute the riches the state held. The country increasingly believed it could become a modern consumer, importing goods with oil dollars, without becoming a modern producer or developing the corresponding modern culture of production. To a certain degree, this was possible for 10 percent of the population when Venezuela had fewer than five million inhabitants, but in today’s Venezuela of twenty-five million inhabitants, how can eleven million workers have dignified, steady jobs, if the country still relies on oil and a rentier culture? After sixty consecutive years of growth (1918 to 1978), and a GDP that grew by more than 6 percent annually, along with considerable social progress, the country began to decline in the mid-1980s and poverty grew alarmingly. In 1996 we began to study ways to overcome poverty. We focused on how three sets of factors—economic, cultural, and institutional— combine to produce poverty, and then to see what changes can overcome it. In the rest of this chapter I describe our empirical work on the issues of culture and attitude toward production. The Study of Cultural Determinants Poverty keeps people from achieving; it prevents them from adopting modern and productive attitudes. Modernity seeks to develop an order where people see the correspondence between effort and sociomaterial improvement, but poverty reverses any such progress. Just as people begin to see the relationship between modern attitudes and well-being, poverty blinds them. This was the situation in Venezuela, where the percentage of poor households doubled over twenty-seven years: from 26 percent in 1975 to 54 percent in 2002. Venezuelans now have the same average income as in 1951. During this period, the GDP grew at 0.9 percent on average and the population at an


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average of 2.6 percent. While countries with similar conditions have managed to reduce or maintain poverty levels, the growth of poverty in Venezuela is becoming chronic and self-perpetuating. Our point of departure in our study is that cultural attitudes do not explain poverty;6 rather, we see a more complex relationship between ways of thinking and acting and sociomaterial conditions. Our focus is a typology of individuals based on three sets of attitudes that identify the modernity of a person’s outlook. Each is tied into a particular dimension: control over reality (the psychosocial dimension), values toward that which is public (social dimension), and trust in the representation of interests (the political–institutional dimension). Using these three dimensions, we developed classifications that allowed us to create a final cultural typology. Locus of Control One of our questions was how people envisioned the relationship between individual action and its results. How do they perceive the possibility that acting in their environment will give them the results they want? We call this the locus of control, and we distinguish two types: external and internal. Individuals with an external locus see control as out of their reach; they think they have little or no capacity to affect their environment. Those with an internal locus of control see themselves as actors who have the capacity to elicit changes in the situation around them. Thus their reality depends on their action. The position that individuals hold toward the authorship of change can be seen on a continuum. On the end where the internal locus of control prevails, we can distinguish two gradations: some attribute their control to individual action (individual control), and others to collective entities, such as the country or society in general (interdependent control). For the second group the emphasis on control no longer falls on the individual but instead is conditioned by social entities. At the other end of the continuum, for those who have an external locus of control, one group attributes the causality of change to extrasocial factors such as luck or destiny (metasocial control) and believes no individual or collective entity has the ability to control events. Those in the second group attribute change to social factors beyond the individual but always within the realm of the social (dependent control). Thus we see four types of control which we use to classify the population.


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Value Preferences In another series of questions we explored the values that guide the ways people differentiate between the public and private realms. We call these value preferences. How do people evaluate the actions that occur outside of their immediate environment? We know that behavior is based largely on context, and in a modern society there is a clear division between the private and the public world. Our focus is on individuals’ attitudes toward the public. We developed a set of dichotomies that describe how the individual decides to act: one set of attitudes about family and personal life, and another about the public and collective context. To establish these dichotomies, we used five variables developed by sociologist Talcott Parsons: affectivity vs. affective neutrality, particularism vs. universalism, adscription vs. performance, diffusiveness vs. specificity, and orientation toward oneself vs. orientation toward the group or collective. As we evaluated and synthesized our data on people’s value preferences, we found that Parson’s variable of adscription vs. performance was the one that most clearly differentiated between behaviors. This is probably because the adscription–performance dichotomy focuses on how people assess others, while the other four dichotomies focus on social regulation. Combining the value preferences with the locus of control, we developed four types of value preferences: traditional, moderate traditional, moderate modern, and modern. The adscription–performance variable allowed us to distinguish between the moderate categories. Trust Finally, we were interested in looking at the role of trust: the belief that others—persons or institutions—could represent one’s own interests outside of one’s immediate social environment. Trust is key to generating associations where one can create and accumulate social capital. Like others who have explored this issue,7 we found that between 70 and 80 percent of Venezuelans do not express trust in people outside their intimate circle. Thus, when discussing the issue of trust, we are really discussing distrust; as we classified the population using this typology, we actually measured the levels of distrust.


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By dividing the cases into percentiles, we created three roughly equal groups. The Cultural Types After using factorial methods to synthesize these three elements— control over reality, value preferences, and trust—we created a typology to classify the population according to the relative modernity of their attitudes, giving rise to six cultural types. Of these types, we identified one that is most oriented toward the modern—the “integrated”—and another that appears to be the least modern, the rezagado, or straggler. The other four types, although they lean toward one pole or the other, generally have mixed characteristics. Rezagados (“stragglers”) were 27.6 percent of our sample. In practical terms, this type refuses modernity, living farthest from it. These people believe they have very little control over reality, and explain situations in terms of luck, God, or fate. Their attitudes are not modern. They tend to resist being specific, to focus on themselves rather than the larger society, to be motivated by emotion, and to evaluate others based on stereotypes. We call them rezagados or stragglers because their beliefs have been little affected by the modernization of Venezuelan society. Tutelados (“wards”) were 10.9 percent of our sample. This group is similar to the stragglers, especially in their value preferences. They consider themselves to have little effect on reality, and locate control in social entities, making them dependent. They will require support from the state or another public organization in order to change their situation. Emanicipados (“the emancipated”), 25.2 percent. These people share with the wards a dependent conception of social control and distrust, but some of their attitudes are more modern, especially the value they place on performance. Movilizados (“the mobilized”), 4.2 percent. This is the smallest group. The main difference between this group and the previous ones is that these people recognize internal, and individual, control toward change. They show medium levels of distrust, but their value orientations point toward the moderate traditional. In a sense, this group finds itself in the middle of a transition from the nonmodern to the modern.


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Desarraigados (“the rootless”), 19 percent. Along with the next group, these people have the most clearly modern attitudes, for they see themselves as having an internal locus of control over change. They also have low levels of distrust and tend toward some thoroughly modern values. Their orientation toward modernity is clear, though they sometimes condition their action on the actions of others. Their low level of trust in institutions makes them “rootless,” with a markedly individual orientation. Integrados (“the integrated”), 13.3 percent. This is the other clearly modern class, which shows clear tendencies in its value preferences and attributes to itself a good level of control over reality, pointing to a type of individualist control. Despite their individualism, these people do tend to trust people and institutions. Now, what do the types mean? We must remember that individuals are not born modern; their interaction with school, family, university, work, and the associative world makes them modern. While primary socialization—internalizing the norms of social conduct—occurs in the family and primary school, people learn to be modern through civic socialization, integrating themselves into the societal dynamic. This requires the active presence of social institutions, from the family and school to the workplace and the public space. As an individual acquires a modern outlook, he or she becomes distanced from poverty. Thus we assume a positive and relatively clear correlation between a person’s social class and their cultural type, at least in a modern society. We see a positive relationship between stratum and cultural type (see Table 17.1), especially in the extreme categories: the cultural types with a more modern orientation tend to correspond with the wealthier strata. Note that 55 percent of the total population is concentrated in the two poorest strata (D and E), but 62 percent of the people in these strata are rezagados (stragglers), the least modern. The better-off classes (strata A and B) include 14 percent of the population. Which cultural types correspond to them? In these strata, 18 percent are “integrated” and 19 percent are “rootless.” These data show the positive relationship between strata and cultural type, though the relationship is not conclusive. A closer look at the other categories in Table 17.1 contradicts these findings. Of the wards, the next-to-least modern, 12 percent are in classes A and B, quite similar to the 14 percent that they represent in the total population. In other words, classes A and B seem to have


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Wards 10.89% 15.61 40.82 31.55 10.50 1.52

Stragglers 27.60% 17.26 44.89 29.30 7.61 0.94

Total 14.33 40.90 30.67 12.09 2.01 12.90 40.14 31.89 12.74 2.33

Emancipated 25.16% 8.71 42.20 34.91 12.16 2.02

Mobilized 4.18% 12.64 38.49 29.72 16.27 2.87

Rootless 18.91% 14.10 37.12 30.54 15.46 2.78

Integrated 13.27%

Illiterate 3.63 No formal education 9.17 Primary 44.20 High school 28.82 Technical 6.79 University 7.39

Total 4.32 12.73 48.53 25.29 4.47 4.66

Stragglers 27.60% 4.86 8.52 46.23 27.60 6.95 5.84

Wards 10.89% 3.00 8.28 42.49 30.92 7.29 8.02

Emancipated 25.16%

2.80 6.11 41.93 32.03 10.64 6.48

Mobilized 4.18%

3.16 7.77 41.70 29.60 8.08 9.69

Rootless 18.91%

3.33 6.95 41.03 31.09 7.47 10.14

Integrated 13.27%

Table 17.2 Percent Distribution of the Population by Educational Level and Cultural Type Educational Level

E D C B A

Socioeconomic Level

Table 17.1 Percent Distribution of the Population by Socioeconomic Level and Cultural Type

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about the same proportion of wards as the overall population. The same is true for the rootless and the integrated, the two most modern types: 51 percent of each group is in classes D and E, not that different from the percentage of the total population in these strata. Let us now look at the relationship with educational level, in Table 17.2. Of the stragglers, 65.6 percent completed only primary school; not surprisingly this figure exceeds the 57 percent in the total population. For the most modern cultural types, the relationship is positive with educational levels above primary school: 43 percent of the total population has had more than a primary school education, as has 49 percent of the mobilized, 47 percent of the rootless and 49 percent of the integrated. Still, we get mixed signals when we examine the rest of the table. Among the wards, the percentage with a high school education or more is almost the same as in the national population (14 percent). It is interesting that the percentages of people in the lowest two educational categories who are either rootless or integrated are quite similar to both the total and to percentages in other less modern groups, such as the wards. If we look at the percentages of each type in each educational level, we note that as we move toward the more modern cultural types, we find higher percentages in the higher educational levels. Looking at those with a primary education, we see an increasingly linear tendency; as the type moves toward the more modern, a lower percentage is concentrated in this level. It would appear that having more than an elementary education is crucial for adopting modern attitudes. But we also know that those who reach these levels are not the poorest, since they need a certain minimum of money to complete even that much education. Several boxes in these tables could be called “dissonant,” as they combine relative poverty with a modern type, or relative comfort with a less modern type, and some others have negligible relevance. This leads us to suggest that the relationship between the modern personality and the productive personality could depend on factors that go beyond the microsocial. So far, our unit of observation has been the individual, and our conclusions from this data take this into account, but this does not imply that the phenomenon is necessarily individual. In other words, some elements that are institutional or societal could also be favoring or inhibiting people’s sociomaterial success.


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We focus especially on those cases where the person has all the attributes to be successful—a modern orientation and career studies—but for some reason is not. Taking all those who have a professional education and are either rootless or integrated—those with the most modern attitudes—only 65 percent are in the A and B strata. If we focus on the integrated and the rootless, we find 40 percent in strata C and D. We suggest that, in times of less poverty, these people would have more likely been in the A and B strata, but the economic crisis has lowered their income. The relationship between cultural types and educational levels, while not what we hoped, does suggest that level of education may have a stronger relationship with the types than do the socioeconomic strata. The argument is clear: while socioeconomic status does not endow the individual with a modern personality, that personality does increase the probability of material success. In other words, affluence does not make us modern, but being modern should make us affluent. More education should endow the individual with a modern attitude, for it encourages individual autonomy—the internal locus—in the face of problems. Though it is in crisis, the Venezuelan educational system remains the only mechanism for disseminating modernity, because the national crisis has reduced or suffocated the other spaces, such as formal and productive work, the family, and political and civil associations. We conducted several other tests to confirm the relationship between education and modern attitudes.We correlated several variables with cultural type and saw that educational variables had a positive effect on the modern cultural type. We also explored subcategories within the cultural types to determine their internal attributes. We found that some cultural types were common to all social groups, including the extremely poor and housewives, but the groups linked to higher educational levels (such as urban professionals and salaried employees) fit better with the modern cultural types. Reflections From the Study: Sociocultural Change The results of this study,8 as well as the ideas and debates that it generated, confirm several of our hunches, such as the role of education in shaping modern, productive attitudes. But they also raise some


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concerns. How do we overcome poverty when the attitudes toward productivity do not guarantee that will be possible? How can we promote change when some of the elites—those with modern attitudes and high levels of education—find themselves in poverty? Why, after years of democracy and oil exploitation, do Venezuelans in all social classes still not hold the values of modernity? At the beginning of this chapter I described Venezuela’s situation when oil exploitation began: its culture and elite lacked a productive outlook. This does not imply, however, that the coming of oil left Venezuelan culture intact. Ramon Velazquez describes how, beginning in 1917, peasants moved away from their homes to work in the oil industry camps, in “the first peaceful mobilization of the Venezuelan people.” Through this process, “The peasant began to know the value of a salary, a work schedule, shoes for his bare feet, electric light at night, school for his children, and a hospital for the sick.” In addition, “The first labor nuclei began to form that would later become the unions . . . the professions that [had been] almost useless, such as the engineer, surveyor, and architect, began to be valued,” and contractors emerged to work for the oil companies. “In other words, the nucleus of a new class, of the middle class, was born.”9 This kind of modernization sees development as consumption and not as a change in production; it also points to modernity as an individual experience and not as a social project. That is, after almost a half century of exploiting oil revenues, Venezuelans were skilled in science, art, technology, and industry. But these groups emerged only because individually they took advantage of modernity. The national productive apparatus and institutions continued to function in the rentier manner inherited from preoil Venezuela, now shored up by oil income. In other words, instead of providing an opportunity for productive investment, oil sustained earlier mentalities, now amid a culture of consumption. Fairbanks and Lindsay show10 that people in both the public and private sector hold the same ideas on many issues, among them the creation of wealth, competitiveness, trust in the government, commercial liberalization, organizational effectiveness, and the relationship between work and achievement. Moreover, among these common ideas, the predominant positions are paternalistic, protectionist, and mistrustful of the government. Only 18 percent identify themselves with positions that are critical of protectionism and are


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disposed to trust the government and see innovation as helpful in creating wealth. When the populist model based on oil revenue failed in the 1980s, we found ourselves in a society with a modernity based on consumption, increasing poverty, and little motivation to make the sociocultural changes necessary to promote productivity. Individual initiatives toward modernity were possible in an economy subsidized by oil, but when the crisis struck, and the standard of living fell, many of these initiatives suffered. This is the contrast between the poor Venezuela afflicted by a quarter-century crisis and the Venezuela that had earlier been a positive example for its neighbors. Given these circumstances, it is clear that to overcome poverty, we need sociocultural change, not only to foster productive attitudes among individuals, but also to establish truly modern institutions and projects to channel these attitudes. Two elements—institutions and the elite—are crucial to support this change. Institutions allow people to arrange desirable and stable forms of social interaction. They establish order, but more important, they promote and formalize social change. As Douglass North has written,11 institutions channel individual conduct through a set of norms, procedures, and ethical codes of conduct, but they also establish incentives for human action. Because society acts on its individuals through institutions, they become the space where social control is formalized and where society manifests its plurality and tensions; that is, when the society is autonomous and free. Elites can help the society understand its place in history, and can invest their knowledge, resources, and leadership in it. Their privilege is precisely the ability to offer something to the group, not merely their advantages compared to those of others. Thus the elite cannot be understood apart from the group and the group needs the elite to “express itself” in historical terms. Action For Sociocultural Change Considering the long term, I propose seven ways that sociocultural change can help overcome poverty, by leading to models of behavior consonant with modernity and thus developing more productive attitudes within society. These changes must involve every institution, formal and informal.


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1. Sociocultural change cannot occur without substantive change in the sociomaterial foundations of Venezuelan society, because they are linked to the cultural determinants of poverty. The first step is to reactivate productivity, as the country’s socioeconomic life is the motor of its social and material well-being. We must also control those economic factors that directly affect the maintenance of families: inflation, interest, income, employment. 2. Schools are key to socialization. Countries that have managed to rise out of poverty have engaged in deep educational reform so they can guarantee autonomy to individuals, expand their knowledge, and prepare them for work. In Venezuela, the school is the only socializing institution between family and society; it can correct or complement the education received in the home. Currently all the poor receive is basic literacy, so it would be very valuable for children to remain in school longer. It is also important to design policies to improve the efficacy of the system, and the quality of the curriculum, teachers, and classrooms. Educational reforms are crucial if education is to help develop a more productive economy. 3. Official employment is also crucial. Only three out of every ten Venezuelan workers, in both public and private sectors, have jobs. Work provides far more than simple material maintenance, allowing families a dignified life; it also allows people to contribute to society. After family and school, work is a key space where individuals finish their civic socialization and spend time. In workplaces, we demonstrate many of the values we acquire in the family, such as discipline, honesty, and respect, putting them to productive use. When people do not have official employment, they seek to extend their familial world in the form of work. When the society is appropriately institutionalized and productive, very productive cooperative systems and local economies can grow from familial relations. In the situation of enormous poverty, however, unofficial employment is not productive. People merely work to survive, missing out on the socializing and productive effects they would otherwise experience. 4. Associations are vital. They include NGOs and volunteer-based organizations, as well as those that represent both private and public interests: from the Red Cross to the Dividendo Voluntario Para La Comunidad (Voluntary Dividend for the Community), and to chambers of commerce, trade unions, and social organi-


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zations. While official employment helps people develop their personal capacity, associations develop their “public” qualities. In other words, they help people see public affairs as interesting. Far more than mere charity and government, work within associations also allows people to articulate their interests with colleagues toward a public or private agenda. This world of associations is crucial to the modern socialization and struggle against poverty that we have described. 5. Associations with political ends—or parties—are also crucial, though they have been held responsible for the crisis, and have lost much of their legitimacy. Political parties are in fact responsible, for they act directly on the public agenda and their ranks contain present and future leaders. The parties’ great flaw has been their identification with private interests, and their great task is to reestablish legitimacy in the political process. Parties should lead in helping socialize the people politically. They should teach, motivate, and maintain a functioning system for representing people’s interests. 6. The state is another crucial factor, especially in Venezuela, where its status as owner and distributor of the oil income makes it the driving force of modernization and development. The fact that oil rentierism and populist clientelism caused the crisis does not mean that the solution lies in neoliberal formulas that suggest the state withdraw from the private sphere. Because the private sphere depends on the distribution of oil income and on the populist system of conciliation, it is currently subordinate to the state. The solution lies in strengthening the state and making the private sphere more autonomous. Thus the state must decide how to remain in the center of the nation, while sharing this space with private actors, like associations. The state, and not just the government, should strengthen democracy as a system in which political groups can cooperate and represent the people’s interests. That is, it must respond to social demands not through clientelism but by creating agreements. The state must bring together Venezuelans to build the public agenda, but it must also impose order so people can do the necessary work. Just as we expect people to be honest, hardworking, and just, and companies to be productive, and associations to be representative, we must expect the state to guarantee public functioning, without confusing regulation and legislation with intervention


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and control. As the force that articulates and implements public policies, the state has a responsibility to direct the strategies of economic development: eliminate the dependency on oil revenue, diversify the productive apparatus, and create legislation on related issues. It is must also develop and maintain political/ institutional spaces, where many functional networks depend directly on the state. 7. Public institutions, which reflect the state, should be models of democratic cohabitation: they should be egalitarian, just, and transparent, and demonstrate that private individuals should care about public life. Above all, they should be inclusive, neutral, effective, and focused. And, because they serve the public, they must be efficient, and not burden the budget. In conclusion, our work is showing that behind poverty in Venezuela, certain conditions are inhibiting the relationship between effort and values and social and material well-being. Everything indicates that acquiring knowledge does help people to become more productive, but the class system does not reflect this because the social strata are not permeable. Our findings lead us to conclude that poverty distorts the relationship between values and achievement, since poverty weakens the modern institutional spaces that should support people in living out their attitudes. In other words, modernity proclaims that we can determine our own destiny. If we can, then it is crucial to cultivate values and attitudes that are consonant with productivity, but they are not the only factor in overcoming poverty. Notes 1. Proyecto Pobreza (“Project Poverty”), http://omega.manapro.com/editorpobreza/ 2. Detrás de la pobreza: Creencias de los grupos socioeconómicos en Venezuela (“Behind the Poverty: The Beliefs of Socioeconomic Groups in Venezuela”) (Caracas: 2004). 3. Francisco Depons, Viaje a la parte oriental de la Tierra Firme en la América Meridional (“Journey to the Eastern Part of Tierra Firme in Meridional America”) (Caracas: Banco Central de Venezuela, 1960), 84. 4. Ibid., 85. 5. Ibid., 229 6. Project Poverty has demonstrated the link between the growth of poverty and the decline of productivity. 7. Roberto Zapata, Valores del venezolano (“The Venezuelan’s Values”) (Caracas: Conciencia, 1996), 21.


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8. Our work, “Detrás de la pobreza” (“Behind Poverty”), includes a more detailed analysis of the data, and a review of Venezuela’s institutional history and its relationship to culture. 9. Ramon J. Velasquez, “El venezolano y su proceso histórico” (“The Venezuelan and His Historical Process”), in Balance Psicosocial del Venezolano del Siglo XX, ed., Francisco Herrera Luque Foundation (Caracas: Grijalbo, 1997), 28 10. Michael Fairbanks and Stace Lindsay, Plowing the Sea: Nurturing the Hidden Sources of Growth in the Developing World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press), 188–220. 11. Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981).


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Part VI Orthodox/Eastern Europe


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18 Which Past Matters? Culture and Economic Development in Eastern Europe After 19891 JANOS MATYAS KOVACS

It is hard to imagine a better historical moment for reflecting on the relationship between culture and economic development in Eastern Europe than the period between 1989 and 2005. During this period, eight formerly communist countries radically changed their development trajectories by implementing the overlapping projects of postcommunist transformation and European integration within a worldwide context of globalization. These projects are veritable cultural revolutions. The interplay of the fading Soviet culture with the emerging European one in a global framework offers the researcher exciting insights into the ways culture affects economic development. European integration is not a logically inevitable continuation of de-Sovietization but one of the several noncommunist futures of Eastern European societies. In order to adjust to European norms, these societies must renounce not only much of their communist past but also some of their “globalized” (Americanized) present. They are “returning to Europe,” to use the 1989 slogan, but not only from communism. Therefore, the region provides the analyst with a cultural blend that consists of at least three major ingredients: Sovietism, Americanism, and Europeanism. And there is certainly a fourth

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ingredient: a great variety of precommunist (distant) pasts filtered through a great variety of communist (recent) pasts. Introduction: Accession as a Trump The dominant narrative rests on six slightly simplified assumptions: 1. In terms of economic development, Eastern Europe’s two historical subregions, Central Europe (more precisely, its eastern half, which is called East-Central Europe, or ECE)2 on the one hand, and Eastern/Southern Europe3 on the other, present significantly different levels and patterns. 2. The first group of countries is moving safely and rapidly toward capitalism/Europe/the West/modernity, while the second is taking insecure steps and experiences repeated relapses. 3. The differences between the development levels and patterns originate in centuries-old cultural features that survived the communist era. 4. In the ECE subregion, the lion’s share of these features were/are imported from the West, whereas in Eastern/Southern Europe the indigenous cultures play the decisive role. 5. Geographical proximity to the West is critical to acculturation. 6. The diversity in development levels and patterns is reflected in the fact that the ECE subregion was invited to join the European Union first. Accordingly, ECE, the “favorite son,” moves along a straight road that connects its precommunist past, via the Soviet intermezzo, with its European future. The countries in the region that were the most advanced before the communist takeover (the Central Europeans) are also the most advanced today. The communist episode did not rearrange the ranking order: the most advanced/Westernized/modern countries in Eastern Europe developed the most liberal/reformist communist regimes and thus coped most successfully with the tasks of postcommunist transformation. The more Western a country is geographically, the more Westernized it becomes. The more Westernized a country is, the more modern it becomes. This iron law could not be broken even by Soviet imperialism. Look at the list of the firstround accession countries in Eastern Europe: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia.


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In this chapter I stress the enormous inflexibility of the dominant narrative. The logic of that narrative is transitive: just as the West has always been superior to the East, the Western half of the latter is superior to its Eastern one. The countries, regions, and subregions are located on a cultural/civilizational slope or cascade, and they usually do not exchange places. This presumption is “authenticated” by the results of the most systematic/scientific measurement and comparison of developmental features ever made: the entrance examination to the EU. The Eastern/Southern subregion has been carefully weighed in the scales and found wanting. Yet if one complicates the dominant narrative, either by referring to the noneconomic motives of selection or to the kind of economic rationality embodied in the examiners’ measurement techniques, then some room will emerge for an alternative interpretation. That interpretation will place more emphasis on how the cultural diversity of national communisms has affected the diversity of the examination results. It will probably also challenge part of the results by identifying short- and medium-term—frequently accidental—effects instead of focusing on secular determinants. My principal goal in this chapter is to formulate a few hypotheses to support this rival narrative by illuminating differences in nations’ determination and ability to pass the EU test. I assume that these differences are highly dependent upon the direct communist prehistory of the given country. At the outset, let me make a few remarks on my main concepts. First, I use the concept of culture in a broad sense: values, habits, lifestyles, knowledge, skills, etc. and the institutions in which they are embedded. The notion of economic development contains a series of qualitative attributes, including economic institutions and policies and their cultural specifics. I will interpret the notion in the context of an “ideal type” of Western modernity; with some reluctance, I see development as tantamount to approaching that ideal. Nevertheless, because the cultural history of Eastern Europe is preoccupied with the question of whether Orthodoxy can breed capitalism, I will also touch on the concept of “multiple modernities.” Second, I will examine the causal relationship between culture and economic development only in one direction. I will not ask how development leads to cultural change or how cultures resist development. My choice is pragmatic; it does not reflect any “culturalist” bias. Third, we cannot ignore the aura of “magic” that seems to be


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invoked by many definitions of Eastern Europe and its subregions. However suspect that magic may be, we must understand the symbolism of the dominant narrative before we can challenge it. Finally, my conclusion rests on a distinction between the recent and distant pasts. By “recent past” I mean the communist era, while “distant past” covers many centuries stretching back to early capitalism. Mapping the Subregions: From Dreaming about Development to Engineering It Eastern Europe has never been known for a consensus among its citizens about the history of the region. A common destiny? Except for a latent hostility toward the Soviets, the nations of the region rarely demonstrated spiritual or moral cohesion even under communist rule. Apart from the cataclysmic days in 1956, 1968, and 1981, when intraregional solidarity materialized in a few street demonstrations and some humanitarian aid, the idea of common family or common roots was preached only by a few dissenters. The idea of Central Europe arose as an expression of felt superiority to Russia and the Balkans (or any country labeled Eastern- or Southeast European). These feelings were justified by a certain strand of historiography, which used a three-area (West/Center/East) model to interpret the long-term evolution of capitalism in Europe. Some went so far as to break with the traditional inferiority complex of the Eastern Europeans, arguing that East-Central Europe became “more Western” under communism than the noncommunist half of Europe, where genuine European culture degenerated in the course of the twentieth century. By rediscovering the “center” of Europe, such writers as Vaclav Havel, György Konrad, Milan Kundera, and Czeslaw Milosz intended to move their region closer to the West, that is, farther from Russia—symbolically at least, since the chances for real integration were negligible at that time. But from within this effort at emancipation some benevolent Westerners were happy to hear a desperate request: “Please adopt us!” And sometimes the message included an arrogant mix of critique and promise: You are so lucky to have us poor guardians of true European culture in your neighborhood. If you accept the “West of the East” into the real “West,” you will gain far more than dirt, crime, and poverty. Soon the West will see a flow of genuine


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European values from the Eastern reservoir, some originally Western and others originally Eastern. The West would get Kaffeehauskultur as well as untouched folklore, a high esteem for the written word as well as authentic entrepreneurial instincts, historical sense, irony, creativity, solidarity, and a stubborn quest for truth. You will profit from us, Kundera concluded, but our reintegration is primarily your moral duty: at Yalta you let the Russians kidnap us; so please, redeem yourselves now. Some who could have easily been included in the concept of “Central Europe”—for example, Romanians, Serbs, and Bulgarians—were not. The “Central Europeans” instructed them to stay where they had always been: in the East. The message was hard to misunderstand: Queue up and wait; we will go West first. If you are patient enough, we may help you once we arrive there. Until then, you had better work on your Westernness. You are not yet sufficiently modern. Ironically, the idea of Central Europe was not received with enthusiasm everywhere in the imagined subregion either. In Poland, for instance, quite a few intellectuals feared that, instead of full rehabilitation (i.e., Europeanness without an adjective), such a concept would legitimize a sort of second-rate position in Europe between Europe proper and “Asiatic” Russia. In their view, “Central Europe” would have remained culturally too close to “West Asia.” Anyway, we do not have to return to Europe through the concept of Central Europe, they contended, since we Poles are, and have always been, Europeans. Many Yugoslav intellectuals followed the same logic, asking, in effect, why they should join a center that lies farther from the West in terms of consumption and freedom of travel, than they—in the alleged periphery—do. Thus the idea of Central Europe proved to be a retroactive utopia. While truly expressing the irresistible desire of nations under Soviet rule for a Drang nach Westen, this utopia endangered what was called their “community of suffering” by dividing them into a more and a less Westernized subregion, the West (of the East) and the rest, to adapt Samuel Huntington’s phrase. In 1989 this utopia seemed to vanish for good. The unprecedented synchrony of the revolutions throughout Eastern Europe dulled the edge of the Central Europe thesis for a while and rendered superfluous all debates on developmental differences between the countries of the region. The collapse of the Soviet empire seemed to wash away the boundaries between the “Central” and the “non-Central”


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subregions of Eastern Europe. The fact that the Eastern European nations broke with communism and started dismantling it at the same time and in a similar way created the impression that Sovietization had left deeper traces on this part of the world than had precommunist history. Soviet-style homogenization, even if it lasted only four decades, seemed to have offset much of the region’s centuries-long cultural heterogeneity. Furthermore, in the light of then-prevailing expectations that the former communist countries would be quickly accepted into the European Community, “Europe” overshadowed “Central Europe.” The notion of Eastern Europe won its battle and withdrew from the war of concepts in political and cultural geography to find its place in pure geography. During the first half of the 1990s, however, it became clear that the European integration of ex-communist countries would take decades rather than years. Right after the 1989 revolution Western Europe proved unwilling or unable to absorb Eastern Europe as a whole, and it is still reluctant to make an allembracing gesture of symbolic absorption. Meanwhile, the idea of Central Europe (or East-Central Europe) has gained support as observers describe the conspicuous differences that emerge in postcommunist development between the two sides of the postulated Central versus non-Central divide. Many analysts talked about re emergence, regarding the new diversity of developmental patterns as historically determined facts that were not in the least surprising. They distinguished between the “diligent” and the “lazy” transformers, the frontrunners in decommunization or de-Sovietization and those who were lagging behind, the states committed to “liberal democracy” and those remaining under “national–communist authoritarian” rule, the “marketeers” and the “interventionists,” the “globalists” and the “isolationalists.” By and large, these distinctions seemed to correspond with the old cleavages between the “Westernizers” and the “autochthonists,” the Western Christians and the Orthodox, or in general between the “advanced” and the “backward,” the “European” and the “Asian.” The ironic journalistic metaphor of the great Soviet deep freezer that, instead of killing all kinds of precommunist cultures, preserved them in suspended animation, even found its way into scholarly works. According to the metaphor, the cultures revived after the last communist apparatchik unplugged the freezer.


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This approach could not have become so influential had it not recently been reinforced by a powerful political project, the eastern enlargement of the European Union. Two decades ago, when Kundera and other noncommunist intellectuals took the first steps on the slippery slope of cultural geography, they could hardly have suspected that their fragmented thoughts would evolve into an official political doctrine of the West. Currently, the terms Central Europe or East-Central Europe (ECE) serve as names of departments in foreign ministries, international organizations, multinational firms, and NGOs, and also appear in titles of a great variety of research programs, media projects, and cultural initiatives. Even the rival acronym CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) emphasizes the difference between the “Center” and the “East.” Today, the controversial idea of Central Europe is being put into practice. Moreover, it is applied in a large-scale social experiment in a vast laboratory called the European Union (EU). It divides Eastern Europe into several rounds of accession countries, and it places Russia at the end of the line. How this happened can be summarized briefly: since the mid-1980s, Central Europe has become a specific political project, as professional policy makers stole the show from the intelligentsia, and the neopopulist left and right expropriated and misapplied part of the left-liberal argument in the former communist countries. Most Eastern Europeans are convinced that passing the entrance examination to the EU is a life-or-death issue: those who get stuck in the examination room will slide down to the third world. The project is par excellence political, no longer a matter of common cultural roots, aesthetic and moral traditions, or historical justice in general. No one talks much about literary styles, religious rituals, or rural cuisine, or about the merits of the Germans and the Jews. In preparing for a future political victory, it may be counterproductive to speak too eloquently of past tragedies. The whole cultural mythology has been put in parentheses. What remains is basically a catalog of pragmatic success and failure stories of the postcommunist transformation and European integration. We stabilized our economies more quickly, privatized our firms to a larger extent, wrote more liberal constitutions, sustained social peace longer, adopted the acquis communautaire more thoroughly, than you did. This is how the Czech, Hungarian, Polish, or


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other Central European transformers speak to their Eastern/Southern European colleagues. Central Europe is the name for success in capitalist development in general, no matter how much or how little the targeted system is free-market oriented, corporatist, republican, or multicultural. It is exactly the imprecision and particularistic thrust (or, less euphemistically, the national self-centeredness and myopia) of the Central Europe concept from the 1980s on that makes it possible for political entrepreneurs to employ it successfully today. The soil was well prepared for them: albeit unintentionally, Kundera and his followers offered the region’s postcommunist policy makers a manageable set of countries for future use or abuse. The boundaries of this set were flexible enough to drop Slovakia and Croatia and include Slovenia and the Baltic states (and rehabilitate Slovakia) at different points in time. This flexibility also helped transform regional identity making into a project that is more about lobbying than dreaming of emancipation. Central Europe is designed and engineered by political professionals in a calculating mode. In the 1980s hardly anyone among them was engaged in rediscovering the region.4 By and large, they are pragmatists who lack the courage and innocence of their predecessors. This is why I talk about expropriating the original discourse. In terms of Realpolitik, the political entrepreneurs of today may prove to be more efficient than the prophets of yesterday. Back in the 1980s, Havel, Konrad, Kundera, and Milosz spoke about the greatness of a whole subregion (even if vaguely defined); today, the political elites under postcommunism prefer to stress the eminence of their own nations. The former celebrated the moral cohesion between the countries of Central Europe; the latter were ready to forget the “spirit of Visegrad” overnight once Brussels flashed the light of individual privileges during the accession process. And so far as relations with the second- and third-round countries are concerned, compassion has vanished even on the level of political rhetoric. The widespread slogan of “Joining the EU with national pride” has little to do with a joint—cosmopolitan—legacy. Rather, it reflects those platitudes of romantic national identity that people in this part of the world have always used to disrupt attempts at peaceful national coexistence based on mutual respect. Cosmopolitanism, a treasured source of pride for those reinventing Central Europe in the 1980s, is being replaced by nationalist insistence on the beauties of the Polish countryside, Czech industrial culture, or Hungarian ingenuity.


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The Dominant Narrative: Pitfalls of Justification Those who are disturbed by the moral and ideological convolutions of symbolic geography in Eastern Europe may raise a down-to-earth question that has remained unanswered since the first concepts of Central Europe were propounded back in the nineteenth century by Prince Metternich and Friedrich List: Where does Central Europe begin and end? This is exactly the question that was deliberately blurred in the 1980s. And today? Do we have reliable indicators of comparative economic, political, and sociocultural history in Eastern Europe, including current affairs, that would allow us to draw a boundary between its subregions? Most experts on Eastern European affairs would agree that the frontier between the subregions has never been so clear. In EastCentral Europe, democratic elections are held regularly, the rule of law is constitutionally granted, human rights are more or less observed, civil society is gaining ground, a great majority of state-owned firms have been privatized, the economies have opened up, and the markets have been deregulated. And the “transformational recession” has switched to fast growth. Undoubtedly the new regimes are still fragile and display the weaknesses of a mixed precommunist and communist legacy with a variety of contemporary capitalist practices. Also, severe business fluctuations, social polarization, authoritarian tendencies, and populist/nationalist lurches have accompanied the transformation process. However, in this subregion they did not result in abusive democracy, new economic centralization, social crisis, or large-scale ethnic violence, as happened in most parts of Eastern/Southern Europe, particularly the former Yugoslavia (with the exception of Slovenia) and many ex-Soviet republics. As a rule, the latter subregion is stigmatized by the hoary term Balkanization, even when applied to Ukraine or Belarus. A gray zone between the two subregions can be constructed as well; for the time being, it includes Bulgaria and Romania (and possibly, Croatia). The first two have already received a formal invitation to accede to the EU in 2007. Simply stated, the countries of the Eastern/Southern subregion are less “Western” than those in ECE because their transition from communism has been slower and more painful. No doubt about it, there are spectacular differences between the records of the two subregions. Let me begin with the growth rates. In terms of GDP growth,


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Slovenia and the Baltic countries completed their recovery before the turn of the millennium, but the others did not return to their 1989 GDP levels until recently. Some of the latter (e.g., Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Moldova) are stuck in the middle of the road. At the same time, the gray zone is fairly large, including the Baltic states (i.e., the first-rounders), Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and even Macedonia and Russia. If growth in the ECE economies were to slow (which has happened in recent years) and the economies in the other subregion were to speed up, then some of the latter could rapidly catch up in terms of GDP per capita. In 2002 the level of development in Latvia, Lithuania, and even Poland was lower than in Croatia; conversely, levels in Russia and Bulgaria nearly reached that of Latvia. Still, it is clear that the development levels of Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia stand out above all other states of Eastern Europe, despite the many distortions of statistical accounting. If we look more closely at the economic preconditions of entry to the European Union (EU) as stated by the acquis (the EU’s body of rights and obligations) and the Copenhagen criteria, we see systemic—predominantly legal–organizational—requirements rather than mandatory targets of economic performance, minimum levels of economic development, or detailed rules of economic behavior. Thus, to put it simply, a country may overtake its neighbor in the accession race even if its economic growth is currently slower, its GDP per capita has always been lower, and its entrepreneurs are less risk-taking, provided it is faster than its neighbor in creating a sound legal framework for the market. For the sake of brevity, let us accept GDP per capita as the most appropriate indicator of a country’s level of economic development. Where does the economic performance behind this indicator originate? How strong is its predictive power? These questions are crucial if one is to test the explanatory force of the dominant narrative. For instance, if the 2002 level of GDP in the Czech Republic is mainly due to its level in 1945 to 1948, and if today’s level is a solid guarantee of further steady progress toward the development levels of the most advanced Western countries, then papers like this one are on the wrong track. But we have no reliable comparative works on the economic history of Eastern Europe in the period since World War II and so we have no ready answers to the above questions. Let us improvise a bit to illustrate the gravity of the problem, continuing with the example of the Czech Republic. In 1939 its eco-


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nomic performance equaled that of France. Except for an aborted reform program between 1966 and 1968, the centrally planned economy remained intact throughout the communist era. Theoretically, it could have experimented with market socialism, tolerated small-scale private entrepreneurship and the informal sector, or opened up the economy to the West (to mention only three patterns of economic development in communist Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia). Instead, the Czechoslovak leaders kept their eyes fixed on macroeconomic balances and avoided reform moves that might have resulted in galloping inflation, a sharp decline in growth, or skyrocketing foreign debts. As a consequence, unlike its neighbors, Czechoslovakia departed from communism in a crisis-free position. However, it did not experience the purging effects of socialist reforms that liberated many citizens in the more liberal communist countries from values, skills, and habits prompted by the command economy. In 1989 Czechoslovakia embarked upon the postcommunist transformation without an army of ambitious and experienced small entrepreneurs, networks of East–West joint ventures, or a government aware of the difference between real and pseudoprivatization and willing to take painful austerity measures to deregulate the economy. The country is still struggling to offset these legacies of the local version of communism. Can one maintain that in Czechoslovakia the prewar level of development essentially explains the current position of the Czech Republic among the frontrunners in Eastern Europe? In my view, the similarity between the current development levels of this group and their precommunist levels is misleading. For the Czechs the similar GDP per capita figures mean a major deterioration of their relative position, but for the Poles or the Hungarians they mean a substantial improvement. Furthermore, Slovenia shows how communism created an opportunity to upset the hierarchy of development by overtaking some of the countries in the region that were doing well before World War II. Maybe the Czech Republic would be worse off today if its starting position in 1945 to 1948 had not been so advantageous. But maybe not, because a less sheltered status might have led to a greater affinity for market reforms under communism. Obviously, communism had complicated effects. To consider the Czech case again: while communism largely contributed to the country’s falling behind the West, it left an ambiguous heritage for its successor, one in which capitalist virtues were relatively weak.


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Restarting capitalist development in 1989 would probably have been even harder if certain elements of prewar economic culture—demand for education, respect for hard work, propensity to save—had not survived to some extent. Nevertheless, these virtues were largely wasted, and if communism had lasted a decade longer, the Czech Republic could well have found itself today among the “laggards” (perhaps in the company of another hard-line regime, the former East Germany) who deserve the label of Central Europe purely in terms of geography. Applying the same logic to the future, we can return to the second question above: Is the 1989 or the 2002 development level of the Czech Republic actually a good predictor of its capitalist progress in the coming years or decades? My answer is a cautious “no.” A delay in the upswing of capital imports and the resulting relatively slow increase in labor productivity support this negative conclusion. One of the test cases is Hungary, where a massive inflow of foreign capital, including several transnational companies, during the 1990s served as the engine of economic growth and cultural change. The other test case is Poland, which excelled in the upsurge of local entrepreneurship. The Czech Republic joined in these trends rather late. Of course, economic development depends on a whole series of important cultural variables, from religious convictions through migration habits to consumption behavior, which also lurk in the background of productivity or import indices. I chose the examples of foreign direct investment and local entrepreneurship not only because they functioned as significant factors of development but also because of their rich cultural content. These cultural factors originate at least as much in communism as in the precommunist era. For instance, it would be a dangerous simplification to see traditional antistatism and xenophobia as explaining why Poland gave priority to small and medium-size enterprises in the first half of the 1990s and, in the privatization process, to indigenous owners, including employees. Solidarnosc, I believe, is a better explanation. Similarly, Hungary’s openness to foreign investment after 1989 might be regarded as a legacy of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, but the desperate search by the Kádár regime for legitimacy in the West after 1956 is perhaps a more significant reason, even if it was the Austrian chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, who first encouraged “goulash communism.”


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Communism (and the Globe) Matters Let us try a hypothetical experiment. Suppose the Soviet empire did not collapse between 1989 and 1992. Gorbachev adopts Deng’s strategy of radical liberalization under continuing communist dictatorship. The war does not break out in Yugoslavia. Under these circumstances, the country groups in the former Eastern Bloc might show an unexpected configuration today. I would not be surprised to find the levels of economic development ordered as follows: on top, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, followed by Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, with the Czech Republic, East Germany, and Romania at the bottom. Hence, the actual configuration described earlier must result from a multitude of interacting historical currents that originated in the communist world. One may presume that these interactions were largely accidental, with plenty of unintended consequences: fortunate ones for the ECE subregion and unfortunate ones for the other group. (Fortunate because otherwise it would have been difficult for the geographically Central Europeans to show why they should form the vanguard of accession in Eastern Europe.) Interactions and coincidences are essential because there are many potential cultural factors and the traditional explanations do not work well. For instance, ethnic homogeneity may facilitate a smooth political transition but prove counterproductive in fostering economic development. Proximity to Western Europe will probably lose its importance in the era of globalization. Inviting foreign capital was not a necessary condition of development in Slovenia; conversely, a resolute political break with communism in 1989 was not a sufficient condition in the Czech Republic. Rapid deregulation and stabilization at the beginning of the transformation backfired in Russia. Even complete assimilation (East Germany) is no panacea. All in all, the relatively successful transformation packages were largely contingent on the exit status of the given communist regime and its cultural microcosm. Which cultural variables are most frequently invoked as causes? Religious values, ethnic character, attitude toward the state, civic virtues, and individualism versus collectivism are a few. Often these variables are linked to institutions: church, nation, state, or to the social actors who actually reproduce, maintain, mediate and carry these goods. Over the past two centuries, the different schools of Eastern


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European historiography have agreed on a set of variables under the theory of “belated modernization,” Backwardness vis-à-vis the West was divided into two categories: a less and a more backward group of countries, half-periphery and full periphery. The half-periphery generally embraced the Habsburg monarchy. The historical analysts suggested a series of contrasting factors for understanding East-West divergence in state and nation building, market constitution, and urban development. They bridged the two extremes by attributing intermediate solutions to the Central European model, which came to be seen as a collection of transitions, hybrids, in-between constellations, dialectical twists, and ironic ambiguities. If the West was characterized by parliamentary democracy and the East by autocracy, the political regime of the Center was “oligarchic democracy” or “parliamentary authoritarianism.” If the West was described as market capitalism and the East as “state capitalism,” the Center was seen as oscillating between the two types. If the West was represented by the paradigm of the political nation and civic patriotism and the East as a hotbed of the Kulturnation and ethnonationalism, the Center was somewhere in between. One could list pairs of representative concepts almost indefinitely: theocracy and secularization, informal relations vs. formalized institutions, fundamentalism vs. pragmatism, romanticism vs. realism, localism vs. universalism, the village and the city, agrarian vs. industrial development, closed vs. open society. Within all these lists, three main variables are most important: religion versus secularization, ethnos versus demos, and state versus civil society and the market. For most authors, these variables explain the most spectacular differences between the two subregions since 1989 (e.g., between ethnic war in former Yugoslavia and velvet divorce in Czechoslovakia). To our underlying questions, they offer convenient but misleading answers: in brief, that religious fundamentalism, ethnonationalism, and state interventionism (which allegedly walk hand in hand) are not congenial to economic development under postcommunism. Certain religions and ethnic groups, this argument holds, are prone to be less Western/modern/developed than others. The Serbs show a weaker affinity for modernization than the Czechs, and if the Czechs cannot perform the task, then the Germans (or the Jews in nineteenth-century Poland and Hungary) will do it for them. In


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Eastern Europe, the main culprit was and is, of course, Orthodoxy. Its impact is allegedly detrimental to democracy, civil society, and the market. Eastern Christianity respects hierarchy, paternalism, and collectivism, hates privacy and civic initiative, resists innovation and risk taking, and prefers isolation and ethnic cohesion. Small wonder, the argument continues, that it could be smoothly combined with communism while the Western Christian nations in the ECE subregion rebelled against Sovietization from the very start. These nations were yearning for liberty, while the Orthodox peoples in the Balkans and the Soviet Union were, as always, silently serving their lords. To illuminate the flaws in this argument, let us take the example of former Yugoslavia. Was it not one of the most liberal, open, and decentralized communist countries for a long time? Did Tito not succeed in moderating religious and ethnic strife for more than three decades? Was the explosion of interethnic conflicts at the end of the 1980s not due to the power struggle between communist oligarchs as much as to reemerging ethnic hatred? Were the Catholic Croats milder and more “civilized” than the Orthodox Serbs in the 1990s? Although religious difference was one cause of the Yugoslav tragedy, I am afraid that people in Croatia have not become more Western than the Serbs just because the neighbors they killed were in their opinion “obscure-minded” and “backward” Orthodox believers. Or we can cite examples that are closer to economic development: Is voucher privatization in the Czech Republic more market-oriented than direct sale of state assets to foreigners in Romania? Is corruption in Hungary more “modern” than in the Ukraine? Is the business mentality of the Polish peasants more developed than that of their Bulgarian counterparts? Is a Serbian entrepreneur less Schumpeterian than a Croat partner? Is civil society stronger in Slovenia than in Bulgaria? Why can the countries in the ECE subregion cope with the task of capitalist development better despite all their ambiguities and “halfWestern” features? Ask the proponents of the dominant narrative. At some point in their answer, there emerge—like a deus ex machina— the ruling elites, in particular the Westernizing part of the intelligentsia that initiated and mediated the borrowing of techniques, skills, and habits of economic development from the West. Hence, external culture shocks are indispensable to swing the Center toward the West. But where do the Westernizing cultural elites come from? Were they not produced to a certain degree by the internal shocks of com-


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munism? Do they simply mediate elite cultures, as often presumed, or do they help spread genuine goods of mass culture such as the work ethic, consumer preferences, and bargaining behavior? The dominant narrative tends to obscure these nuances. It either considers the Soviet period as a black box or postulates an undisturbed continuity under communism. It takes for granted that the relatively developed Central Europeans retained part of their civilization (e.g., doctrines of Westernization) during the communist era, whereas backwardness in the countries of the Southern/Eastern subregion was reinforced by communism. I challenged this thesis earlier by stressing the homogenizing effects of the communist system. But a more sophisticated counterargument looks at the inherent ambivalence of those efforts at homogenization. Let us look at communist economic culture. I believe we cannot understand it exclusively by means of the old concept of Homo Sovieticus. This culture had been Janus-faced under communism, and its legacy became even more complex in the period of transformation. State paternalism and informal markets, public ownership and private redistribution, central commands and decentralized bargaining, overregulation and free-riding, collectivist economic institutions and individual (or family-based) coping strategies, apparatchik and technocratic mentality, learned helplessness and forced creativity— one could go on listing the contrasting features of economic culture in Eastern Europe before 1989. Country by country, in varying degrees, it combined the command economy with elements of market socialism, and all this with precapitalist traditions and a dynamism reminiscent of early capitalism. In a sense, it was not double- but quadruple-faced. Paradoxical but true: even if in a distorted way, communism was not only a modernizer but also a school of capitalism. Industrialization, urbanization, mass education, and public health are incontestable achievements of the “quantitative” and “outmoded” modernization (or simply, breaking of traditions) under Soviet rule. In the course of this kind of modernization, people also had to learn calculative behavior, risk taking, and competitive attitudes, by default, to be sure, and not by design. Communism conserved and reproduced a sort of capitalist ethos, rooted, for example, in trust rather than formal rules, personal rather than institutional transactions, small rather than large organizations, which were meanwhile eroding in the West. Ironically enough, this ethos rooted in the reaction to communism may grant a comparative advantage to the Eastern Europeans today.


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Let me make it clear that this ethos has little in common with other neocapitalist success stories, such as Confucianism and Evangelical Protestantism. It has no religious foundations, contains weaker feelings of responsibility for the family and community, and focuses less on self-denial and savings. Nor are its components distributed proportionately among the countries of Eastern Europe. Romania and Russia, for instance, may have more of these components than Slovenia and the Czech Republic. And this may lead to peculiar consequences. While in 1989 most observers expected that the legacy of the social(ist) market might create an organic connection between the economic cultures of Eastern and Western Europe in an enlarged EU, the past ten to fifteen years have proven that another kind of cultural affinity is also possible. The virtues of capitalism shaped by the communist experience may have qualified the countries in both subregions to take their fair share from globalization. Moreover, given that contemporary global capitalism rests on such elements as networks, informality, flexibility, human resources, and innovation, the European Union might become a brake rather than an accelerator of economic development. At the outset I suggested that, in retrospect, the mere fact of accession to the EU is dubious proof of economic development. But I did not speculate on whether or not EU membership would enhance development in the future. The dominant narrative presumes that any approach made to the West will have a positive impact. What if, on the contrary, it is more lucrative to stay outside? Let us try another hypothetical experiment. In the near future Croatia’s historical potential of economic culture (ranging from the entrepreneurial skills of Dalmatian merchants to Tito’s market reforms) is combined with a massive import of venture capital from the United States or Southeast Asia, laying the foundation for a formidable takeoff in a tax haven. Meanwhile, suppose the economies in the European Union begin to stagnate and membership does not compensate the new entrants for the losses they have to incur because the Accession Treaty obligates them to fight tax evasion, illegal trade, and price dumping, while they stop privileging the transnational corporations and follow extremely expensive environmental norms. The new member states might also be worse off in another way. In all probability, they will spend at least as much time in the EU’s “poorhouse” as did the “Southern” participants of the 1981/1986 accession rounds. The story of Greece’s slow adjustment will always


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loom over them. They will move from “best Eastern European performer” to “worst EU member state.” The memory of the one-time advantages of entry will evaporate quickly. Countries like the Czech Republic and Hungary will probably continue in a lasting third-rate position on a scale ranging from Finland or Denmark through Portugal and Greece and down to themselves. Catching up rapidly or jumping the queue, as the Irish did, may be inhibited both by the new EU architecture and by the rules of global competition. Instead of gradually closing the development gap between long-time members and new entrants in a framework of group solidarity and dynamic economic exchange, the more prosperous EU members may be less generous toward the poorer ones in terms of income redistribution than at any earlier period. In addition, the more prosperous members might bypass the poorer members to find more attractive opportunities for investment and trade outside the EU, for example in China and India. This leap will deprive the first-round accession countries of many of their favorite markets, thereby prolonging their own “poorhouse” status in the union. Furthermore, any recession in Europe, any major weakening of the EU’s relative position in the world economy, or any experiments in overregulation by Brussels will have disproportionately heavier repercussions for the newcomers than for the established members, especially because the Maastricht criteria may prevent the candidate countries from pursuing a “rapid growth/high inflation” trajectory for catching up in the future. Imagine if East-Central Europe were to suffer within the EU while the Balkan countries enjoy life outside the Union. That would be a real blow to the dominant narrative! The farther you are from Western Europe, the more developed you become. Why? Because you are closer to the “Globe.” Notes 1. In order to make the argumentation digestable for the reader outside the “culture & economics” discipline, I omitted the references of my original project report. Many of them are, however, to be found in the following papers of mine: “Westerweiterung? Zur Metamorphose des Traums von Mitteleuropa,” in: Transit 21 (2001); “Approaching the EU and Reaching the US? Transforming Welfare Regimes in East-Central Europe: Rival Narratives,” in Peter Mair und Jan Zielonka (eds.), The Enlarged European Union: Diversity and Adaptation, Frank Cass, London 2002; “Rival Temptations – Passive Resistance: Cultural Globalization in Hungary,” in Peter Berger und Samuel Huntington (eds.), Many Globaliza-


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tions (Oxford UP 2002); Zwischen Ressentiment und Indifferenz. Solidaritätsdiskurse vor der EU Erweiterung, Transit 26 (2004); “Little America,” Transit 27 (2004); Vergangenheit oder Vorvergangenheit? Berliner Debatte, 2005. 2. The “Visegrad Four” are Slovenia and the Baltic states. As we will see later, East Germany is a cuckoo in the nest of every typology. 3. The “Balkans” minus Slovenia and the ex-USSR minus the Baltic states. 4. Vaclav Havel is a prominent exception here. He lost much of his intellectual prestige in the eyes of scholars and politicians outside the region by insisting on Central European particularism in his capacity as president of the Czech Republic.


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19 Timeless Identity versus Another Final Modernity Identity Master Myth and Social Change in Georgia IRAKLI CHKONIA

The anthropological origin of Georgians is obscure. Georgians first appear in written history in the twelfth century bce. Their language does not belong to any of the world’s major language groups but to a group of its own, called Iberian-Caucasian or Kartvelian (meaning Georgian in the Georgian language). Linguistically and anthropologically, Georgians have no broader group of “relatives” perhaps except for the Basques. Unlike most of the region’s ancient cultures, the ancient agricultural Georgians were not overrun and assimilated by the nomadic Indo-Europeans, Semites, or Turkic tribes—ancestors to the bulk of the Eurasia’s present population. This authentic cultural core has expressed itself stubbornly up to the present. The origins of the state formations of Georgians can be traced back to the third century bce. Since then, Georgia has been a small state at the frontier between the rival civilizations of the great empires: ancient Persia, the Hellenic city-states, Rome, and Byzantium, then the Arab, and later the Ottoman and Russian empires. To Georgia has been attributed every one of the political–cultural constructs that meet and overlap in the southern Caucasus. It is often considered part of Eastern Europe. Oil companies and the military and 349


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intelligence communities see it within Central Asia and the Caucasus. In some geopolitical discourse, it belongs to Eurasia. From the perspective of Russia’s imperial ambition, it is in Transcaucasia. For socioanthropologists and archaeologists, it is a part of the broader Mediterranean and Black Sea region. From the perspective of international political history, it perhaps belongs to the Middle East or its expanded and politically more modern version, Southwest Asia. In short, any definition of Georgia’s regional “address” depends on the definer’s professional, political, and ideological perspective. That Georgia survived politically and culturally is astonishing, given the shifting civilizational boundaries and cultural, ideological, and religious impositions that accompanied political expansion. Georgian kings often managed to achieve a profitable client-state arrangement with the hegemonic empire of the day. Even under direct foreign occupation, they managed to ensure a considerable degree of cultural, religious, and political autonomy. The historical pattern and record of cultural resistance to the forces of assimilation is perhaps even more remarkable. Forced conversions under different hegemonies failed consistently as the small kingdom of Georgia outlived its dominant empires. No wonder that this powerful idea of surviving impositions constitutes the core of the National Identity narrative shared among Georgians. At the same time, more than twenty centuries of exposure to neighboring great empires left Georgia with layers of cultural influences that are still identifiable. War and trade with ancient Persia allowed Georgia to import advanced practices of state organization, as well as sophisticated standards in art and literature. The Arabs brought their cutting-edge scholarship from the great libraries. Dynamic exchange with the clerical-scholastic centers of eastern Christendom brought the depth of the medieval theological and philosophical argument. The Russians brought peace, railroads, industrial production, the revolutionary political ideas that brought down their own empire, and access to the modernizing drive of nineteenth-century Europe. However, Georgians consumed all of these influences selectively, seeing them as enriching rather than shattering the authentic core culture they so cherished. Georgia adopted Christianity as its state religion in 337 ce, making it one of the first Christian states. Soon after the Christian split occurred in the eleventh century, Georgia sided with Orthodox Christianity, which remains the most continuous and influential religious


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confession and a strong marker of ethno-national identity. Christianity introduced the notion of civilizational identity with medieval Christendom. But as we shall see, Georgia can hardly be considered a carrier of the stereotypical patterns of traditional Orthodox Christianity. The combination of monastic scholarship and religious art and a rich secular tradition produced an early twelfth-century renaissance in Georgian philosophy, secular art, and literature, along with certain protodemocratic institutions of government and productive exchange with both Western Christendom and the Islamic world. However, the Mongol invasion a century later led to Georgia’s decline and nearextinction. In the late eighteenth century the Georgian king, caught between threats from Iran and the Ottoman Empire, tried to play the emerging Russian Empire against Georgia’s more “oriental” rivals—leading to Georgia’s annexation by the Russian Empire in 1801. In their never-ending game of playing off foreign powers against one another, Georgians lost their statehood, although they escaped physical and cultural extinction. After three decades of rebellion, the Georgian elites turned their energies to economic and cultural modernization. Within a few decades Georgia became an educational, intellectual, cultural, and commercial center for the Caucasus region. Unlike many other societies absorbed by Russia, Georgia was well prepared for independence by the time of the Russian Revolution. For a brief period, the Georgian Democratic Republic, established in 1918, set up significant precedents, and in some policy areas even achieved exemplary standards of democratic inclusion, citizenry solidarity, and patriotic enthusiasm. In 1921, in violation of the peace treaty Lenin had signed several months earlier, Bolshevik Russia invaded the Georgian Democratic Republic and quickly defeated it. As in the nineteenth century, Georgia still remained a key to Russia’s planned expansion into the Middle East. But the Georgians resorted to some of the ancient techniques of survival under occupation. By the 1960s and 1970s it was unrivaled among republics in the USSR in defying the oppressive political system and maintaining its national identity. By 1989, almost two years before the USSR’s de facto dissolution, Soviet authority had collapsed in Georgia as the result of a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that emerged during Gorbachev’s perestroika. But independent Georgia was torn by civil and


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ethnic conflicts. Its first democratically elected president was ousted by force. De facto secession of the two autonomous provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, was accompanied by precipitous economic decline. From 1992 to 1994 Georgia was ruled by paramilitaries after the state institutions collapsed. Georgia became a typical failed state. In 1995 warlords installed the Georgian-born Eduard Shevardnadze, formerly the Soviet foreign minister, as a figurehead. Shevardnadze proceeded to oust the warlords. A young, Western-minded political group allied with Shevardnadze promoted democratic and economic reforms. These reforms, once praised internationally as a model for post-Soviet transition, were reversed by Shevardnadze. The reformers went into opposition, and the socioeconomic situation deteriorated. Fraud in the parliamentary elections of November 2003 denied the democratic opposition their evident victory and resulted in a wave of mass political protests. To survive politically, Shevardnadze attempted to reorient Georgia from the West toward Putin’s Russia, but his authority collapsed. The election of a new president, Mikhail Saakashvili, in January 2004, caused a wave of public optimism and enthusiasm. The Georgians broadly support the reforms advocated by the new Western-educated elites, but it remains to be seen how Georgia will deal with poverty, a stagnant economy, widespread corruption, weakness of young democratic institutions and ethnic conflicts. Most of these challenges surely have cultural roots; the search for their solutions will inevitably require social transformation linked to cultural change. This brief overview hints at some culturally embedded and enduring sociopolitical patterns. What are these patterns? How, if at all, do these patterns explain Georgia’s journey from one extreme to another during the social and political transformations since 1989? What predictions and practical recommendations do these patterns suggest? And will the cultural characteristics allow for the social change that Georgia needs to make democracy and the economy work? What Makes Georgianness? Perception of Civilizational Distinction Civilizational distinction or “peoplehood” has especially strong meanings for Georgians. Their language and civilizational roots have


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set them apart. They produced one of the world’s fourteen original scripts, have an ancient urban heritage, made significant advances in the later classic and medieval periods, and can claim rich ethnographic, literary, and artistic achievements. For the Georgians these constitute a unique civilization: they proudly perceive themselves as the survivors of the lost world that preceded Indo-European and Semitic domination of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Above all else the Georgians value the ability to continue their epic civilizational journey—to avoid assimilation and remain themselves. Of all the seventeenth-eighteenth-century states, only 5 percent survived into the twentieth century as nation-states. Surely no more than ten states that existed in the third century bce today preserve their ethnonationality and language. That Georgians appeared on the verge of extinction at the hands of Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Seljuks, Ottomans, and Russians, but outlived all of them and maintained most of their land, makes the appeal of this continuity myth especially powerful and heroic. The core Georgian identity is sedentary, partly because Georgians perceive themselves as born into their land and have no myths or traditions of colonization or conquest of a promised land. Georgian cosmology does not involve humans thrown into the frightening realm of hostile nature. Rather, it evokes a world of the ancient settled civilizations: a divine order of the universe, humans living in harmony with nature. Another element of core identity derives from the ideals and standards of excellence cultivated by the landed military aristocracy—the traditional cultural, intellectual, and political avant-garde of Georgian society—and linked to the notion of chivalry glorified in art, poetry, literature, and historiography. This view condemns greed, materialism, and mercantilism as reflecting the lower aspects of human nature. Still, Georgians have enjoyed relatively high living standards. They have never seen poverty as praiseworthy; though firmly grounded in the tradition of chivalry, their political leaders have never disdained enterprise and commerce. Orthodox Christianity That Orthodox Christianity as a state religion dates back to the times of the Great Schism within the early Church suggests that Georgian society carries cultural patterns cultivated by Christian Orthodoxy


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similar to the cultural profiles of the Serbs, Russians, and Greeks. These patterns, often contrasted with Western Christianity and especially Protestantism, include submission to authority, and discouragement of dissent, initiative, innovation, and social change. Submissive collectivism is stressed over individualism, and ethnic cohesion over supranational relationships. Isolationism, particularism, spiritual determinism, and fatalism complete the list. Also embraced in the pattern is Orthodoxy’s aversion to the non-Orthodox Christian West and the Islamic world, political rivals of both past and present. One would thus expect that Georgia, as a Christian nation in a hostile Islamic neighborhood, would inevitably evolve a messianic myth of a martyr nation and a siege mentality reinforced by its linguistic–anthropological uniqueness. Interestingly, however, most of the stereotypical characteristic patterns of Orthodoxy simply are not found in Georgia. The anti-individualist, anticosmopolitan ethos failed to prevail over several other aspects of Georgian identity and culture: its elaborate decentralized feudal order, the strong secular culture of the educated elites, and ideals of chivalry and of personal dignity. Because of trade, war, and the elite’s willingness to import knowledge even from rival cultures, the Georgian culture developed a cosmopolitan humanism. The Georgian church never pushed, or never succeeded to push very hard against foreign cultural influences or seriously censored the rich flow of secular knowledge and secular art. Despite repeated bloody incursions by Muslim invaders, Georgians never demonized the world of Islam. Perhaps because the Orthodox empires, Byzantine and then Russian, were comparably aggressive, the Georgians never embraced a pan-Orthodox solidarity against Western Christendom, preferring to identify with Christendom as a whole. The Georgian Orthodox Church remains a strong marker of Georgian ethno-national identity: more than two-thirds of Georgia’s population affiliate with it. However, as in Russian society, the doctrinal conservatism of Orthodoxy and its failure to come to terms with basic aspects of modernity have resulted in low levels of church attendance. Expertise in Cultural Warfare Over the centuries the Georgian elites passed on and perfected certain techniques of cultural survival. Geographic location predestined


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the southern Caucasus to be the zone of friction between the “tectonic plates” of several civilizations. Once or twice a century or two Georgia would see radical shifts in external ideological and cultural impositions, a shift from one imperial modernity to another. Georgia’s usual role was as a client state of mostly non-Christian empires. Its unique history allowed Georgian power elites to master preventive diplomacy and to assure their cultural survival. As a client state, Georgia accepted the hegemonic empire, including military and tributary obligations, in exchange for sovereignty with respect to culture, religion, and continuity of the social structure. Peter Berger uses the term nonsacramental consumption to explain how a modern mass culture can be consumed superfically without erasing the “thick” or “hard” aspects of non-Western cultures; it nicely describes the historic condition of Georgia.1 The skill of “discourse imposture”—the ability to recite the hegemon’s master narrative— has served Georgians well, both in the client state mode and under foreign occupation, from the times of rivalry between Parthians and Romans well into the Pax Americana and the age of the World Bank and IMF. This skill has allowed Georgians to benefit from whatever modernity was established by the empire of the day, while retaining their own cultural identity. To employ a metaphor from the computer age, Georgians acquired the ability to process “multiple cultural software” while preserving their own authentic “operating system.” Catacomb Society A key to Georgia’s cultural survival is its ability to function as a “catacomb society.” People resist the externally imposed institutions that conflict with their authentic culture by retreating to an informal catacomb, an extrainstitutional domain. In doing so they remove the bulk of social reality from the formal institutional domain. Thus major economic transactions, power relations, core structures of their social organization, systems of solidarities and community life, ethical and value systems, and even effective norms of justice all operate informally.2 Formal, visible institutions are maintained as necessary to simulate compliance with the hegemonic regime, and extract maximum gains from it.


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Current Patterns of Societal Behavior and Values that Influence Economic Performance The elements of Georgianness outlined above constitute a set of shared patterns of response to current trends of globalization and modernization. At the same time, they include the structural and behavioral patterns formed under communism, the most recent longterm imposition. Many such patterns still endure. In terms of the CMRP typology of progress prone/resistant cultural values, an average Georgian carries the following worldview, rationality, and ethics. Georgian culture strongly emphasizes the spiritual over the material. For Georgians, major achievements are not tangible but represent abstract ideals. Georgia is an “honor and shame society,”3 in which social class is a cultural rather than an economic notion. The artistic, academic, and intellectual elites rank well above the economic elite. The major variable influencing individual–group relations and the radius of trust is the clientele network, a complex system of client– patron relations that involves obligations, favors, recognition, and solidarity. Membership is a matter of personal choice, recognition, and acceptance. Advances in social status depend on having a network that is essential in pursuing status, privileges, and wealth. The networks are meritocratic, not based on kinship or birth status, and encourage individualism and initiative. Individuals are included and promoted in such networks by living up to the code of honor and shame. The networks are relatively flexible and people can switch networks or associate with more than one with no consequences that would diminish their social status. Georgians share a strong sense of “horizontal camaraderie” that embraces a shared system of values. But their ethical system, code of conduct, and radius of trust are largely determined by their clientele network. Members of the network engage in cooperative rather than competitive behavior and are bound by a solidarity that includes obligatory charity, some sharing of resources with other members, and a promise to provide them with economic support if and when necessary. Those who fail to follow the obligations of solidarity may lose their status or even be excommunicated from the network. Outside the network, ethical standards are less rigorous, levels of trust much lower, and competitive behavior more aggressive.


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Turning to work ethic and economic behavior, Georgians do not “live to work.” Given their non-Protestant religious tradition, and their historical experiences that rarely included mass poverty and no memory of hardships of colonization, their attitude toward work is more like that of Europeans than Americans. Georgians value leisure, and success requires significant investments of time in social relations within the networks. Since people advance mainly by socializing within and between networks, the pursuit of social status requires leisure. Nor is frugality, the mother of investment, a virtue for Georgians. An average Georgian sees it as revealing an over commitment to the material that will result in an underdeveloped human being. In addition, it contradicts the value that Georgians place on affirming and enjoying life and conflicts with the broadly admired Georgian aestheticism. Georgians have a high propensity to spend money, even by the most sybaritic European–Mediterranean standards. Their attitude is largely hedonistic. Taste is important, and some waste money on conspicuous consumption. Georgians find it expensive to maintain their social networks and observe the rituals of social life. Large ritual banquets, for example, are a tradition dating back centuries. They must also attend social functions and anniversary parties, visit the restaurants that help maintain their status and image, and dress well, often beyond their economic capability. They also overinvest in real estate, lavishly decorate living rooms and graves, and contribute financially to a relative’s family when someone dies. It is the rate of spending, not the rate of saving, that determines one’s social status. A strong entrepreneurial spirit distinguished Georgians within the Soviet Union and contributed to their stereotypical image. Some Georgian underground capitalists, even after they were arrested and exiled, managed to create considerable enterprises in Russia’s northern prison camps. But this entrepreneurship has little to do with the ideals of Weber or Schumpeter. The tendencies that thrive under capitalism—like delayed gratification, reasonable risk-taking, and strategic planning—were suppressed or deflected by more than seventy years of Soviet Communism. Under communism, the major economic game in town was to acquire capital from the Soviet federal center and channel it into private


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hands. Soviet underground capitalism mostly implied rent-seeking and extortion of state funds, even when it also involved producing unregistered goods and reinvesting underground finances into the catacomb industries. Thus delayed gratification was irrelevant for decades. Easy money from a renewable external source had been redistributed through the informal institutions of solidarity and then easily spent. As personal relations outweigh impersonal institutions and rules, such lesser virtues as punctuality and precision are given little emphasis. Contractual obligations are underpinned by personal reputations and trust rather than impersonal contracts, which have been hard to enforce under conditions of post-Soviet corruption, nepotism, and institutional inefficiency. During the Soviet period, a spirit of deviance from the institutions of the police state thrived in Georgia as a form of protest and a strategy of survival. Illegal economic activity and corruption were considered moral and were indulged in fully—almost as acts of patriotic resistance and vengeance. These patterns and attitudes persisted well into post-Soviet times. Corruption has not declined, and its scale nearly brought the Georgian state to its knees. In sum, from the perspective of the CMRP typology, several progress-prone elements are in place: individualism, education, innovation, meritocracy (even if partial), and competition (even if between separate networks). On the other hand, these patterns are offset, if not outweighed, by the low legitimacy of material pursuits, high rate of spending, primacy of personal relations over impersonal rules, endemic post-Soviet corruption, and lack of respect for the “lesser virtues.” The Western modernity that the Georgians embrace is more European than American. It does not include the consumerism characteristic of the globalizing American culture. Perhaps because Georgia has never been an evangelistic empire, Georgians tend toward relativism and postmodernism. In their understanding of history, there are no final modernities and no “ends of history.” Modernities come and go with the political projects of hegemony, and history, from their perspective, is an open-ended story of their cultural survival in different modernities.


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Georgian Identity versus Pressures of Modernities: Four Revealing Episodes Four consecutive historical episodes of cultural change (or its absence), from the emergence of capitalism in nineteenth-century Georgia to the velvet revolution of November 2003, reveal the particular logic, patterns, and responses of society to the pressures of modernizations of different modes and intensity. Episode 1: From Chivalry to Capitalism When the Russians annexed the Georgian kingdom they instituted severe policies that aimed at assimilation. They abolished Georgian statehood, and ended the rule of the royal house of the Bagratids, who had reigned for a thousand years and became a powerful symbol of cohesiveness and continuity in nationhood. Use of the Georgian language in education and government was discouraged, and the Georgian Apostolic church was also deprived of its independence. Economic life was dominated by the Armenian national minority, which controlled the bulk of trade and artisan industries. Most Georgian aristocrats found their family estates, often owned for a thousand years, redistributed to people of another class, ethnos, language, religion, and values. If nothing had changed, most Georgians, noblemen and peasants alike, would soon have become guests in their own land. The powerful new modernity of capitalism was rapidly wiping out existing economic and social institutions. It was culturally alien, especially toward the heroic and idealist ethos of the military aristocracy, a traditional elite going back as far as the third century bce, which set its chivalric–humanist values, its idealism and romanticism, its Christian altruism and sophisticated aestheticism, as the standards of excellence. In sum, each aspect of the crisis had to do with cultural identity. Economic inequalities and political disempowerment coincided with the ethnocultural lines of division: Russians ruled while Georgians plotted rebellions, Armenians grew richer as Georgians died fighting for their land. The very core of Georgianness and the ethnocultural community of Georgians were challenged. Georgians shared a sense of hopelessness.


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The project of social change was led by the aristocracy and later by the intelligentsia. As Russia pursued a coopting strategy of “enlightening” its new subjects, the Georgian elite gained direct access to the empire’s power structure and institutions as well as to European ideologies, politics, and scholarly thought. A modernizing elite and a network of patriotic intellectuals soon emerged, led by Count Ilia Chavchavadze, the orphaned son of a glorious and ancient but impoverished noble family who had been exposed to the university and legal studies in St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian empire. Ironically, it was the unifying outcry for cultural survival and maintenance of the national cultural identity that helped legitimize fundamental cultural change and mobilize broad popular support. The new modernizing cultural elite promoted the unifying standard of the vernacular Georgian, public education, nationalist propaganda, and philanthropy. Their program included the first nationwide network of schools; the education of women, especially of the lower class; and financial aid for Georgian students of all classes studying abroad. Several Georgian newspapers and magazines were created; despite imperial censorship, they managed to communicate the message of nationalism and social justice. The Georgian theater was also used to spread the messages of patriotism and social change. Using all these tools, the Georgians waged a revolution to preserve their identity and culture. Within two and a half decades, Georgians transformed themselves from an alienated and marginalized community into a dynamic society that broadly shared a project of liberation across the cleavages of class and political ideology. Elitist–aristocratic nationalism was reshaped into a popular nationalism embracing a horizontal togetherness of people united by the ties of blood, culture, and history. By the late 1800s, the Georgia of the 1820s, with its medieval rural landscape, and ancient castles, cathedrals, and estates, was transformed into a dynamic regional economic hub. In 1918, the expanded educated class that now included both noblemen and commoners not only restored national independence but also established a democratic republic. Episode 2: Surviving Bolshevik Modernity The new Soviet reality brought an imposition of communist ideology, Soviet-style economic modernization, political repression, and


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physical extermination of the cultural elites—the guardians of identity—along with sporadic attempts at Russification. According to the plan of the Soviet policy makers, modernization and industrialization were to bring urbanization, more public goods, a broader educational system, new relationships between labor and management, and an economic integration of the republics that would link the interests of social groups across the borders of nationality. The goal was a common Soviet identity under the Bolshevik socialism. The chief tool of Sovietization was Russification, both linguistic and cultural. How else than through a common language and way of life could the Soviets bind together the fourteen titular (and scores of nontitular) nationalities, most of whom were linguistically and anthropologically unrelated to each other and lived with radically different cultures, historical experiences, and social orders? The Soviet Union largely continued the Russian Empire’s drive toward assimilation, using both carrots and sticks. The Georgians, like some other groups, realized they had to reduce their nationalist goals to simple cultural survival: covertly propagate their national identity through art and education, and sabotage the policies of the central Soviet authority that aimed at cultural assimilation. The Georgian intelligentsia acquired the status of a national shadow leadership, and their influence extended to the nomenklatura, a network of the Georgian power elite ostensibly serving the Soviets. The nomenklatura, motivated in part by ethnonationalistic impulses, successfully exempted Georgia from many attempted intrusions by the Soviet government and cushioned the Soviets’ assimilatory pressures on the Georgian majority. Working clandestinely in their catacomb mode, the intelligentsia not only preserved the essence of Georgian nationality but even advanced and reshaped it to better fit the age of technology and global communications. Georgians developed an ability to read between the lines and communicate through metaphors and dual meanings that allowed them to avoid the state’s ideological censorship. When Soviet attempts at assimilation were particularly threatening, Georgian society responded with mass, nonviolent protest actions unprecedented in their scale and courage, particularly in response to Soviet efforts to suppress the Georgian language in the 1970s and 1980s. In Georgia, as in many other republics, economic modernization through the Soviet period failed to reduce the strength of national


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identity and nationalist drive—both fatal ideological heresies within Soviet doctrine. In fact, technological innovations, urbanization, and growing levels of education only strengthened the Georgians’ nationalist attitudes and equipped them with better means to pass it on. Thus they effectively sabotaged and resisted the assimilatory Soviet identity policies that dealt with culture, language, and education. Through seven decades of Soviet rule, then, those Soviet identity policies only strengthened Georgian nationalism and Georgian national identity. Episode 3: Reinventing the Collective Self for National Liberation and Independence Ironically, the rapid withdrawal of the Soviet regime was a difficult test for Georgian society. Velvet revolutions and nationalist defections of the communist elites in Eastern Europe had a strong demonstration effect on Georgians. As the Soviets withdrew their ideological restrictions on expressions of national identity, they created a space for nationalist social action that had previously been suppressed. Societies that had been entrenched in the defensive mode of resistance now had a chance to fulfill their nationalist dreams. Georgian society was too dynamic and its sense of national identity too powerful and defiant of Soviet rule to adopt a “wait and see” attitude. Pressures on the Georgian communist government forced it to offer concessions and then retreat until the eventual velvet revolution occurred and power was transferred to the leadership of the mass movement. Leadership fell to the radical wing of the nationalist opposition in formation, the one group that, by 1988, was willing and able to lead a mass movement. Its leader was the visionary Zviad Gamsakhuria.4 As a master myth, this movement introduced a new, heroic-messianic image of Georgia and Georgians, with its underlying theme of their historical suffering and heroic survival. This heroic-traumatic type of identity stressed the image of the martyr nation under siege, similar to Jewish and Armenian identity narratives but distinctly chivalric-heroic. The new myth was essentially revivalist and nativist. The nationalist sentiment of those times stressed a “return to history,” as opposed to Fukuyama’s “end of history.”5 That is, it was nationalist-particularist as opposed to liberal-universalist.


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Although the vision seemed original and captivating to most Georgians and was effective in building a mass protest movement, it contained fundamental flaws and did not truly build on the core Georgian identity. Though it attracted a broad following in the short term, it ran out of steam within two years. The dream of national sovereignty and liberation turned into international isolation and vulnerability to any intrusion from outside. From a quest for a strong established state the situation deteriorated and soon the existing state had disintegrated. Broad public admiration for the unchallenged superleader Gamsakhuria evolved into his humiliation and exile. The more zealously the Georgians pursued national unity, the deeper the divisions grew. The more emotional their celebration of personal liberation and total camaraderie in the romantic aura of the mass liberation movement, the stronger the anger those same individuals brought to the civil war a year later. The stronger the anti-Soviet and antidictatorial rhetoric of the once dissident champions of democracy, the more evident their true authoritarianism. Episode 4: Revolution of November 20036 The elections of November 2003 followed a protracted social, political, and economic crisis. The already rampant corruption had grown steadily worse. Hardly surprising the Georgians, in 2003 the nation was declared one of the world’s five most corrupt countries by Transparency International.7 President Eduard Shevardnadze succeeded in reversing some promising and internationally praised reforms. International development aid that once formed the bulk of government expenditures was virtually withdrawn. The economy was in ruins. Social welfare was nonexistent, and poverty and economic inequality grew dramatically in a country that had once enjoyed the highest living standards within the USSR. Up to 20 percent of the population—some of the country’s most valuable human capital—left the country.8 Crime increased dramatically. In November 2003, the Shevardnadze regime attempted massive electoral fraud that promised to consolidate the elite’s power. The fraud triggered mass nonviolent protests and later, mass civil disobedience. Under the pressure of the mass protests and the effective collapse of his authority, as law enforcement and other officials refused to follow his orders, Shevardnadze resigned. The civil, nonviolent


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character of the revolution was astonishing. Not a single shot was fired, not one human life was lost, not one file or document was misplaced, and no property was damaged, though two chairs belonging to Shevardnadze were shredded into small pieces that the jubilant protesters took away as souvenirs. The opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili, a young, U.S.-educated lawyer, overwhelmingly won the presidential elections that followed. The new government, which includes a large share of Western-educated and Western-minded individuals, embarked on a program of drastic anticorruption measures and institutional reforms. Defense of democracy was the goal and the essence of the Georgian protest movement. However, the dynamics underlying that movement are more nuanced. Is an appeal to abstract principles, even if universal, enough to make people from remote villages leave their work and daily concerns and take part in high-risk protest actions that could endanger their livelihoods, or even their lives? In Georgia, furthermore, electoral fraud has been common. Why, then would thousands rally in support of something as abstract as democracy? The truth is, Georgians of all walks of life did rally for democracy. They did rebel against a government that deprived them of the right to vote in free elections, and they rallied in support of a democratic future. But something more than a zeal for democracy brought the Georgians out in huge numbers. Since the early twentieth century, nationalism has dominated Georgian political discourse and the glue that held together the Rose Revolution, in fact, was a strong sense of nationalism. The idea of Georgia’s civilizational identity with the West has been a central notion of the commonly shared identity narrative and a matter of national honor. Shevardnadze’s policies during the crisis of 2003 directly conflicted with this notion. Had Shevardnadze succeeded, Georgia would blend with the “grey zone” of kleptocratic-authoritarian “potemkin democracies” of Central Asia—a cultural and political realm Georgians often point at to ascertain who they are not. A solidarity forged around a national identity, which bridged class and political divisions, and was cherished by the people, inspired Georgians to take up nonviolent protest in defense of democracy. The revolution of November 2003 provided a window of opportunity that promises most Georgians a better future. The old power structure has been dismantled; the new is yet to be constructed. The task now is to institutionalize this change and to maintain the mo-


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mentum of the struggle for justice and empowerment. High public expectations and enthusiasm are strong assets in this process. Georgian Culture in Modern Times The cultural identity and attitudinal and behavioral patterns broadly shared by Georgians are very different from the model rooted in the Protestant ethic and social institutions of industrial capitalism. In addition, the long history of this identity, as well as the society’s effective and internalized strategies of cultural survival, suggest that a total and rapid conversion to the commandments of the current mainstream modernity is unlikely. The culture of the Georgians is too deeply rooted in their history. To change their cultural profile, Georgians would have to go back to the early pre-Christian era, leave their land for no particular reason, and adopt a nomadic cosmology and religion. Then they would have to conquer a land closer to Switzerland or Germany or produce their own Martin Luther. After this they would have to find a new continent, depopulate it, become inspired by the French Enlightenment and revolution, and mix with communities of various cultural origins. This scenario is in itself impossible. From this point of view, Georgia’s strong cultural identity appears to be an insuperable obstacle to development. But a historical analysis of the four consecutive episodes reveals a different picture. In the nineteenth century when the new capitalist, nation-state modernity seemed to threaten Georgia’s cultural identity, Georgians legitimized a breakthrough cultural change and mastered modernity, and accepted its developmental benefits, in the name of cultural continuity. In the Soviet period, the new overlords brought the most intense assimilatory pressures imaginable: a powerful mix of industrialization, ideologically controlled mass education, and urbanization combined with ruthless oppression of any national-culturalist dissidence. But their attempt to erase Georgian identity and to import Soviet ways failed as Georgians developed an effective strategy of resistance and defiance. After the Soviet Union disbanded, the Georgians constructed a newly redefined identity to support new political projects of national liberation and eventual independence. But the new narrative of vulgar ethno-nationalist identity did not effectively incorporate the


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traditional and continuous core themes of identity, and the new vision did not develop long-term popular appeal. Instead of consolidating the society, it resulted in a major split and civil war. Most recently, when the country’s political and economic future was in doubt, it was the sense of Georgia’s cultural continuity and civilizational identity, as opposed to the appeals of social justice or prodemocratic agitation, that facilitated a nonviolent ousting of the usurper regime. From the Georgian experience, we might extract four generalizations. 1. Successful and cost-effective modernizing cultural change is possible if the proposed change is legitimized within the society’s authentic cultural system. The people will support and adopt the change if it seems to provide continuity for the core aspects of the collective being. 2. Societies that are strongly attached to their cultural identity and have internalized the experience of defying hegemonies are likely to resist even the most intensive and skillful attempts at assimilation. 3. Identity reconstruction to promote a particular political project is doomed to fail unless it ensures continuity with the implicit, historically transcendent themes of the society’s collective identity. 4. Paradoxically, the sense of national pride nourished by a shared cultural identity can propel, or pave the way to, such globalist and universalist political projects as the struggle for Western liberal democracy. In short, the Georgia case suggests that successful cultural change must be sanctioned by culture and that the richer the cultural material, the higher is the probability of constructing a narrative that will legitimize change. Change proceeds smoothly and successfully if and when it does not violate the critical aspects of continuity. Notes 1. Peter L. Berger, “Introduction,” in Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, eds. Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).


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2. For more on these concepts see Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997); and Charles H. Fairbanks Jr., “Clientelism and the Roots of Post Soviet Disorder,” in Transcaucasia: Natonalism and Social Change: Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, rev. ed., ed. Ronald Grigor Suny (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996). 3. Gerald Mars and Yochanan Altman, “The Cultural Bases of Soviet Georgia’s Second Economy,” Soviet Studies 35, no. 4 (1983): 546–60. 4. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, “The Spiritual Mission of Georgia,” 1990. http://rustaveli.tripod.com/sakartvelo/literature/Gelati.html 5. This is from Aviniery quoted in Nodia Ghia “Georgia’s Identity Crisis” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 1 (1995): 104–16, at 114. 6. The assessment of situation in this section is based on the state of affairs as of Spring 2004. 7. See The 2003 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index. Available at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/0/7/8/1/3/5/A0781359.html 8. According to the population censuses of 1989 and 2003, the overall population of the country fell from 5.5 million to 4.4 million people.


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20 A Tale of Two Regions Novgorod and Pskov as Models of Symbolic Development NICOLAI N. PETRO

Sprawling over eleven time zones, Russia is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse countries on earth. In Soviet times, this diversity was dismissed as politically irrelevant, since all important decisions were made in Moscow. With the collapse of the USSR, however, local governments have been forced to assume many responsibilities previously held by national governments. As a result, in post-Soviet Russia regions have become the level of society at which the impact of political and economic reforms are most readily felt. Regional disparities in rates of economic growth range from negative 3 percent to plus 25 percent, while average per capita incomes can differ as much as tenfold among regions. But development analysts are still reluctant to attribute much weight to purely regional efforts, since they are by definition subordinate to the center both politically and financially. Despite renewed efforts to recentralize political authority under President Vladimir Putin, for the better part of the period from 1995 to 2005, the traditional pattern of relations between local and national governments in Russia was turned upside down. During this remarkable period, as one observer of Russian politics put it, Russian regions became “a

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natural laboratory for testing theories about why and how political systems change.”1 During this decade of turmoil, the abrupt demise of ideological controls and the shifting of responsibility for primary and secondary education to the regions made regional elites the dominant shapers of cultural identity. It seems only natural to ask just how much of a role these new cultural identities play in the disparities we now see. The neighboring regions of Pskov and Novgorod, located in northwestern Russia, reveal that the cultural symbols and myths adopted by regional elites can be a powerful force in shaping local development strategies. Novgorod and Pskov: A Study in Contrasts During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Pskov region mirrored Novgorod in almost all basic economic and social indicators. By 2000, however, Novgorod’s industrial output had shot up to 18,909 million rubles while Pskov’s was less than half of that, at 8,306 million.2 Observers describe Novgorod as one of the country’s most dynamically developing regions, while Pskov has become “stably depressed.”3 In fact, the percentage of people in Pskov living in poverty is about twice what it is in Novgorod, though the numbers rise and fall, partly depending on the sources: in 1997, 33 percent in Pskov and 20 percent in Novgorod; in 1999, 48 percent in Pskov and 27 percent in Novgorod; and in 2002, 31 percent in Pskov and 17 percent in Novgorod.4 Equally dramatic shifts are seen in the voting patterns of both regions. “Novgorod and Pskov appear to be opposites in their political behaviors,” as Merja Tekoniemi and Laura Solanko wrote in a report for the Bank of Finland. Novgorod voters, they say, “choose pragmatic individuals to run the region; parties have little power,” and the region is “characterized by cooperation with various economic and political groups.” On the other hand, “Pskov’s are less stable. Political parties (mainly the Communists) are firmly established and conflict between the political and economic elite is more pronounced.”5 The crucial difference has been Novgorod’s ability to forge an elite consensus around liberal values. In the absence of such a consensus, the same reformist policies, half-heartedly begun by Pskov’s first gover-


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nor Oleg Tumanov, were quietly abandoned by his successor, Evgeny Mikhailov. In Pskov, elites seem to feel that the less effective local government is, the less of an obstacle it will be to them. But in Novgorod, elites have cooperated in ways that benefit society as a whole. An internal assessment by the USAID Regional Investment Initiative for Russia describes the “attitude about the future and about getting ‘rich’” in Novgorod: “Their growth strategy for the Oblast is focused not on today’s spoils or the current size of the ‘pie,’ but rather how quickly the ‘pie’ is growing. They are willing to be patient and wait for longer range, future benefits.” In comparison, the other three pilot regions “are still concentrating on dividing up the pie as it exists today.” Thus “Novgorod has been a clear success story—particularly relevant because it is a story about what a region without natural resources, strategic location, or important manufacturing assets CAN accomplish through sheer will, competence and self-promotion.”6 Under governor Mikhail Prusak’s leadership, Novgorod’s government reached out to the local business elite for support. In return for supporting the governor’s course toward financial autonomy from Moscow, they received a prominent voice in formulating local legislation. The resulting web of dependencies fostered a commingling of corporate and civic identity, and led to the creation of several new and innovative institutions for mediating conflicts. In short, elites in Novgorod developed a sense of collective responsibility that transformed state institutions from “spoils of war” into a benign patron, a pattern not unlike that followed by other successful regions in Ireland and Italy.7 In contrast, to preserve the status quo, Pskov’s elites believe they need only enough resources to maintain social tranquility. Significant new investments are actually unwelcome because they introduce an element of uncertainty into the local political equation. This explains Pskov governor Evgeny Mikhailov’s seemingly irrational alienation of local businessmen. Were he to broaden his own political base by courting them, he might destabilize the region’s uneasy political balance and bring about his own downfall. Another striking difference between the two regions is the degree of civic activism. While the growth of nongovernmental organizations in Russia peaked in the late 1990s, the Novgorod region has continued to register scores of new civic organizations annually, reaching a level of per capita civic activism that rivals areas of Western Europe.


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One Novgorod NGO leader explains: “Novgorod officials know how to listen. They do not always follow our suggestions and we may have disagreements. But it would be sinful to complain. When I tell my NGO colleagues from other cities that I can just come to the mayor or the governor and say what I intend to say, they roll their eyes in amazement.”8 By contrast, the Pskov elite never learned to view NGOs as potential partners, but only as potential rivals. With little engagement between civic activists and local government in Pskov, it has lurched from cliquish political radicalism at the beginning of the decade to widespread social and political apathy at its end. The Impact of Western Aid and Investment Studies of the impact of Western funds on democratic development reveal a mixed picture. One report notes that in every country of Eastern Europe and the former USSR, direct foreign assistance has led to weaker ties between civic institutions and society and greater dependence on foreign support.9 Novgorod stands out as a clear exception to this pattern. Whereas the typical Eastern European NGO rarely survives beyond the initial grant period, a review of USAID programs in Novgorod found that since 2001 the majority of financial support had shifted from Western sponsors to local sources. Novgorod NGOs now employ nearly three hundred people full time and pay the equivalent of U.S.$11,000 in local taxes.10 The explanation for this difference seems to lie in the Novgorod elite’s ability to define a common social agenda with NGOs and to incorporate them into a social partnership that was established well before Western democracy activists discovered the region. Overcoming their initial reluctance to deal with this foreign constituency, the local elite soon saw the benefits of redefining its original social partnership model to include them. This ability to identify a common social agenda helps to explain the high ratings that Novgorod NGO leaders give to local government and business elites. By expanding its social partnerships, the Novgorod elite is beginning to understand that it can reduce social tensions by creating mechanisms for regular feedback and political involvement from organized civic constituencies. The regional administration may initially have been interested only in co-opting potential political opponents, but its strategy has coincidentally led to a more robust support for new political institutions.


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It is equally important to note that Western funding for democracy initiatives, which shot up dramatically in 1998, came to Novgorod well after large-scale foreign direct investment (FDI) had begun to have an impact in the region. Thanks to the investment of more than U.S. $800 million over the course of the past decade, this tiny region of less than 750,000 inhabitants was able to preserve 24,000 jobs and add nearly seven thousand new ones.11 FDI, however, did far more than simply provide a momentary economic stimulus; it fundamentally altered the region’s revenue base. Today more than a quarter of the region’s factory workers are employed by foreign companies, and they are paid, on average, three times more than their domestic counterparts.12 Even after being freed from paying local taxes, foreign company contributions to the pension fund, medical insurance fund, and employment fund constitute nearly half of total receipts and have allowed the region to pay its pensions and social payments without delays.13 FDI has also had a profound impact on the behavior of the Novgorod elite, encapsulated in the comment by Irina Kibina, former deputy chair of the city duma, that the success of political reforms in the region would only be assured when Novgorod officials understood the need for government not merely to work with business, but to work as a business.14 Socially, the region is characterized by a high level of corporate philanthropy and a high level of public–private partnership. Nearly two-thirds of local assistance for the poor is generated by private businesses, with the rest divided more or less evenly between district and regional budgets.15 Another example of local business’s social concern has been the rapid expansion of microcredit cooperatives. In 2002 alone, the number of such individual participants enrolled in such credit cooperatives increased by more than a third.16 Such public–private partnerships are regarded as models for local leaders. Tracing the Impact of Culture in Novgorod and Pskov Regional comparisons tend to highlight the fact that different political choices lead to different investment climates, while leaving unresolved the crucial question of why. That is because existing theories look first to the economic, structural, and political choices made by elites, rather than to the cultural preferences that underlie them. They fail to see that the Novgorod and Pskov elites made choices based on


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different regional self-images, different “regional myths,” that later transformed social expectations. The relationship between elite myths and actual policies is revealed in the symbols that each elite promoted. In Novgorod, local elites responded to the crisis of values caused by the collapse of communism by evoking the ancient image of the Novgorod Republic. By systematically highlighting Novgorod’s heritage as a medieval trade center and cradle of Russian democracy, local elites redefined reform as a return to the values of a more prosperous Russian past, rather than as something imposed from outside. This eased the shock of cultural discontinuity, broadened the social constituency that favored reforms, and increased confidence in local government. In Pskov, elites also tapped into the images of the region’s past for political support. The image Pskov chose to resurrect, however, was that of “Russia’s Northern Watch,” a bulwark against Western invaders. Different elite myths, different elite strategies of self-preservation in Novgorod and Pskov, resulted in very different environments for reform despite the seemingly overwhelming geographic, demographic, economic, and historical similarity of the two regions. The Pskov Myth totally dominates cultural and political discourse in the region today. The “Battle on the Ice” of 1242 remains the single most important local symbol, commemorated by a gargantuan bronze statue at the outskirts of the city. Local legends typically describe Pskov as being surrounded by “hungry and pitiless enemies,” and warn against wily foreigners. As if echoing the past, the current Archbishop of Pskov, Evsevii, recently warned his countrymen to beware of Catholic proselytism in the region: “We should know that Catholics are not our benefactors. . . . Wherever they came, there was ruin, division, destruction.”17 The high concentration of xenophobic narratives readily available in local bookstores and kiosks sets a tone for social discourse that is very different from that of neighboring Novgorod. Walking down the streets of Pskov one gets the sense that time stopped in the early 1980s. The main streets are still named for the heroes of the October Revolution. A statue of Kirov stands before the entrance to the regional administration facing October Street. In contrast to Novgorod, where the early transfer of key national relics to the church helped forge an important link between reformers and the clergy, Pskov’s leading cathedral and monasteries remain in the limbo of “joint administration” with civil authorities.


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Pskov’s governor Evgeny Mikhailov describes the city as connected to “the most important events in ancient and modern Russian history.” For example, “the concept of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ was devised by a monk of Pskov’s Elizarov monastery” and Nicholas II abdicated here. Furthermore, “the territory of Pskov has its own face—there were no Mongols here,” and unlike Novgorod, Pskov “voluntarily joined the Muscovite state,” that is, “it did not betray Moscow.” Thus he believes that “the significance of Pskov may have been somewhat diminished in the historical literature compared with that of Novgorod.”18 It is important to point out that what determines the success of reform efforts is not the actual historical antecedents, but their interpretation by the current elite. Thus, should the interests of the local elite change, it would not be difficult to recast the Pskov Myth to seem more friendly to the outside world. Pskov has as much raw cultural symbolism as Novgorod; it could be adapted to serve the interest of political and economic reform if people had the political will to do so. The emergence of this political will in Novgorod can be traced through three distinct phases. During the first phase, which lasted from 1989 to 1993, the symbols of the Soviet era were relentlessly attacked by the Novgorod City Soviet, setting the stage for more sweeping socioeconomic changes. During the second phase, from roughly 1994 to 1998, civic leaders sought out specific symbols from Novgorod’s medieval past to help them define a new, long-term vision for the region. In the third phase, since 1999, the government has become acutely conscious of the political utility of Novgorod symbols and adopted them quite overtly to build political support for its policies. The key initiative of the first phase was the City Soviet’s decision to purge the city of all its Soviet-era street names. Local history professor and city councilman Vasily Andreyev cultivated the idea in the public’s mind for more than a year. His efforts bore fruit on January 4, 1991, when the City Soviet restored the pre-1917 names of all streets in historical Novgorod. In one fell swoop, the names “Lenin,” “Bolshevik,” “Komsomol,” “Proletariat,” “Soviet,” and “Worker” were stricken from the city map in what remains to this day the most comprehensive cultural de-Sovietization of any city in Russia. The City Soviet, however, did far more than just disavow the past. It linked reforms to a particular image of Novgorod’s past—the


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Novgorod Myth of a prosperous state of self-governing people, and thus encouraged people to consider options outside their immediate Soviet-era experience. During the second phase of this transition, the local university made significant efforts to mobilize public opinion behind the Novgorod Myth. University leaders helped key segments of the local elite to formulate a regional development strategy rooted in the Novgorod Myth. These efforts not only highlighted the myth’s political and economic usefulness but described in considerable detail exactly how Novgorod’s symbolic resources could be applied, so that when opportunity arose, the blueprint was already at hand. By 1999 the links between symbols of the past and policies of the present had become so commonplace that they could almost be described as official policy. As the current governor, Mikhail Prusak, puts it, the “Novgorod model” is a direct extension of the principles of the Novgorod Republic. He sees “no need to invent artificial ideas, no need to mechanically transfer the American dream onto Russian soil.” Russian history reveals “a city that combined democracy, free market relations, and other accomplishments of civilization, with national traditions. That city was Lord Novgorod-the-Great, the capital of a once flourishing civic republic that extended from the White Sea to the Urals.” Prusik quotes an academician named Yanin, who has studied the city’s history for “his entire life” and has “shown conclusively that Rus originated here.” Unlike the “starkly centralized model” of “Muscovite Rus” and “Kievan Rus, . . . the Novgorod model was characterized by greater openness and democracy.” A “popular assembly, the veche” made “all major decisions. . . . It elected its own spiritual leader—the archbishop—who was the leading figure in the city, while the prince fulfilled the role of military commander.” Thus he sees a new historical opportunity: for the model today, “our generation can return to the principles of our ancestors, but on a new basis. Self-government, elections, public accountability of authority, private property, individual liberty—the very cornerstones of the Novgorod Republic—are regaining their former significance.”19 Prusak’s public conversion to the Novgorod Myth encouraged other senior government officials to embrace the imagery of Novgorod’s past. Now in Novgorod one can find the head of a district talking about the problems that Novgorod local councils faced in the 1800s,


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or read an article on the legal and administrative reforms proposed by a nineteenth-century Novgorod governor written by the chairman of the regional legislature. The city and regional administrations never miss a chance to link themselves to the glory days of Republican Novgorod. As one senior official put it bluntly, “Our major goal is to develop Novgorod’s identity. . . . The city administration employs history to develop and maintain ideals.”20 The prominent local media attention given to the Novgorod Myth has heightened public awareness of the region’s historical conflicts with Moscow and led both civic activists and government officials to see similarities between the problems Novgorod faces today and those it faced in medieval times. The late mayor of Novgorod the Great, Alexander Korsunov, liked to point out that today, as then, in order to survive Novgorod needs to expand trade, strengthen local self-government, and “know how to navigate through Muscovite shoals.”21 On the other side, regime critic Igor B. Alexandrov contends that “political activism in Novgorod is high not because of Soviet ideals but because of the historical ideals of the past.”22 By providing a common enemy, the Novgorod Myth offered a unifying political framework at a time when the rest of country was in disarray. In-depth surveys in both Novgorod and Pskov found that 69 percent of the NGO leaders interviewed in Novgorod expressed trust in government officials, compared with only 27 percent in Pskov.23 By binding the region’s political and economic success to the Novgorod Myth, Governor Prusak has also managed to create a strong emotional link with his administration—and he has reaped the political rewards. He intuitively understood that more direct use of the Novgorod Myth would generate a reservoir of public trust among both the elite and the public, and in his second campaign for governor in 1999, this intuition was rewarded with a phenomenally high 91 percent voter approval rating. At the time, it should be recalled, the standard of living had fallen sharply as a result of the August 1998 economic collapse, and Prusak had recently been engaged in a bitter public feud with Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov and was being accused locally of shirking his duties as governor by launching a new political party. The only factor in Prusak’s favor going into those elections was that this time he was campaigning not merely as a competent manager but as a Novgorod patriot.


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Local Development and the Dilemmas of Cultural Adjustment Cultural analysis remains in many respects the unwanted stepchild of international development. At one important conference organized by the World Bank in Washington, D.C., while foundations, government donors, scholars, and practitioners could all agree that culture was somehow vital to development, views split sharply on exactly how.24 For one group, whom I call advocates of cultural adjustment, traditional culture is the key obstacle to development. The task of development analysts should therefore be to identify and remove it. For another group, whom I call advocates of cultural congruence, traditional culture is a vital ally of development. For them the task of development analysts should be to link reforms with traditional cultural values. A prominent figure in this debate was the late Aaron Wildavsky, who argued that because beliefs and values are closely tied to social relations, a successful policy has to be justified in terms of a particular culture. Because people choose their cultural preferences as part of constructing, modifying, and rejecting institutions, culture always has a visible manifestation and a tangible social impact.25 Individuals filter their social environment in ways that allow them to select appropriate objects of attention, and these choices cannot be identified outside their cultural context. It therefore follows that successful development strategies depend on a supportive cultural context.26 Wildavsky also made the important point that it is the proper balance of hierarchical, egalitarian, and individualistic cultural tendencies (all “yoked together in an uneasy harness”) that makes stable progress possible.27 Precisely because they depend upon each other for definition it would be futile, even dangerous, to attempt to entirely eliminate a negative cultural trait.28 The first task of development should therefore consist of conducting what Wildavsky calls a “cultural audit” that identifies which traits in a culture are in short supply and which are overstocked.29 Wildavsky’s nuanced approach contrasts with a simpler, more direct path to development. One such initiative emerged at a conference in 1999 under the auspices of Harvard University’s Academy for International and Area Studies to establish a program of research that could provide clear “value and attitude-change guidelines, in-


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cluding practical initiatives,” that would promote “progressive values and attitudes.”30 Most of the Harvard conference organizers argued that efforts to use culture to promote development had failed because development specialists had not fully confronted the need to eliminate traditional cultural obstacles. The dominant theme of the conference was that traditional cultural patterns are the source of poverty and the central task of development should be to remove them. Michael Fairbanks cited with approval the remarks of Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, that “development represents a transformation of society, a movement from traditional relations, traditional ways of thinking, traditional ways of dealing with health and education, traditional methods of production, to modern ways.”31 Modern ways are both easy to identify and popular, says Lawrence Harrison, because “progress in the Western sense has become a virtually universal aspiration.”32 Daniel Etounga-Manguelle’s “cultural adjustment program” for Africa is even more specific: promoting individualism by undermining the authority of traditional chieftains, using education to suppress the construction of religious structures, emancipating women, emphasizing business training. Africans, he says, must learn to “accept profit as the engine of development . . . the entire African nation must be put to work.”33 What for Wildavsky had been an option of last resort—“people-changing”—has now moved to the forefront.34 But implementing cultural adjustment has proved enormously difficult because it rests on assumptions that undermine its application, such as the notion that greed and consumerism are the engines that drive economic success. While few would disagree that economic efficiency requires cultural attitudes that value efficiency, it is not clear why competitive individualism, a relative latecomer to social thought, should be deemed the only option for enhancing economic efficiency in each and every cultural setting. Why not the communal values of a monastery or a kibbutz which, in both Eastern and Western Europe, were often the driving forces behind the discovery and settlement of new territories, new scientific and commercial discoveries? They prospered as selfsustaining economic communities during times of deep social crisis and even contributed their surplus wealth to the support of local communities, creating hospices and hospitals, and in times of national emergency contributed significantly to the national defense.35


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In their own way, they too managed to address the key challenge of modernity, what Wildavsky called the adaptation of “the creative and expansionist tendencies of individualism to the stabilizing forces of hierarchy.”36 Cultural adjusters retort that such examples are no longer relevant today, that the triumph of the West has established a new model for success which is clearly at odds with traditional cultural values. Societies that wish to survive simply have no choice but to remove such obvious cultural obstacles to modernity as tribal or clan-based authority figures, religion, and an emphasis on community. Still, it is intriguing that religious and monastic orders have undergone a revival throughout Eastern Europe since the fall of communism, not least as models of economic stewardship. The fatal flaw of cultural adjustment is that the aspects of culture it seeks to transform are very often the same ones that people cling to in times of change: the comfort and stability of traditional values. As a strategy for economic and social development, therefore, cultural adjustment is doomed to a hostile reception, making implementation a never-ending struggle. So long as development efforts continue to emphasize the need to adjust people’s attitudes to suit developmental models, rather than the other way around, this struggle will continue. The Novgorod Model of Culturally Congruent Development At a 1992 Washington conference, another group, led primarily by practitioners rather than scholars, argued that only developmental practices congruent with strongly held local norms, beliefs, and practices could succeed. Taking culture into account should be as instinctive as a farmer taking the characteristics of the soil into account before planting.37 Logically, if one wants to know what kind of soil one is dealing with, one ought to ask the farmer. Such an approach encourages development analysts to “identify components of their culture that can be built upon to have greater synergy in the workplace as a result of working with, rather than against, widely held cultural norms.”38 When this occurs the members of the culture become the agents of their own change. The difference between these two approaches is illustrated by comparing the views of two leading specialists on African develop-


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ment, Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, president and founder of SADEG, an African consulting group, and Mamadou Dia, director of World Bank operations in Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea. Like Etounga-Manguelle, Dia is highly critical of the tendency to dismiss culture as a factor. Unlike him, however, he sees value in many aspects of traditional culture. He sees the vitality of the informal African economy and traditional village economies as a challenge to our conventional assumptions about development. This vitality, he contends, is a result of reconciling traditional social and cultural values with the needs of economic efficiency.39 Formal economic institutions have failed because of policies that assume that “Africa’s development must be stimulated from the outside, through transfer of culture, institutions, methods, and techniques from the industrialized Western countries.”40 Development assistance should aim not at introducing new values but rather at ensuring that Africans can identify with assistance efforts. Dia suggests that Etounga-Manguelle’s litany of cultural obstacles to productivity are not all socially unproductive. For example, he counters Etounga-Manguelle’s call to direct education toward emancipating the individual from traditional tribal dependence by pointing out that “a society founded on dependence and paternalism . . . may prove just as creative as any other. Indeed, the impulse to bring oneself to the notice of the ‘prince’ may be a more powerful incentive than self-achievement.”41 To Etounga-Manguelle’s argument that traditional cultural patterns are the source of Africa’s economic inefficiency, Dia counters that the strength of the informal sector rests precisely on traditional patterns of hierarchy and paternalism. The best strategy for development, Dia says, is to promote indigenous entrepreneurship by extending the African concept of family solidarity throughout the economy.42 The problem with cultural adjustment has always been that it attacks the traditional social consensus and thus undermines the very resource that politicians must rely on to gain legitimacy. The problem with cultural congruence has been that it provides no clear guidelines for measuring change. The solution would seem to be to embrace traditional culture as a resource for change, thereby shoring up public support, while at the same time identifying specific mechanisms that allow independent observers to measure their implementation. The Novgorod region shows us how this can be accomplished through the elite’s manipulation of symbols.


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The Novgorod Model suggests that key cultural symbols can play a crucial role in promoting broad public acceptance of rapid social change. When confronted with a bewildering array of new data, individuals seek ways to simplify their responses. Local myths and symbols allow people to reduce the difficulty of selecting the values that shape their actions.43 Those symbolic shortcuts that best fit our cultural self-image are the most readily accepted, while those deemed too “foreign” are rejected. But while the cultural environment broadly determines which symbols are the most suitable to support a particular policy, it does not constrain actual policy options. The cultural milieu itself should be viewed not as a straitjacket, but as a realm of opportunities: a rich heritage from which a wide variety of potentially useful symbols can emerge, their contemporary meaning shaped by local elites. Early elite advocacy of new interpretations for old symbols is an essential component of any rapid social change, because it sets the stage for their political use. The more the elite can form a consensus around the interpretation, the more convincing it will be to the public, and the more useful in building public support for new policies. It is tempting to view Russia as sui generis, but scholarship on political transitions around the world shows that it is quite common for elites to invent traditions that match present-day needs. Such invention typically accompanies the birth of new nations and political systems—the United States, the USSR, postwar Germany, Japan, and Israel all readily come to mind. In places like Wales, where cultural self-awareness was all but lost, historian Prys Morgan wryly notes that it took “a great deal of invention.”44 Studies of democratic transition in regions as disparate as Spain, Poland, Turkey, Taiwan, and Slovakia all show that the evocation of local symbols and myths played a crucial role in the early phases of democratic transition.45 What distinguishes Novgorod from other regions of Russia, therefore, is not that it had better symbols or a better history. These are politically inert unless coupled with a strategy that illuminates their meaning for the present. Rather, Novgorod benefited from the early emergence of an unusually strong elite consensus around how to interpret the key symbols of Novgorod’s past. The symbols of medieval Novgorod promote development today through their ability to change people’s perceptions of the possible. Once explicitly linked to particular policy initiatives, they also become measurable markers of social change. A thorough knowledge of their meaning thus


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facilitates an explicit analysis about the type of political change being advocated, who is advocating it, and how successful that effort has been over time. To succeed in forging a new and democratic social consensus, however, the elite must also ensure that its interpretation of key symbols is accepted by the public. It cannot impose it from above, at least not in the long term. By continually accepting or rejecting new interpretations of key symbols, the public exercises a powerful constraint on elite mythmaking. Rapid social change took place in Novgorod society thanks to circumstances that favored both elite consensus on new values and their easy acceptance by the populace. Public familiarity coincided with an unusually high level of elite consensus on the interpretations of key symbols, and this allowed a consistent message to be presented in the local media. This consistency helped create a high level of comfort with these new elite interpretations. Not only did the symbols of the Soviet era seem less appropriate in this context but, more important, an alternative agenda was ready to take its place. Novgorod’s formula for rapid social change thus can be summarized as follows: public acceptance of the interpretations of key symbols proposed by the elite conferred an aura of legitimacy on the reformist policy agenda that accompanied them. This aura created a reservoir of social support that political leaders could tap into to implement their agenda more rapidly and effectively. While clearly the Novgorod Model is not a panacea for all instances of underdevelopment, it does demonstrate the singular impact that the selection of the right cultural symbols can have in the hands of a reform-minded elite. It suggests that even societies with little or no democratic tradition have the potential for rapid political and economic development, and that the astute use of key local symbols of the past can transform “the burden of the past” into a powerful resource for change. Notes 1. Theodore H. Friedgut and Jeffrey W. Hahn, eds., Local Power and Post-Soviet Politics (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), 279. 2. V.I. Poleshchenko et al., Pskovskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik, vol. 1 (Pskov: Pskovoblkomstat, 2001), 14; Marja Tekoniemi and Laura Solanko, “Novgorod and Pskov—Examples of How Economic Policy Can Influence Economic Development,” Review of Economies in Transition (June 1998): 68. 3. Olga Kuznetsova, “Novgorodskaya i Pskovskaya oblasti: ekonomicheskoe polozhenie i faktory razvitiya,” Voprosy ekonomiki, 10 (1998): 143.


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4. General population data taken from Regiony Rossii: statisticheskii sbornik, vol. 2 (Moscow: Goskomstat, 2000), 32–33, and from “2002 All-Russian Population Census” on the website of EastView Publication Services: http://www.eastview. com/docs/resident_population.xls (accessed November 25, 2003). Pskov poverty figures taken from V. I. Poleshchenko, et al., Otdelnye pokazateli urovnya zhizni naseleniya Pskovskoi oblasti: Statisticheskii sbornik (Pskov: Pskovoblkomstat, 2001), 126. Data for 2001 and 2002 provided orally by Vladimir I. Kobyzhecha, deputy director of the Northwest Civil Service Academy in Pskov. Information on Novgorod obtained from the Chairman of the Committee for Labor and Social Assistance of the Novgorod Oblast, A. V. Dubonosov in a letter to Alexander I. Zhukovsky May 30, 2002 (correspondence No. 01-717/05). 5. Tekoniemi and Solanko, “Novgorod and Pskov,” 71. 6. Christa Capozolla, “Assessment of Regional Investment Initiative in Russia: Summary Report—March 1999,” prepared for the U.S. Department of State, personal copy. 7. Simona Piattoni, “Can Politics Create Communities? Evidence from the Italian South,” paper delivered at American Political Science Association, Boston (September 3–6, 1998), 13. The relevant writings of Lee Komito on Ireland include “Irish Clientelism: A Reappraisal,” Economic and Social Review, 15, no. 3 (1984):173–94; and “Dublin Politics: Symbolic Dimensions of Clientelism,” in Ireland from Below: Social Change and Local Communities, eds. Chris Curtin and Thomas Wilson (Galway: Galway University Press, 1989), 240–59. 8. Natalya Dinello, “What’s So Great about Novgorod-the-Great: Trisectoral Cooperation and Symbolic Management,” (June 3, 2001), contract no. 814-25 by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), Washington, D.C., 10. 9. Sarah E. Mendelson and John K. Glenn, “Introduction: Transnational Networks and NGOS in Postcommunist Societies,” in The Power and Limits of NGOs, eds. Sarah E. Mendelson and John K. Glenn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 3; The only exceptions were groups whose basic function was to deliver social services. 10. Mendelson and Glenn, “Introduction,” 3; Vasily Dubovsky, “Bolshoe delo malogo granta,” Novgorod (April 3, 2003). 11. Svetlana Kudryashova, “Arnold Shalmuev: ‘Dobitsya uspekha mozhno tolko komandoi’,” Novgorodskie vedomosti (December 4, 2002). 12. “Gorodskaya Duma,” Novgorod (April 4, 2002). 13. “V novyi god s novymi zakonami,” Novgorodskie vedomosti (December 20, 2002). 14. Irina Kibina, “Federalism in the Russian Federation,” report prepared for the law firm Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C. (summer 1999), 24–26, personal copy. 15. “Soobshechnie press-tsentra Novgorodskoi administratsii za 12.03.2002 v 10:59.” 16. “Soobshchenie press-tsentra Novgorodskoi administratsii za 16.10.2002;” “Kontseptsiya sotsialno-ekonomicheskogo razvitiya oblasti na 2002 god.” 17. Liam Pleven, “Orthodox, Catholic Tensions Church Mirrors Rift in Russia,” Newsday (June 9, 2002). 18. Aleksandr Utkin, “Sravnitel’noe kraevedenie,” Versiya v Pitere (St. Petersburg), (January 8, 2002). 19. Mikhail M. Prusak, Reformy v provintsii (Moscow: Veche, 1999), 94–96. 20. Cited in Dinello, “What’s So Great About Novgorod-the-Great.”


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21. Viktor Krutikov, “Dela gosudarstvennye, a zaboty-gorodskie,” Novgorod (March 28, 2002). 22. Interview with Igor B. Alexandrov, chairman of the United Democratic Center, Novgorod-the-Great, Russia (November 1, 1998). 23. Dinello, “What’s So Great about Novgorod-the-Great,” 22. 24. Ismail Serageldin and June Taboroff, eds., Culture and Development in Africa (Washington, D.C.: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, 1994). 25. Wildavsky, “How Cultural Theory Can Contribute to Understanding,” in Culture and Development in Africa, eds. Serageldin and Taboroff, 142. 26. Aaron Wildavsky, Culture and Social Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 200. 27. Ibid., 210, xv, 195. 28. Ibid., 208. 29. Wildavsky, “How Cultural Theory Can Contribute to Understanding,” 154. 30. Lawrence E. Harrison, “Why Culture Matters,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, eds. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2000), xxxii. 31. Michael Fairbanks, “Changing the Mind of a Nation: Elements in a Process for Creating Prosperity,” in Culture Matters, eds. Harrison and Huntington, 268–81, at 272. 32. Harrison, “Why Culture Matters,” xxvi. 33. Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, “Does Africa Need a Cultural Adjustment?” in Culture Matters, eds. Harrison and Huntington, 77. 34. Wildavsky, “How Cultural Theory Can Contribute to Understanding,” 148. 35. Nicolai N. Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 60–70. 36. Wildavsky, “How Cultural Theory Can Contribute to Understanding,” 148. 37. Robert Klitgaard, “Taking Culture Into Account: From ‘Let’s’ to ‘how’,” in Culture and Development in Africa, eds., Serageldin and Taboroff, 82. 38. Coralie Bryant, “Culture, Management, and Institutional Assessment,” in Culture and Development in Africa, eds. Serageldin and Taboroff, 454. 39. Mamadou Dia, “Indigenous Management Practices: Lessons for Africa’s Management,” in Culture and Development in Africa, eds. Serageldin and Taboroff, 172. 40. Ibid., 167. 41. Ibid., 178. 42. Dia, “Indigenous Management Practices,” 191. 43. Aaron Wildavsky, “Choosing Preferences By Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation,” American Political Science Review, 81, no. 1 (1987): 16. 44. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 98. 45. Laura Desfor Edles, Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain: The Transition to Democracy After Franco (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Stéphane Corcuff, ed., Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the Search for a New Taiwan (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002); Judy Batt, The New Slovakia: National Identity, Political Integration, and the Return to Europe (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1996).


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21 Cultural Change and Continuity in the Transition from Communism The Russian Case ARCHIE BROWN

Two opposing dangers beset the use of the much-debated concepts of “culture” and “political culture.” On the one hand, it is all too easy to make them explain too much—and, on the other, too simple to imagine that they can be explained away. While cultures are historically conditioned, a concern with the patterns of the past should not lead us to underestimation of the significance of the times people actually live through, the direct impact of their personal experience. Culture, nevertheless, amounts to a good deal more than current attitudes. It embraces values, deep-rooted beliefs, and sense of identity. Attitudes are malleable and may be subject to quite rapid change. Values, beliefs, and identities, although they are not immutable, generally change more slowly. Political cultures do change over time, and dramatic events such as war, revolution, or regime change may have a more than usually immediate impact on values and beliefs. But it would be stretching the (already much-stretched) concept of culture too far to describe such stimuli as themselves “cultural.” A more meaningful understanding of culture is offered by Richard A. Schweder when he writes: “I mean community-specific ideas about what is true, good, beautiful, and 387


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efficient. To be ‘cultural’, those ideas about truth, goodness, beauty, and efficiency must be socially inherited and customary . . . Alternatively stated, culture refers to what Isaiah Berlin called ‘goals, values and pictures of the world’ that are made manifest in the speech, laws, and routine practices of some self-monitoring group.”1 While many ideas about what is true, good, beautiful and efficient are, indeed, socially inherited and customary, these ideas also change over time— none more so, perhaps, than notions of what constitutes efficiency, since they are particularly affected by technological innovation. While rational choice analyses may, at times, amplify cultural interpretations, they do not adequately substitute for them, since what is perceived to be rational, or what a person will use his or her reason to support, is profoundly affected by cultural context and is itself the product of a process of political socialization. As Robert E. Lane has observed, symbolic identifications, including such ideological labels as “conservative” or “liberal,” are themselves highly valued and lead people “to exercise their reason to defend their identifications rather than to calculate the probable benefits of switching loyalties.”2 Still more fundamentally, as Geert Hofstede observes: “Culture affects in particular those ideas that are taken for granted without further proof because no one in our environment ever challenges them.”3 A Czech economic reformer remarked to me in Prague in 1965 that “the greatest stimulus to change is failure.” There is a lot to be said for that observation, but failure has to be perceived as failure, and any such perception is culturally conditioned, as is attribution of the causes of what is identified as failure. People anywhere who are starving would doubtless recognize their condition as constituting “failure,” but whom or what they would blame for that failure—government, God, evil spirits, the economic system, the natural order, or just bad luck—would vary according to cultural context. Even in countries with as much in common institutionally as the European communist states there were significant cultural differences. In Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union in 1965, when living standards were poor compared with those of Western Europe but well above the starvation level, the extent to which people thought their economic conditions—not to speak of their political systems—represented failure depended on their standard of comparison and on their expectations. At that time Soviet citizens were still inclined to compare their living standards with those of the past and to take consolation from


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the fact that, for a majority, these conditions had improved compared with prerevolutionary Russia, the 1930s, the war years, or the early postwar period. In spite of Nikita Khrushchev’s optimistic bombast that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in per capita production by 1970,4 Russians in the 1960s were not much given to comparing their living standards with those of other countries. For Czechs, in contrast, the Austrians were an important reference group. During the five study visits I made to Czechoslovakia between 1965 and 1983, I was told by a variety of interlocutors on every occasion that the Czechs had been just as prosperous as the Austrians between the wars and now, as a result of the imposition of a Soviettype system on postwar Czechoslovakia, the Austrians had left them far behind. What this suggests is that perception of failure is linked to expectations and these, in turn, are colored both by historical experience and by which country (or countries) serves as a standard of comparison. The Concept of Political Culture and the Communist Experience In this chapter I am concerned mainly with political culture, i.e. those elements of a culture with particular relevance to politics. Writing in the mid-1970s, I suggested that political culture be understood “as the subjective perception of history and politics, the fundamental beliefs and values, the foci of identification and loyalty, and the political knowledge and expectations which are the product of the specific historical experience of nations and groups.”5 Some political scientists have included behavior, along with beliefs, within the definition of political culture, but that is unhelpful in several respects. First, if political culture is to contribute to an explanation or interpretation of political behavior, the former should be kept definitionally distinct from the latter, for otherwise circular reasoning can hardly be avoided. Second, behavior may be used as evidence of cultural patterns, although care must be taken then, too, to avoid circular argument. Third, a problem of including behavior (along with subjective orientations) within the very definition of political culture is that behavior may or may not reflect fundamental beliefs and values. In authoritarian regimes it is, by definition, frequently far from voluntary. If, as in the case of voting behavior within communist systems, it is coerced, the analyst obviously cannot take behavior at face value. In this and


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other instances it becomes necessary to distinguish between behavior that reflects the individual’s values and that which merely indicates a prudential desire to avoid sanctions. In the 1970s, scholars’ interest in the study of political culture was less than in the 1960s, and the value placed on the concept waned.6 This was, however, a period in which students of communist systems took up the concept. The studies did not and could not meet the specifications of positivistic social science, given the paucity of data and the impossibility, in particular, of undertaking survey research within the countries of Eastern Europe. Some of the work did, however, provide persuasive evidence for the proposition that deliberate social engineering, or political socialization from above, in communist states had been a good deal less successful in inculcating the official ideology than communist leaders hoped and some Western analysts feared. As against the view of Samuel Huntington and Jorge Dominguez, writing before the publication of most of these political–cultural studies, that “the most dramatically successful case of planned political culture change is probably the Soviet Union” and that communist systems were the exceptions to a more general rule that “planned political culture change through mobilization has been rare and has fared poorly,”7 Gabriel Almond, drawing on the writings in the 1970s of specialists on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, declared in 1983: “What the scholarship of comparative Communism has been telling us is that political cultures are not easily transformed. A sophisticated political movement ready to manipulate, penetrate, organize, indoctrinate, and coerce and given an opportunity to do so for a generation or longer ends up as much or more transformed than transforming.”8 Although there is a large measure of truth in Almond’s generalization, it must also be observed that communist systems did leave a greater mark on the consciousness of citizens who lived in those states than was appreciated at the time of the quite sudden demise of communism in Europe at the end of the 1980s.9 The resultant mindsets, however, bore little resemblance to Marxist–Leninist belief systems but were an amalgam of perceptions of what had been positive about the communist compared with postcommunist experience—for example, relative equality rather than extremes of inequality—and of what had been negative, such as pressure to join organizations. This last feature of communist systems, as Marc Morjé Howard


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has shown, is reflected in the widespread reluctance of people in the countries of postcommunist Europe to join civil society associations and to become members of political parties, in particular.10 Institutions and Culture The liberalization and democratization that occurred in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s provided qualitatively new conditions for research into beliefs and values within these societies. In particular, both indigenous scholars and Western social scientists (often in collaborative teams) were able to engage in serious survey research. While single surveys can tell us little about political culture, we now have at our disposal series of replicated studies by different teams of reputable scholars which are revealing of belief change and continuity over time. The findings are not unambiguous, but they do point to much weaker support for “democracy” Russianstyle—that is to say, what Russian citizens in the 1990s were told, however misleadingly, both by their own leaders and by Western presidents and prime ministers was democracy—than for the principles and norms of democracy. The interaction over time between institutions and culture is such that it is impossible to accord a universal primacy to one rather than the other. Experience with institutions plays an important part in molding a culture, whether these be the institutions of a Protestant church (though both religiosity and the influence of churches have been in steep decline in Europe) or legal and political institutions that persist over a lengthy period, such as those of Great Britain or the United States. But new institutions may fail to “take” in an inhospitable cultural context. One of the stimuli to the study of political culture in the late 1950s and 1960s was the fact that the “Westminster model,” exported by the former colonial power (in this case Britain) to newly independent African countries, worked very differently there than in Westminster. But the relative failure thus far of parliamentary democracy in Africa does not necessarily mean that “Culture is the mother; institutions are the children.”11 William Mishler and Detlef Pollack have distinguished between “thick” and “thin” notions of culture. One of the central tenets, as they see it, of a thinner conception of political culture (and one with which I agree) is: “Culture is created. Institutions and behaviour shape it as much as it shapes


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them. Political culture and political institutions are closely and reciprocally related; the causal arrow runs both ways. Neo-culturalist theory and neo-institutionalist theory are two sides of the same coin, whose differences have been exaggerated by advocates of both perspectives.”12 The democratization that occurred in the last years of the Soviet Union led to an upsurge of support for democratic values.13 Both the new freedom of speech and the emergent political pluralism were, for the great majority of Russians (as well as for observers in the West), quite unexpected. The dramatic changes were certainly not forced on the political leadership from below. They have been aptly described both as a “revolution from above”14 and as a “revolution from within.”15 The initiative for democratizing change not only came from within the Communist Party (for in Soviet conditions, if it were to have a chance of success, it could come from nowhere else), but also from the higher echelons of the party, in which only a small minority of officials genuinely favored systemic change. However, that minority included, crucially, the principal power holder in the country. The far-reaching changes that occurred in Russia and the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s should not, therefore, be explained primarily in cultural terms, except for noting that there were very different political tendencies—which could be described, indeed, as subcultures—within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Among them were Westernizing reformism (of both social-democratic and liberal variants) and Russian nationalism in addition to orthodox Marxism-Leninism. That the first of these tendencies prevailed was due to a combination of political leadership, institutional power (above all, the general secretaryship in the hands of a reformer) and innovative ideas. The “New Thinking” had been developing in research institutes, and even within parts of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, for some years, but it required, first of all, a new freedom if it were to be publicly articulated (and further developed) as well as institutional bearers if the fresh ideas were to be translated into policy.16 In a country such as Britain, where systemic political change has been very gradual,17 it is especially difficult to disentangle political, social, economic, and cultural change and impossible to accord causal priority to just one of these elements. Experience with institutions that embody political pluralism—which allow rulers to be held accountable for their actions, and which make manifest a rule of


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law—leaves an imprint on the political culture. Over the years such experience fosters and solidifies values and beliefs supportive of the principles underpinning democracy. In Britain the values are sufficiently internalized by the political elite that they are unlikely to be abandoned and, to the extent that they are infringed, such moves are likely to meet political and cultural resistance.18 Russia’s Postcommunist Political Experience This chapter is mainly concerned with post-Soviet Russia and the relative failure of democratic institutions and a strongly democratic political culture to take hold in that largest country in the world. We should be careful, though, from the outset to avoid a cultural determination which suggests that because of Orthodox religious tradition, autocratic tsarist rule, and seventy years of communism, Russia is doomed by history to be an authoritarian state. There is a great deal of lip-service to Orthodox Christianity in contemporary Russia. While, however, the church may add dignity and color to state occasions, religion is not an especially salient factor in contemporary Russian politics. As Richard Rose and Neil Munro have noted: “Only 2 per cent of Russians claim to go to religious services once a week, 4 per cent monthly, 17 per cent at least a few times a year, . . . a fifth less often and fifty per cent never go to church. There is no significant relation between church attendance and party preference.”19 The Orthodox religious legacy is almost certainly of less political significance in contemporary Russia than the seven decades of communist rule, followed by some fifteen years of political pluralism, even if at no point in the last decade and a half would it be accurate to describe Russia as a democracy. In Greece the Orthodox Church has not been an impediment to a sufficiently thriving democratic state, which is an active member of the European Union. Despite seven years of repressive military rule, from 1967 to 1974, Greece has had a reasonably successful parliamentary system since a new, democratic constitution was adopted in 1975. It is worth keeping in mind that in every land where today democracy prevails there was at one time authoritarian rule. The idea that Russians are not able to adapt to democracy would be hard to square not only with the democratic breakthrough of the late 1980s but also with the level of support for democratic principles that millions of


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Russians have continued to evince, even while they express disillusionment with post-Soviet political institutions and self-proclaimed “democratic” politicians. In fact, Russians’ attachment to democracy, while qualified and not corresponding in all respects with Western notions of democracy, has been more impressive than the willingness of political elites to deliver a worthwhile version of a democratic polity. Or as Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul have observed, on the basis of their survey research, “the people have assimilated democratic values faster than the elite has negotiated democratic institutions.”20 In the Yeltsin years the President alternated between periods of intense activity and periods in which the current favorite, whether Yegor Gaidar in 1992, Alexander Korzhakov (Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard) between 1993 and 1996, or Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatiana Dyachenko, in the late 1990s, took important decisions. Prime ministers were dismissed by Yeltsin at an increasingly bewildering speed, and political parties—especially those supportive of the Kremlin— came and went in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to hold the government to account. This was accompanied by infringements on a massive scale of the rules governing electoral expenditure and a power of money in politics that greatly exceeded the importance of wealth for garnering votes even in American politics (where this factor substantially exceeds the importance of money for politicians and parties in Western Europe). Moreover, some republics and regions of Russia became highly authoritarian—ruled by local despots to whose activities Moscow turned a blind eye, so long as those presidents and governors rallied round the Kremlin at federal election times—while other regions displayed substantial elements of democracy.21 Under Vladimir Putin the decision-making process within the Russian executive has become more orderly and there has been administrative reform, but there have also been echoes of the Soviet past. As Eugene Huskey has observed: in some areas of political and economic development, post-Communist Russia has distanced itself convincingly from the Soviet inheritance. In other fields, however, there has been a tendency to re-create rules and patterns of behaviour from the Soviet era, after a short period during which these traditions were disrupted or abandoned. At issue is not the full revival of Communist-era practices, but a partial return to


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institutions that are culturally familiar and politically valuable to the ruling elite. The more visible examples of this phenomenon are in high politics, whether in the creation of personalist rule in Moscow or the provinces or in the establishment of a party-of-power, the development of which is now being pursued with special vigor.22

The reaffirmation of central state power, following the Yeltsin years, was not in itself unjustified, given the extent to which a number of ultrarich businessmen—whose wealth had been acquired through backdoor deals which gave them ownership of Russia’s mineral wealth at a fraction of its market value—had gained disproportionate influence over public policy.23 However, it has been accompanied by an extraconstitutional restructuring of federal–regional relations, politically selective application of the law, much tighter state control over the electronic media, and a weakening of the legislature, whose docility in the face of presidential power is now much greater than that of the Congress of People’s Deputies in the last years of the Soviet Union, though not yet plumbing the depths reached by the Supreme Soviet in the unreformed USSR. Elections have been so manipulated that the term, used with approval by Kremlin spin doctors in the earliest years of Putin’s presidency, “managed democracy,” has given way among careful analysts to what may, at best, be called “managed pluralism” or, at worst, “façade democracy.”24 Much of Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric about democracy is unexceptionable, but there is a gap between word and deed. Strengthening state institutions has been a high priority for Putin, and an understandable one following the idiosyncratic and personalistic rule of Yeltsin. However, this is not synonymous with democratic institution building. The evidence so far suggests that for Putin that is a low priority, although he is not indifferent to Western opinion. The clock is not being turned back in all respects. Along with the strengthening of central state power some market institution building has also proceeded, and the composition of the Russian government formed in March 2004 suggested that the construction of a market economy in the Russian Federation would continue. Indeed, Putin and most of the Russian political elite see no viable alternative either to a market or to Russia’s greater integration in the world economy, although the Russian president shares with a significant section of that elite concerns about foreigners acquiring ownership of too substantial a section of Russia’s natural resources, especially of oil and gas.


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It would not be surprising if communist regimes were to be viewed more unfavorably in East-Central Europe, where the systems were seen largely as an alien imposition, than in the Slavic heartlands of the former Soviet Union, and there is substantial survey evidence to suggest that this is the case.25 That Russians, nevertheless, hold out hopes for a democracy different from the post-Soviet regime is suggested by a variety of studies, among them those conducted by Stephen Whitefield. Two questions asked at regular intervals in research conducted by Whitefield (often in association with Geoffrey Evans) have been: “What do you think about democracy as an ideal system in Russia?” and “What do you think about the actual practice of democracy in Russia today?” These questions were put to Russian respondents in six surveys, the first of which was conducted in 1993 and the most recent in 2003. There was a notable dip in support both for the norms of democracy and for what passed for democracy in Russia in 1998, but the evaluations of both have picked up under Putin. That raises the question, however, whether this reflects satisfaction with aspects of Putin’s leadership other than enhanced democracy (not its most obvious attribute) and the associated reduction of critical comment in the mass media, especially television and radio. The gap between support for democracy as an ideal and for the practice of “democracy” in post-Soviet Russia remains clear. Whereas in 1993 48.8 percent of the population were either strong supporters or supporters of democracy at a normative level, only 18.9 percent endorsed “the actual practice of democracy in Russia today.”26 In 1998 these figures had dropped to 32.9 and 13 percent respectively. In 2003 46.9 percent of respondents expressed their support or strong support for the principle of democracy, a proportion not much lower than ten years earlier, and 24.8 percent were satisfied with the practice of “democracy” in contemporary Russia. In the surveys of the Yeltsin years, that level of support was exceeded only in 1996 when Yeltsin went on the campaign trail and the resources both of the tycoons and of the mass media were mobilized in vigorously promoting a positive image of the Russian president and of the improvements that had occurred since the fall of Communism.27 When, however, the assumption that Russia is already a democracy is not built into the question, a somewhat different picture can emerge. A survey conducted in February 2004 under the leadership of the doyen of Russian investigators of public opinion, Yuri Levada, showed that only 10 percent of the population thought that Russia


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had already become a democratic country. Nine percent held that Russia needed another five years to become more fully democratic, 23 percent thought it required another fifteen to twenty years, and 13 percent believed it needed twenty to fifty years, while 18 percent thought Russia would never be democratic. For a significantly high proportion of respondents, 44 percent, democracy was equated with freedom of speech, of print, and of religion.28 While these are far from the only attributes of democracy, they are essential components of it. Beliefs that seem more traditionally “Soviet” are also, however, quite widespread. A survey conducted three years earlier by essentially the same researchers found over half the population in favor of state “control” (meaning monitoring) of citizens’ contacts with foreigners and almost two-thirds supporting state control over television.29 When Russians have been asked to evaluate both the last hundred years of Russian history and their twentieth century leaders the results have been interesting in indicating their foci of identification but hardly consonant with the relatively high levels of support expressed for the principles of democracy. In most surveys the Brezhnev era emerges as the best time to have lived in Russia during the twentieth century, although Brezhnev himself is not ranked so high as a number of other leaders. Of course, even those Russians who look back with nostalgia to the Brezhnev era do not see it as an example of democracy in action. They recall it with affection because they perceive it as a time of stability and predictability, when there was no threat to the continued existence of the Soviet state, and when the Soviet Union was recognized internationally as a great power.30 Thus, for example, a survey by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) published in the early summer of 2003 found that as many as 49 percent of respondents named the Brezhnev era when the question was put to them, “Which was the best time of all to have lived in this country for people like you?” The period of the Putin presidency (which, to much lesser extent than the Brezhnev era, but to a greater degree than the later Gorbachev years and most of the Yeltsin era, has had the “advantage” for the authorities of substantial control over the output of the electronic media) came second, named by 22 percent of Russians. No other time was chosen by more than 4 percent. Three different eras were, in fact, named by precisely 4 percent of respondents: the period before the 1917 revolution, the Stalin era, and the Gorbachev years. (Three percent named the Khrushchev era and two percent the Yeltsin years.)31


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Equally, the years in which the country was led by Gorbachev and subsequently Yeltsin, which displayed more of the attributes of democracy (while being far from fully-fledged democracies) than any preceding period of Russian history, are criticized not so much for their democratic components as for other features, some of which were unintended consequences of greater freedom and of democratization. The Gorbachev era is seen as the beginning of a time in which Russians became worse off and life become more unpredictable and— above all—as the era during which the Soviet Union disintegrated, an occurrence a majority of Russians still regret. In addition, more Russians name the Gorbachev era than any other as the period in which Russia “lost its world role as a great power.”32 The Yeltsin period is unpopular in still greater part as a result of the emergence of extreme economic inequality and the rise of the “oligarchs,” as the tycoons who made their fortunes by acquiring ownership of Russia’s natural resources became known, as well as for such negative phenomena as increasing poverty and wages and pensions not paid on time. When Russians are asked to rate leaders of their country from all periods, Peter the Great is consistently chosen by more people than any other ruler. At five-year intervals—in 1989, 1994, and 1999— VTsIOM has asked respondents to name “the ten most outstanding people of all times and nations.”33 The answers were heavily Russocentric. The only non-Russian to make it into the top ten was Napoleon, and then only in 1994 and 1999. Peter the Great was named by 41 percent in 1989, 41 percent in 1994 and 45 percent in 1999. In the second and third of these surveys that meant that he was the most highly esteemed of all. Lenin, however, was still the most highly regarded person of all in 1989, named then by 75 percent of respondents.34 In the 1994 and 1999 surveys the positions were reversed, with Lenin coming second.35 How should we interpret this? It is probably indicative of growing disillusionment with “democracy Russian-style” in the Yeltsin years and a correspondingly growing nostalgia for aspects and symbols of the Soviet regime that the percentage of respondents choosing Lenin as one of the most outstanding figures of all time rose from 34 percent in 1994 to 43 percent in 1999 and that the proportion naming Stalin (who occupied fourth place in both of the two more recent surveys) increased from 20 percent in 1994 to 35 percent in 1999. Following the criticism to which Stalin and the Stalin era were subjected during the perestroika period, Stalin was named as one of the top ten


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greatest figures by only 12 percent of the people in 1989 (which put him in tenth place). In the following decade, the longer the Yeltsin era continued, the more highly regarded became the “Communist heroes.” Jeffrey Hahn, whose survey research has focused on the Yaroslavl region in central Russia, found that “support for democratic values and institutions” declined over the period from 1990 to 1996. Hahn observes: “By almost all the measures of diffuse support, including political efficacy, political trust, electoral commitment, and political interest, there has been an overall drop”.36 What Hahn finds in this one Russian region appears to hold good for much of Russia, including its central government, namely that “while progress in introducing the forms of democracy has been undeniable, changing the norms and practices that go with it has been less successful.”37 Conclusions While, in the absence of reliable pre-perestroika survey data on politically sensitive topics, there will remain scope for debate about how much political beliefs and values have changed over the past several decades, I see no compelling argument against the view that the liberalization and democratization introduced in the Gorbachev era, and especially between 1987 and 1990, both facilitated and produced substantial belief change. Citizens were given the opportunity to hear a wide range of unfamiliar analyses, to listen to and engage in serious political debate, and to vote in contested elections. The dissident movement was at its lowest ebb under Andropov and Chernenko (in Stalin’s time, of course, there was not, and could not be, any dissident movement) and pluralism was a gift from above. It was Gorbachev who broke the taboo on using the term pluralism other than pejoratively in 1987.38 The society was, however, far more ready to respond to an invitation to awaken than it would have been a generation earlier. There were several million more people with a higher education, and while knowledge of the outside world was still poor, it was much greater than at the time of Stalin’s death. By 1990–91 pressures from below, including nationalist pressures from a number of Soviet republics, were driving political events and Gorbachev and his supporters were increasingly responding to developments they could no longer control. By that time a radicalized intelligentsia deemed


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progress to be too slow and had become impatient with a process which, Gorbachev argued, needed to be “revolutionary in essence but evolutionary in its tempo.”39 It was crucially important that the Soviet system placed great power in the hands of the top leader and when a reformer attained the post of general secretary, a combination of strongly innovative leadership and institutional power made possible systemic changes that were accompanied by cultural change. The presence of well-educated specialists in research institutes, and even in some sections of the central party-state apparatus, provided a reservoir of ideas that could be drawn upon, although it turned out to be easier to liberalize and democratize the political system than to move from an economic system based on one set of principles to a system operating under a different logic. As the experience of post-Soviet Russia has illustrated, such a transition was liable to make conditions for a majority of citizens worse before they got better. Even now, when they are improving in the economic sphere, it is questionable how much this rests on fundamental structural improvements and how much on the high price of oil during the Putin presidency (in sharp contrast with the trend in oil prices during perestroika). In the Gorbachev era and during the early Yeltsin years there was, additionally, very substantial influence from the West on Russian thinking and on state policy. Institutionally, the dual executive—with both president and prime minister—was borrowed from the Fifth French Republic. These institutions of the late Soviet period were taken over by the Russian Federation in the post-Communist era, although Yeltsin’s 1993 constitution tilted power still more in the direction of the presidency as compared with either the prime minister or the legislature. Western interaction with Russian economic reformers was especially close in the early Yeltsin years, and both Western governments and international economic organizations (over which the United States had great influence) identified reform with the person of Yeltsin and a new breed of policy entrepreneurs, among them Yegor Gaidar and Anatoliy Chubais. This cozy relationship, especially when it meant turning a blind eye to the “loans for shares” scandal,40 went some way to diminishing Russians’ support for a market economy, as compared with their (often naïve) support for it in 1990 and 1991, when they associated it primarily with higher living standards and ignored the likely pain of transition.


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Moreover, both the Yeltsin leadership and their Western supporters, who included all the major Western governments, placed a higher priority on building capitalism than on building democracy. Some in the Yeltsin administration simply did not care about the latter. Others believed that a market economy would automatically produce support for democracy and that once enough Russians had acquired substantial amounts of property, they would demand a rule of law to protect their property rights. This turned out to be naïve, at least in the short term, for Russian businesspeople, including the biggest tycoons, found that informal (often corrupt) relations with people in positions in power, and the use of informal networks, provided better protection for their assets than the law. The lesson is that democratic institution building and the rule of law must be pursued for their own sakes. It is not enough to assume that they will emerge as by-products of something else, even a market economy, especially given the nature of “capitalism Russianstyle.”41 The postcommunist era has seen some revival of support for Soviet symbols and Soviet norms, and there is evidence, as the survey data indicate, of disillusionment with what has been presented to Russians as democracy. Indeed, of the new political institutions that have emerged since 1990 only the presidency today enjoys widespread support, and even that has doubtless owed much to Putin’s personal popularity. There is little sign that the further curtailment of democratic institutions that has occurred during the Putin presidency has led to popular discontent. This has induced great gloom among Russia’s most committed democrats. Thus, Lilia Shevtsova, of the Moscow Carnegie Center and a prominent political analyst, has said, “Our society is demoralized and not ready for institutional democracy,” adding: “It’s not ready to live in a pluralistic world. It wants to live in the court of the czar.”42 That is to take too pessimistic a view. There are, indeed, cultural continuities to be discerned in postcommunist Russia as well as indications that changes of outlook evident in the last years of the Soviet Union have by no means disappeared. The development and consolidation of a democratic political culture may once again depend on a leader or leaders committed to a process of democratization. It will depend also on the construction of a civil society, which remains weak in contemporary Russia, and on conscious democratic institution building. The task is essentially one for citizens of Russia


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themselves, but the West can help by not describing arbitrariness, when it occurs, as democracy and by taking at least as much interest in the building of democratic institutions in postcommunist countries as in the marketization of their economies or their recruitment in the “war against terror.” Notes 1. Richard A. Schweder, “Moral Maps, ‘First World’ Conceits, and the New Evangelists,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, eds. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 158–76, at 163. 2. Robert E. Lane, “What Rational Choice Explains,” in The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered, ed. Jeffrey Friedman (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 115. 3. Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in WorkRelated Values (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1980), 323. 4. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (London: Free Press, 2003), 510. 5. Archie Brown and Jack Gray, eds., Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London: Macmillan, 1977), 1. 6. As Ronald Inglehart has observed: “The idea that political culture is linked with democracy had great impact following the publication of The Civic Culture (Almond and Verba, 1963) but went out of fashion during the 1970s for a variety of reasons” (“Culture and Democracy,” in Culture Matters, eds. Harrison and Huntington, 80–97, at 91). 7. Samuel P. Huntington and Jorge Dominguez, “Political Development,” in Handbook of Political Science, vol. 3, Macropolitical Theory, eds. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, MA.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 1–114, at 31– 32. 8. Gabriel A. Almond, “Communism and Political Culture Theory” in A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990), 157–69, at 168. This article was first published in Comparative Politics, 13, no. 1 (1983). The books on political cultures in communist states on which Almond specifically draws are Brown and Gray, eds., Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States, and Stephen White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (London: Macmillan, 1979). See also Robert C. Tucker, “Culture, Political Culture, and Communist Society,” Political Science Quarterly, 88, no. 2 (1973): 173–90. 9. A valuable recent study, which provides substantial evidence of the lasting impact of the communist experience on citizens in postcommunist states, is Marc Morjé Howard’s The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 10. Ibid., esp. chapters 4 and 6. 11. Lawrence Harrison (citing Daniel Etounga-Manguelle), “Promoting Progressive Cultural Change,”in Culture Matters, eds., Harrison and Huntington, 296–307, at 302.


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12. William Mishler and Detlef Pollack, “On Culture, Thick and Thin: Toward a Neo-Cultural Synthesis,” in Political Culture in Post-Communist Europe: Attitudes in New Democracies, eds., Detlef Pollack, Jörg Jacobs, Olaf Müller, and Gert Pickel (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2003), 237–56, at 243. 13. I do not doubt for a moment the diversity of belief systems within Russia or within any other twentieth-century industrial society, but a combination of the nature of the Soviet system and the length of time it lasted meant that attachment to the values of pluralist democracy was a central feature of the belief system of only a rather small minority of Russians who were disproportionately to be found in the ranks of the urban intelligentsia. In the last years of the Soviet Union, in contrast, when people were given experience of competitive elections for a legislature in which real debate took place, a clear majority of the population became supporters of democratic principles. That last statement must, though, be qualified by noting that even the beliefs of the self-styled “democratic” activists were a mixture of the Soviet and the non-Soviet. On this, see Alexander Lukin, The Political Culture of the Russian ‘Democrats’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Lukin, on the basis of in-depth interviews with democratic activists in many different parts of Russia and a close study of their programmatic documents produced during the perestroika period, concludes that “the political views even of those ‘democratic’ activists who decisively rejected Soviet ideology were nevertheless greatly influenced by it” (298). 14. See, for example, Gordon M. Hahn, Russia’s Revolution from Above, 1985– 2000: Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). Alexander Yakovlev, a key political actor in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s, has argued that it is crucial to an understanding of perestroika to recognize that it was a “revolution from above.” See Yakovlev, Predislovie, Obval, Posleslovie (Moscow: Novosti, 1992), 267–68. See also Yakovlev’s fullest volume of memoirs, Sumerki (Moscow: Materik, 2003). Yeltsin also referred to the beginning of this process—the April 1985 plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—as a “revolution from above” (Yeltsin, Against the Grain: An Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), 114. 15. John Gooding, “Perestroika as Revolution from Within: An Interpretation,” The Russian Review 51, no. 1 (1992): 36–57. Gooding observes: “The very ‘withinness’ of the revolution vitiated its effectiveness, since it had to proceed under the auspices of that which it was in fact to undermine” (56). 16. For detailed elaboration of these points, see Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Archie Brown, ed., The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 17. The period from 1997 to the present has, however, been one of unusually extensive constitutional change in Britain. 18. For an impassioned argument that the “war” against terrorism and crime has led British governments to take a series of measures that undermine the rule of


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19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

Archie Brown law, see the recent book by the prominent British lawyer and Labour life peer, Helena Kennedy, Just Law (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004). Richard Rose and Neil Munro, Elections without Order: Russia’s Challenge to Vladimir Putin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 157. Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul, “Are Russians Undemocratic?” PostSoviet Affairs 18, no. 2 (2002): 91–121, at 117. For evidence and arguments that amplify the points made in summary form in this paragraph, see Archie Brown, ed., Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2003); Jeffrey Kahn, Federalism, Democratization, and the Rule of Law in Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Rose and Munro, Elections without Order; and Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999). Eugene Huskey, “Nomenklatura Lite? The Cadres Reserve in Russian Public Administration,” Problems of Post-Communism 51, no. 2 (2004): 30–39, at 30. See also Eugene Huskey and Alexander Obolonsky, “The Struggle to Reform Russia’s Bureaucracy,” Problems of Post-Communism, 50, no. 4 (2003): 22–33. Archie Brown, “Vladimir Putin and the Reaffirmation of Central State Power,” Post-Soviet Affairs 17, no. 1 (2001): 45–55. On Russia’s tycoons, see Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution (London: Little, Brown, 2000); David Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs, 2002); and Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York: Harcourt, 2000). See Harley Balzer, “Managed Pluralism: Vladimir Putin’s Emerging Regime,” Post-Soviet Affairs 19, no. 3 (2003): 189–227. For Russia as a “façade democracy,” see Peter Rutland, “The Sorry State of Russian Democracy,” RFE/RL Russian Election Special, December 15, 2003. See also three articles by Alexander Lukin, “Authoritarianism Deposing ‘Clan Democracy’,” Moscow Times, January 21, 2004, 11; “Authoritarianism and its Discontents,” Moscow Times, February 12, 2004, 8; and “A Short History of Russian Elections’ Short Life,” Moscow Times, March 17, 2004, 11. See William L. Miller, Stephen White, and Paul Heywood, Values and Political Change in Postcommunist Europe (London: Macmillan, 1998); and Pollack et al., Political Culture in Post-Communist Europe. See Stephen Whitefield, “Putin’s Popularity and its Implications for Democracy in Russia” in Alex Pravda (ed.), Leading Russia: Putin in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For additional data from his earlier surveys, cited in my chapter, I am indebted to Dr Whitefield. Ibid. In 1996 27.5 percent of respondents expressed their support or strong support for the practice of democracy in Russia at that time. The survey was conducted by the Yuri Levada analytical center. Levada was for many years the head of the leading Russian survey research center, VTsIOM, but that institution was taken over in 2003 by state appointees less committed either to independence from the state authorities or to asking a wide range of political-


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29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

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ly sensitive questions than was Levada. See Levada Centre, “Demokratiya nam ne grozit?”, http://www.levada.ru/press/2004030901.html Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin, “Institutsional’nye defitsity kak problema postsovetskogo obshchestva,” Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya (VTsIOM), 3 (65) (2003):33–52, at 38. There is a recognition now, however, that the living standards that generally prevail in the West are preferable to those which Soviet citizens experienced under Brezhnev. When Russian citizens were asked in 1998 whether they would prefer to have the level of welfare enjoyed by a majority in the West or that of the Brezhnev era in the USSR, 50 percent plumped for the former, although as significantly large a proportion as 36 percent chose the Brezhnev era, with 14 percent finding it too difficult to say. See Boris Dubin, “Litso epokhi: Brezhnevskiy period v stolknovenii razlichnykh otsenok,” Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya no. 3 (65) (2003): 26–40, at 31. Dubin, “Litso epokhi,” 25. Boris Dubin, “Stalin i drugie. Figury vysshey vlasti v obshchestvennom mnenii sovremennoy Rossii,” Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya no. 2 (64) (2003): 26–40, at 26. This is the second part of an article, the first part of which appeared in the January-February issue of the same journal. Dubin, “Stalin i drugie: Figury vysshey vlasti v obshchestvennom mnenii sovremennoy Rossii,” Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya no. 1 (63) (2003):13– 25. While it is always desirable to check one’s understandings of public opinion in another society or even one’s own against serious survey research, in the preperestroika Soviet Union this was impossible. However, writing in 1984, I suggested: “As far as national heroes are concerned, while Lenin may not command as much universal affection among Russians as Pushkin . . . his significance as a political symbol is very great. There is no other political figure to compare with him. Though the Lenin cult may provoke a satirical response from a minority of Soviet citizens, respect for Lenin (amounting at times to reverence) would appear to be widespread. That Lenin is admired at least as much as a great Russian as he is as a great revolutionary or enormously influential theorist is suggested by the incomparably higher degree of popular esteem for him than for Marx” (Archie Brown, ed., Political Culture and Communist Studies, London: Macmillan, 189). For an excellent study of the Lenin cult in the unreformed USSR, see Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Dubin (note 33), 20. Alexander Pushkin came third in all three surveys. Jeffrey W. Hahn, Regional Russia in Transition: Studies from Yaroslavl’ (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 106. Ibid., 241. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 127. Pravda, February 6, 1990, 1. See, for example, Freeland, Sale of the Century. See Thane Gustafson, Capitalism Russian-Style (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Chicago Tribune, March 13, 2004 (Johnson’s Russia List, No. 8115, March 13, 2004).


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Part VII The West


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22 Scene from a Fast-Food Restaurant Signs of the Times in Black America and the Path Beyond JOHN McWHORTER

One recent afternoon in a fast food restaurant in New York City, I was seated near a group of eight African-American boys around fourteen years old. Since it was 1:30 on a schoolday, and they were carrying bookbags and seemed in no hurry, I assumed they were skipping school. They were extremely loud, tossing bits of food across and around their tables and leaving them on the floor. The restaurant was run by black people, and most of the customers were black. But it was hard to see much of a healthy black “community” here. After repeatedly telling the boys to be quiet, the manager on duty, a black woman, finally told them to leave. It was almost poignant watching her try to make her commands more effective by infusing them with inflections of black “mother wit” in the way that black teachers often discipline black schoolchildren by tapping culture-internal authority, with its echoes of the home. Even this timehonored method had no effect here. The boys continued eating and talking. Clearly the prospect of losing face by being the first to get up was direr than refusing an elder’s command. They finally started leaving, but only very slowly and only after the manager had called in a male security guard. After they left, they circled the restaurant slowly

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for several minutes, as if taunting the manager as much as they could before finally ambling off. These boys did not by any means give the impression of being monsters. But neither could I regard them merely as young “chuckleheads” getting into “scrapes.” They seemed to consider themselves inherently exempt from observing public norms of behavior. They gave a sense of having begun checking out of mainstream society. Their speech was one indication. As a linguist, I have to tread carefully here—as I have argued in many venues, Black English is not a collection of errors but rather an alternate variety of English from the standard, with rules of its own. Worldwide, languages viewed up close are actually bundles of dialects, and Black English is to standard English as Bavarian German is to Hochdeutsch. Yet I was struck by how very far from the standard these kids’ version of the dialect lay. They were speaking a Black English so deep that I suspect many whites would have had a hard time comprehending it. Slang was just part of this. Their slurred enunciation was most of it— striking, given that Black English can be spoken as crisply as any other dialect or language. To me this had a particular meaning. In languages around the world, slurred pronunciation is especially pronounced among tight-knit groups, where sonic clarity becomes less necessary because shared context conveys so much meaning. These boys’ speech was one of many indications that they were in their own world within a world, to an extent that will interfere with their ability—or even desire—to compete and succeed in the mainstream as they get older. Their music gave the same impression. Rap was so deeply rooted in their consciousness that several times one or the other would spontaneously break out into some lyrics, sliding into the angular, bellicose gestures associated with rap performance, while another one or two would casually join him. Just a phrase here, a phrase there, decorating the joshing group conversation. But since this music is rooted in a violent, sullen, alienated ethos, it must give us pause that these boys identify so deeply with it. The affectation is to some extent theatrical; kids often enjoy the thrill of an alienated pose regardless of their actions and attitudes in everyday life. But to completely dissociate this music from the souls of its listeners courts self-deception. Just as we unexceptionably analyze an indigenous group’s folk music as a reflection of their culture and souls, the grip that grim, cocky rap lyrics have on today’s black


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America must be read as a badge of a cultural orientation—one quite different from that of black Americans before the eighties, for whom no music so angry held sway. Certainly there are, and have always been, rowdy, disobedient white boys. Nor, of course, do all black boys behave like the ones I am describing. But with respect to black writers who complain that the black “gangsta” pose is a mere parallel to the Mafia mystique in movies about Italians or the popularity of “bad boy” white rockers, I do not believe that I am stereotyping these boys and essentializing a race-neutral phenomenon as “black.” There is no impulse among Italian-Americans to regard the Mafia as the essence of being Italian, nor does mainstream white America regard rampant drug abuse and property damage as the core of being an American. On the contrary, both behaviors are considered sideshows in the larger cultures to which they belong. But since the 1960s, black America has been infected by a notion, sometimes explicit though usually tacit, that the core of black identity is rebellion and disaffection. Misbehavior and criminality are not the only ways this is expressed. Even the most educated blacks with the most assimilated demeanors get their “black authenticity” stripes to the extent that they subscribe to the notion that being black remains a battle forty years after the Civil Rights Act. Hence the celebration of black radical professors in contrast to the marginalizing of conservative black academics like Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, as suspect and “controversial,” or the tendency among wealthy, successful black film and television actors to paint black America (and themselves) as eternally plagued by white racism. Certainly, this contrarian pose would be a justified survival mechanism in an overtly racist America with concrete bars to black achievement. Yet in fact, the politics of alienation only triumphed among blacks after this kind of discrimination began eroding after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This paradox may be traced to the new fashion that emerged among thinking Americans at the same time, to unearth and eliminate racial prejudices once considered acceptable in general society. Black America was understandably bedeviled by a racial inferiority complex owing to the depredations of the past, and white America’s new interest in absolution offered a ready form of selfmedication. The person haunted by a sense of inferiority can hardly help but derive comfort from identifying flaws in an Other, and this explains something often perplexing to white observers: that a group


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nominally committed to getting ahead so often seems focused more on crying victim than on building. Today, because it is fundamentally an emotional crutch, this cultural aspect of black America thrives independent of direct experience with racism and is taught in colleges and universities as well as passed along the grapevine. Because this ideology seems at first glance so out of step with modern American reality, it is considered especially “enlightened,” a form of tutelage and moral generosity required to parse the rampant racism remaining, hidden but potent, in a society that might otherwise appear so far removed from that of 1960. As a result of this “strange attractor” in modern black ideology, the development of black identity among teens often entails learning to process mainstream America as an alien realm, deserving contempt rather than engagement. Some studies have suggested that there are racist disparities in criminal sentencing, for example, but none of them belie the sad fact that black men do commit a vastly disproportionate amount of violent crime that brings them into the justice system to be sentenced in the first place. The various task forces that have arisen in countless black communities attempting to address the criminal tendencies of young black men amply attest to the raw problem itself. Among too many black men, there is less of a fundamental recoil from criminality than among many other struggling groups. A conviction that rebellion is “understandable” and even proactive for black people surely plays a significant part in this. Black men attend and finish college at much lower rates than black women. Black students underperform in school regardless of socioeconomic level, one important reason for this being a sense that full engagement with school is “acting white.” As for rap music, though most of its listeners today are white, the music is largely created by blacks and is couched in linguistic and musical practices and attitudinal patterns drawn directly from black culture. It’s not surprising that black listeners connect with a music they perceive as theirs more intimately than other listeners, especially when a major theme of the music is disparagement of white America. A culture that thrills to Malcolm X’s upraised fist and cherishes rapper Tupac Shakur as an icon is a culture in which certain divergences from mainstream behavior can be expected. Some insist that what leads these kids to reject societal norms is less a cultural mindset than direct experience of racism. Yet while racism


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exists in America, it cannot doom an entire ethnic group to failure. The fact that black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean frequently thrive in the United States shows that racist biases, a human universal, need not prevent a group from striving and achieving. Many are offended to see black Americans compared with immigrants, noting that immigrants relocate voluntarily and thus present an unfair comparison. But my point is not “Jamaicans do it, so black Americans need to just get real.” Rather, what the experience of immigrants shows is that we should not too quickly assume that racism is the culprit, the reason why black Americans so often fail. Equally misleading is the common assumption that the boys in the restaurant were merely acting out a “legacy of the past.” Especially in view of the current movement for reparations for blacks, black spokespeople often analyze black inner cities as continuations of plantations and sharecropping, with negative black behaviors traced to the evils of slavery and the spiritual perversions it foisted upon blacks. What this overlooks is that before the late 1960s the association between blacks and crime, drug abuse, illegitimacy, and scholastic failure was much thinner than it has been since 1970. For example, black ghettoes before the 1960s were not the uniquely violent, desolate wastelands of wayward fathers and multigenerational dependence familiar to us. Countless monographs and endless reminiscences from old heads indicate that while poverty and associated ills were certainly real in black ghettoes before the seventies, its residents shared a fundamental sense of optimism and looking ahead, in contrast with the fatalism and stasis typical of modern inner cities. Black ghettoes were done in by two fateful developments. During the 1960s welfare programs were gradually expanded and their requirements loosened, with the worthy goal of lifting blacks out of poverty. But in the process, what began as a stringent program for widows became one that in effect paid poor women to have children and stay on the dole for the rest of their lives. In 1960, 22 percent of black children and 2 percent of white children were born out of wedlock; by 1994 70 percent of black children and 25 percent of white ones were. True, the white rate multiplied more than twelve times over while the black one tripled: changing societywide norms over the period obviously played a role. But the stark fact is that by 1994 nearly three-quarters of black children were born outside of wedlock while only a quarter of white ones were. It was in these same decades that ghettoes declined into the calamities that now concern us all.


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Open-ended welfare brought out the worst in human nature among a tragic number of poor blacks. Meanwhile, the countercultural revolution found black America heady with triumph after the Civil Rights Act. This birthed a shift in the black American zeitgeist. The integrationist goals of the old Civil Rights orthodoxy were proclaimed inauthentic; a new separatist focus enshrined rejection of the white mainstream, embracing lower-class black cultural traits as genuine and admirable. Here we can begin to understand why the “gangsta” rap pose would entrance young blacks twenty years later. It was also in the late 1960s that the taboo against “acting white” emerged among black teens, contrasting with attitudes of an earlier era when, for example, black students at Dunbar High School in Washington, DC outscored white ones on standardized tests in 1899. Black America, then, is saddled with some cultural traits that thrive independently of racism despite lending themselves well to being linked to racism in ex post facto fashion (e.g., “If blacks are 13 percent of the population and half the men in prison are black, then what does that mean?”). Many black Americans are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that today blacks’ problems are as much culture-internal as imposed. But those rejecting such analyses as “black-bashing” operate under another legacy of the countercultural revolution, derived from the anthropologist Franz Boas. I mean what is frequently called “cultural relativism”: the (usually tacit) assumption that the only culture with negative traits is Western white culture; others are cohesive, vibrant, benign. Certainly most individuals adopt this view with at least a minimum of nuance: few can think of nothing good at all to say about the West. But there remains a perceptible tendency to treat Western culture as fundamentally twisted and misbegotten and to refrain from negative judgments on any aspect of other cultures. But surely the blood feuds of Albanians (to take one example among countless others) are not benign in any obvious sense. Nor is the immolation of widows on their deceased husband’s pyres. There is no reason at all to expect that black American culture—a human one, like all the others—would for some reason display only positive traits. A corollary to Boasian cultural relativism is what Roger Sandall has termed “The Culture Cult”: To the extent that a group displays some negative cultural trait, it can safely be ascribed to the depredations of the West; before contact with Westerners all indigenous cultures were


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Edens populated by noble savages. Thus when John Ogbu published a book-length study of the “acting white” phenomenon, black Harvard public policy scholar Ronald Ferguson sharply criticized Ogbu’s thesis and even his decision to publish the book—and in the next breath fully acknowledged that the phenomenon exists but identified it as black teens’ response to a racist society. What all such criticisms miss is that in organic systems, both cultural and linguistic, traits often persist independently of usefulness. In English, something sits on a table, but one can make it sit when one sets it; something lies on the floor, but one can make it lie when one lays it. That distinction is archaic in the current language: we regularly sit things on tables as well as set them, and most speakers have a hard time distinguishing lie and lay at all. But in earlier English, a great many more verb pairs had this vowel change, connoting what linguists call the causative, and it was a living part of the language that rarely troubled its speakers. Cats knead people before curling up on them, as a useless reflex that begins when they have to do this to coax milk from a mother’s breast. Similarly, one component of any human culture is historical flotsam. Thanksgiving began when desperate American colonists offered heartfelt gratitude to God for sending rain after a hot, dry summer. Now it is simply an occasion to gorge on turkey with family, dutifully giving thanks in a preprandial prayer for food that was easily obtained, with the actual origins of the holiday only dimly perceived. Cultural traits are especially likely to survive when they prove adaptable to new circumstances. With the effects of weather on the harvest no longer relevant to most Americans, Thanksgiving serves as an opportunity to see family in a society where families tend to be more geographically spread out than previously, as well as to enjoy certain foods rarely prepared at other times of the year. In the same way, black vigilance against victimization was a logical response to the overtly racist America of the past; as racism has receded, the embattled pose survives in part because reflexive alienation can be, ironically, a kind of psychological balm for human beings. To be the underdog is to have a standing nemesis that one can point to as less moral than oneself—a seductive temptation for a race understandably haunted by a sense of inferiority inherited from a nasty history. The general American culture’s enshrinement of contrarianism as progressive and “cool,” signaled by hard rock, the domination of hard leftist sentiment in academia, Bart Simpson and South


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Park, only reinforces this. But the benefits of permanent victimhood are outweighed by the self-destructive behaviors and attitudes that it conditions and encourages. Certainly we must work to eradicate remnants of racist discrimination in all its forms. But we should not ignore cultural “flotsam.” A sober perspective on the race dilemma must squarely face the fact that the synergies and ironies of cultural contact over a historical period do not simply leave standing a depraved victor and a noble victim. Rather, the agonizing realities of history can leave a group with a culture some of whose aspects hobble them rather than empower them. It is unlikely that the boys I mentioned earlier were victims of poverty, considering that full meals at Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants cost about $6 and the youngsters were wearing glistening new sneakers that cost about $100 a pair. The humble neighborhood made it unlikely that they came from affluent families, but grinding poverty it was not. Now in New York there are a great many poor and working poor people in Chinatown—but restaurants there do not require security guards. Here as elsewhere, culture matters. But one fact is heartening: these cultural residues bedevilling black America are largely recent developments. Black America, like the rest of America, has always had its ruffians. But before the 1960s its overriding cultural norms—those espoused unhesitatingly by responsible black adults—were much more suited to achievement in an imperfect world. These blacks faced a virulent racism that needed no pointing out to them. Yet they managed to construct thriving urban communities across the nation. The Civil Rights movement was focused on the races coming together rather than seeking to define blacks against the mainstream. Separatist notions of “black nationalism” hovered at the margins but had little impact on general thinking. Reorienting black America toward the norms of yesteryear will entail, among other things, changing the overall context of the race debate in the United States, along lines indicated by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. Gladwell describes the “Broken Windows” initiative in New York City: crime went down on streets where surface features like broken windows and graffiti were removed and petty civil violations were prosecuted instead of ignored. In the same way, a healthy black America will be one where societal structures that encourage victim-based thinking are eliminated and replaced by self-


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directed orientations of the sort that flower naturally unless artificial barriers are erected. In an America where more black families are middle-class than poor, racial preference policies predicated on the notion that all blacks, regardless of circumstances, are incapable of serious competition can only reinforce a sense that black skin inherently exempts one from mainstream expectations. This is especially true of younger generations of blacks who never knew an America without such preference policies. In such circumstances, one can barely help coming of age assuming that such policies are natural and reasonable and that black people simply cannot be expected to hit the very highest notes in any competitive intellectual endeavor. For the reasons I have outlined above, the common assumption that such policies must remain in place until there is no more racism anywhere in our society is erroneous. Racial preference policies are increasingly being questioned, and this must be seen as a progressive development. A race required to thrive by its own efforts to the same extent as other races will in time acquire a true self-confidence that will eat away at the internalized shame that fuels the victim culture. Similarly, the recasting of Aid to Families with Dependent Children programs as temporary safety nets designed to move the unfortunate into the workforce is a progressive alteration of practices and premises that disabled legions of blacks for far too long. In contrast to claims that welfare reform would leave millions of blacks stranded in destitution, study after study has shown that, when assisted in seeking and retaining employment under a time-limited program, welfare recipients tend strongly to become self-sufficient citizens. Problems remain—child care must be more liberally funded, for example. But this change in policy, regularly hailed by former welfare recipients themselves, must be seen as a promising development for black America. A second strategy for addressing the self-imposed impediments to success in black America will be a public intellectual culture devoted less to idle criticism and scoring rhetorical points than to carefully persuading blacks willing to listen that there are ways of being “black” beyond willful alienation. I have worked toward this goal in my own writings and have found that despite predictable objections from some blacks, mostly in academia and the media, legions of others are receptive to an empathetic but critical analysis of where black


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America has gone wrong over the past four decades. I hear from countless black teachers and school officials who understand that subjecting black students to high expectations is not an injustice and have begun to seek strategies for doing so. Two black churches have devoted discussion sessions to the ideas I present in my essay collection Authentically Black. Losing the Race is assigned in African-American Studies classrooms in colleges and universities nationwide. I note this not to boast but to suggest a paradigm for effective public advocacy. We cannot usefully reach black America with cavils and potshots that only put people on the defensive. Rather than cooking up yet one more excoriation of aging, increasingly irrelevant black leaders like Jesse Jackson, we must point to the true black leaders, unsung by the media, working with disadvantaged blacks one at a time in city after city. This will help people discard the assumption that blacks can only be saved by a massive influx of largesse from the federal government and a most implausible psychological revolution in a white America finally realizing its “debt” to blacks. Dismissing the reparations movement will not persuade black Americans steeped in a zeitgeist that portrays blacks as objects of pity. Rather, we must emphasize that black America has already received reparations via affirmative action, welfare expansion (misguided in that case), the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and other policies, and go on to outline strategies whereby we can now use those policies as a springboard for healing it from within. Rather than simply dismiss black Americans as “whining 150 years after slavery was abolished,” we must stress that we have been misled in being taught to assume that black America remains condemned to failure until all residual racism has disappeared. I find this argument is highly effective and inspiring when presented with the goal of persuading rather than mocking or scoring debating points. The boys at the restaurant were victims indeed, not of “racism” but of an ideological detour thrown up by the sociological history of black America. That ideology would perplex the black Americans who worked so hard before the 1960s to pave the way for blacks to make the best of themselves in an imperfect world. Realizing that culture is the main problem now rather than racism or societal inequity, our task is to pull black America out of that detour, freeing us from the self-fulfilling prophecies of self-indulgent indignation and returning us to a clear-eyed, proactive race leadership that will allow us to “get past race” for good.


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23 Ireland as the Celtic Tiger How Did It Happen? DICK SPRING

In 1950 the Republic of Ireland had little to boast about on the economic front. High unemployment and mass emigration were the order of the day. Agriculture dominated the economy, though the majority of farming families were merely subsistence farmers, eking out a living on small holdings. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the picture is very different; “worlds apart” aptly describes the conditions in which Irish society finds itself today. By any standard, the transformation has been remarkable, and it may be of assistance to developing economies to gain some insights on how the Irish miracle happened. From the 1920s into the 1960s, economic conditions in the new Irish state were grim. Following separation from the United Kingdom in 1921, successive governments adhered to protectionist economic policies; high tariffs on imports aimed to protect Irish producers who would not have been able to compete in a free-trade environment. Ireland was isolationist, traditional, pessimistic, and fearful that competition would do it in. With the foundation of the state in 1922, an alliance between the Catholic Church and the new state erected powerful defenses against the perceived enemies, notably liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and non-Catholic, commonly British, freethinking. Social and cultural 419


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conservatism interacted with the antimaterialist doctrine of the church to stifle economic development. Consequently, after World War II Ireland failed to participate in or benefit from a golden period of economic expansion in Western Europe. Noninvolvement in the war, nonmembership in NATO, and late membership in the United Nations (1955) all reinforced Ireland’s isolation from the West European mainstream. By the early 1950s, however, it became clear to policy makers that the government needed new economic strategies if it was to overcome high unemployment and mass emigration. With Eamon De Valera, one of the state’s founding fathers, elevated to the presidency (a largely ceremonial office) in 1959, his successor, Prime Minister Sean Lemass, had the freedom to pursue alternative economic policies. A debate commenced in Irish policy circles between protectionism and free trade and, more generally, between economic conservatism and liberalization. Out of these debates emerged the government’s First Program for Economic Expansion in 1958. The report strongly advocated ending protectionism and moving to free trade and a more open economy in which the government was less intrusive. This was a radically new direction for the Irish economy, vastly different from any economic policy since the state was founded. The program was to lead not only to an opening up of the Irish economy but also to the development of policies aimed at attracting foreign investment to Ireland. In 1959 the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) was created as a semiautonomous organization charged with encouraging foreign industrialists to locate manufacturing plants in Ireland. This was a very important milestone in Ireland’s economic transformation. The main target countries were the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, and, after the Asian economies emerged in the 1970s, Japan and South Korea. An Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement was signed in 1966, a very significant development given the hostility between the two countries that had dominated the previous century. This agreement was also an important stepping stone for both Ireland and the United Kingdom as they moved toward joining the European Economic Community. The IDA’s success was limited until 1973, when Ireland entered into the EU along with the United Kingdom and Denmark—the most important event since Ireland’s independence. Membership opened up a new dimension for Ireland: EU membership meant new trading relationships and a more balanced relationship with Britain, which


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became a major trading partner. This access to new markets gave the IDA a whole new impetus: now it could offer American, Japanese, or other companies access to the European market, making Ireland significantly more attractive to foreign investors. Further enhancing its attractiveness were a corporate tax rate of 10 percent and programs that facilitated access to capital and training. A large, English-speaking labor pool was also a valuable resource. Until 1968, all secondary education was private, in Catholic schools administered by orders like the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy. Since these schools charged fees, many families had no choice but to send their children to work after primary school. Many fourteen-year-olds went straight into jobs in factories, delivering milk, and the like. In 1968, the government made a crucial educational decision, introducing free secondary education in public schools. Attendance in secondary schools rose rapidly, and Ireland was on its way to becoming one of the most highly educated countries in the world. The church’s role in education is declining now, and in another twenty years it is unlikely that religious orders will be involved in education. Although joining the EU was a turning point for the Irish economy, the early years did not produce a significant economic surge. The main benefits from membership went to the farming sector as a result of the very generous terms of the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP). Unfortunately for the vast majority of the farming community, 80 percent of the financial rewards from the CAP went to 20 percent of the farmers. This distortion, which continues today, has led to the consolidation of farm holdings and the migration of many people to urban areas. The early years following entry into the EU also proved difficult for many traditional Irish industries that were unable to compete in the new open trading environment. Many jobs were lost in the traditional manufacturing sectors. Successive Irish governments set out to maximize the very substantial financial assistance from Europe. Apart from the CAP, which Ireland needed to sustain its agriculture, vast amounts of money obtained from the Regional Development Fund and the Structural and Cohesion Funds were spent on education and training to improve the skills and the knowledge base of the emerging workforce. Ireland was very successful in attracting a range of industries: textiles, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, computer components,


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call centers. Ireland’s success is evident from the fact that it has captured over 25 percent of all U.S. investment coming into the European Union in recent decades—quite remarkable given that Ireland accounts for less than 1 percent of the GDP of the EU. Recently, some of the more labor-intensive industries, such as textiles and call centers, have departed Ireland for lower-wage countries in Eastern Europe, North Africa, and India. Despite some job losses, the success of the Irish economy continues with the emphasis now on e-business, information/communications technologies, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and international financial services. More than 1,050 foreign companies now operate in Ireland employing 130,000 people. They account for one-quarter of GDP and one-fifth of Ireland’s exports. Ireland has enjoyed the fastest-growing economy in Europe for a number of years and continues to be an attractive location for investment, offering access to a market of 380 million people as the EU expands. The factors that remain in Ireland’s favor are a skilled and flexible English-speaking workforce, one of the world’s lowest corporate tax rates, and the youngest and best-educated population in Europe. Of interest also is the fact that Ireland’s exports are now far more diversified than they were in the mid-1960s, when 60 percent went to the United Kingdom. Now only 18 percent goes to the United Kingdom; 41 percent goes to other EU states, 22 percent to the United States and Canada, and 19 percent to the rest of the world. The percentage of the working population now in agriculture is about 6 percent compared to about 60 percent in the mid-twentieth century. This decline is expected to continue. The education system has been a major contributor to Ireland’s economic success. In 2001, from a population of 3.8 million, about 1 million people were engaged in full-time education, and 13.5 percent of public expenditure went to education, among the highest rates in Europe. Sixty percent of secondary school graduates now go on to third-level education, with the majority taking courses in business, engineering, and computer science. In a very innovative measure, the Irish government is providing €650 million to Science Foundation Ireland, a body charged with ensuring that the research and development component of industrial policy provides Ireland with a competitive advantage in this area. Agreements between the government and trade unions, employers, and farm organizations have been very important in achieving indus-


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trial harmony since 1990. These agreements have played a key role in enabling monetary policy to keep inflation under control by promoting moderation in wage increases. The current agreement aims at keeping Ireland competitive in a rapidly changing world. It provides a strong basis for further economic progress, for improving the quality of life and living standards for all, and for bringing about a fairer and more inclusive Ireland. In summary, a combination of American investment, Irish budgetary discipline, and EU development funds, coupled with sweeping economic and educational reforms, enabled Ireland to overcome its economic problems. High growth rates and the expansion of employment transformed the Irish economy and brought wealth to the society. The Irish have proven that sound domestic management of the economy is vital if a country is to succeed in the highly competitive market zone that the EU has become. One major personal reservation is my concern at how dependent on the United States the Irish economy has become. If U.S. multinationals decided to move to locations like India and China that offer lower labor costs, the consequences for Ireland could be disastrous. At the time of Ireland’s accession to the EU in 1973, some feared that Ireland and its culture would be overwhelmed by its larger European neighbors. The opposite has in fact been the case: Irish artists, musicians, writers, and film makers have enjoyed new freedom and opportunities with a far larger and more receptive audience than previously available. Music groups like U2 and The Corrs and writers like Roddy Doyle and Maeve Binchy are recognized around the world. Despite the extraordinary economic success of recent years, the accompanying personal liberation, and the impressive achievements of Irish artists and writers, dark clouds still linger on the horizon. Substantial inequality still exists, crime rates are soaring, homelessness has increased, and marriage breakdown, something of a rarity in the past, is commonplace; divorce was legalized in 1996. Moreover, the rates of both childbirth outside wedlock and alcohol-related violence among young people have increased dramatically. Numerous public tribunals of enquiry, established by the Irish Parliament, are investigating corruption and criminal activity by leading politicians in the 1970s and 1980s. They relate mainly to illegal payments made to government ministers, including the prime minister, and favorable legal decisions that allowed property speculators and


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developers to make vast amounts of money very quickly. The conduct of religious orders in the administration of industrial schools in the 1950s to 1970s is also the subject of a public enquiry, arising from claims of sexual and physical abuse by men and women who were placed in the church’s care when in their teens. These troubling phenomena have led to widespread cynicism and lack of confidence in both church and state institutions. The Ireland of my childhood in the 1950s was a country where family was sacrosanct, neighbors and community were of vital importance, and there was a warmth and a welcome at the hearth for all. Alas, this is no longer the case. We are caught up in the post-Thatcher era, in which the individual is of prime importance, the commercial law of the jungle dominates, and the lowest common denominator determines how standards are set in many aspects of life. I hope the pendulum will swing back.


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24 The Long and Winding Road The Italian Path to Modernization1 MATTEO B. MARINI

A recent cartoon shows an Italian looking at himself in a mirror and saying, “Italians are extraordinary people. . . . I wish they would just be ordinary.” Once the center of the Roman empire and today one of the world’s seven most industrialized countries, Italy presents a puzzle: so many aspects of its social life contrast with its advanced economic status. For example, Italy ranks thirty-fifth among 133 countries in the 2003 Corruption Perceptions Index. It is also home to the mafia. Italian governments are among the world’s least stable, having changed fifty-seven times in the last fifty-seven years. The world’s five hundred largest corporations include only twelve Italian firms. A common explanation is the character of Italy’s modernization process, which historians and sociologists have variously described as passive, distorted, and original. Whatever the valence of these adjectives, they all underscore the peculiarity of the pattern. In discussing this peculiarity I will follow the account of the Italian anthropologist Carlo Tullio-Altan, who claims to have identified a set of constant behavioral patterns traceable throughout Italian history. He calls the attitudes associated with these patterns conformism, rebelliousness, and opportunism.2 According to a recent opinion poll, 61 percent of Italians take a conformist attitude in political matters.3 Italian history does not 425


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feature major points of institutional discontinuity such as the British republicanism of the early seventeenth century or the French revolution of the eighteenth, both resulting in progress toward democracy. Modern practices spreading across Europe during the past three centuries were generally regarded in Italy with suspicion, and the modernization of political institutions has generally come from outside, as during the Napoleonic wars or after World War II, when the country’s current republican constitution was introduced (1948). In reaction to Italy’s societal conformism and resilient elites, the social movements inspired by enlightened minorities who wanted to modernize the country took the form of rebellion.4 Through the centuries the Italian political arena has been prey to radical ideologies such as fascism, communism, and anarchism. Many of those who attempted to assassinate kings and queens across Europe during the nineteenth century were Italians. Even now, more terrorist groups survive in Italy than in other European countries. Moreover, Italy’s rebellions were not restricted to ideological elites but sometimes included large social groups. Peasant bands (briganti) appeared at many turning points in the nation’s history, notably after the country’s political unification between 1861 and 1870. The third attitude, opportunism, is the most characteristically Italian. Opportunism means shifting one’s position in order to stay on the winning side. To the opportunist, norms and rules do not have independent force, but are to be adopted temporarily and instrumentally. Opportunism is the art of “changing everything in order to change nothing,” according to a famous sentence from Giovanni Tommasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard.5 That novel described the strategy adopted by Sicilian landlords when the king of Piedmont was unifying the country. Afraid of losing their privileges after unification, the landlords transformed themselves into fervent patriots in order to be co-opted into the winning elite and to be able to maintain their rentseeking strategy based on the exploitation of local peasants. Opportunism has been in evidence at major turning points of Italian history.6 Like conformism and rebelliousness, it is a generalized social attitude. The Italian expression “l’arte di arrangiarsi” connotes both the ability to manage a difficult situation and the use of any means, even illicit, to fix it. This attitude is often found in the main character of Italian comedy films, and the expression has been recently identified in opinion polls as naming a typical feature of Italian culture.7


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In combination, these three attitudes create instability: conformism presents an obstacle to modernization in the long term, while rebelliousness and opportunism together undermine the stability necessary for sustained progress. The environment defined by such traits can be compared to an inefficient engine, expending much energy but producing little motion. Nevertheless, thanks to the worldwide spread of technological progress, Italy participated in the economic miracle of the West in the twentieth century. Latecomers to economic growth, like postwar southern Europe, imported technology and paid much lower wages than more developed countries. Contemporary latecomers, mainly located in the Eastern Hemisphere, are engaged in the same pattern of development, attracting industrial production thanks to their lower labor costs and their ability to imitate advanced technologies.8 Their competitive advantage is difficult for early-comers to match and forces the latter to specialize in technological innovation, as the United States and some European countries are doing. Unfortunately, Italy may not be one of them. Many observers have recently spoken of “the decline of industrial Italy,”9 though others contend that its climate, landscape, design tradition, and tourist attractions will save the country from economic crisis. Whatever economic path Italy takes, it will need modern institutions that perform efficiently for all Italians. The problems listed earlier—political instability, corruption, and the mafia—impose huge costs on the economic system, affecting Italy’s competitiveness. This is why the long and winding process of Italian modernization must advance further. Italy is at a crossroads: either it brings to maturity its long process of modernization, or it may well follow the Argentine path of dedevelopment. In what follows I identify the origins of conformism, rebelliousness, and opportunism, explain how these three attitudes have been at work at the turning points of the country’s history, and look at the alternatives Italy faces. The Cultural Matrix: Amoral Particularism The Italian mentality cannot be fully understood without referring to Roman history. Since the fall of the Roman empire, any major turning point in Italian history, such as the Renaissance of the fourteenth


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century, the country’s political unification in the nineteenth century, and the fascist adventure, has invariably been conceived by its protagonists as a return to the splendor of Rome.10 It is as if the Italian citizen still feels pride, a conviction that Italians were the best, and believes that only a fate inflicted from outside deprived the country of the Roman grandeur. The contrast between the Roman era and the centuries of foreign domination that followed it is so devastating a blow to Italian self-esteem that it is often suppressed from collective awareness. Italy’s fall may be better understood through the impact of broader historical forces than through the decay of mores. The historical forces I refer to are those identified by the French historian Fernand Braudel to explain the crisis of Mediterranean civilization: the discovery of America in 1492, which opened up to northern and western European countries an immense range of opportunities, coupled with the Protestant Reformation, which provided the ethics for the development of capitalism. This combination moved the center of gravity of trade from the Mediterranean Sea northwest to the Atlantic coast of Europe.11 The orientation of the Italian elites of the time also played a major role in explaining the Italian decay at the threshold of modernity. Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries Italy had been a cradle for many economic institutions that fostered capitalism, such as letters of exchange (contracts between money lenders and borrowers), double-entry accounting, the certified check, and insurance.12 But Italy could not translate such initial advantages into a stable pace of national economic growth. While other major European countries were witnessing the birth of the nation-state, Italy was still subdivided into a dozen small states fighting with each other. Italy’s late unification (1870) may explain the persistent political fragmentation, and such phenomena as the lack of trust in abstract norms and institutions like the state or the rule of the law, as well as political instability and the economic backwardness of southern Italy. Nicolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), probably the most renowned Italian political philosopher and a founder of modern political science, described the weakness and shortsightedness of the Italian elite at the threshold of modernity. Famously, Machiavelli’s prince is supposed to disguise his own sentiments if the situation requires him to do so in order to reach his political goals. “The ends justify the means” is Machiavelli’s counsel about the arts of governance. Fran-


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cesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) is less famous than Machiavelli but no less important for understanding Italian culture. In his secret diaries,13 Guicciardini urged a cynical and secretive approach, a kind of “amoral particularism” that foreshadows the “amoral familism” of Edward Banfield’s seminal 1958 book about a southern Italian village, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.14 A third basic factor explaining Italy’s arrested modernization is its north–south divide. The south was dominated by feudal regimes such as the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal state, while the north was organized in city-states like Florence, Venice, and Milan—the Comuni (communities). These were little towns with thriving economies, far more advanced than the agrarian economy of the south. Traders, artisans, and professionals were able not only to create an incipient middle class but also to defend their political autonomy against attacks from northern Europe. As Robert Putnam first documented in his 1993 book Making Democracy Work, there is probably a relationship between southern Italy’s low economic growth and institutional efficiency and the region’s lack of self-determination since the Middle Ages.15 The shift of trade from the Mediterranean to northern Europe did not help either. Bella Italia What of Bella Italia, the joy and glamour usually associated with Italy? Tourists have long been smitten by its beautiful landscapes, treasures of art and history, and extraordinary cuisine. Italy is today the fourth most requested tourist destination worldwide, after France, Spain, and the United States.16 The same aristocracy that was responsible for this dolce vita also bears responsibility for the persistence of traditional practices in the economic, political, and religious realms. The many courts (the Medici in Florence, the Estensi in Ferrara, the Sforza in Milan, and the popes who came from these families) were mentors and patrons for many artists, embellishing their palaces and cathedrals with paintings, sculptures, and architecture unique in the history of humankind. But during the centuries when northern Europeans were engaged in “ascetic” capitalism, Italy was dominated by the Counterreformation of the Catholic Church and its civil arm, the kingdom of Spain.


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Spanish elites, like their Italian counterparts, did not believe in the work ethic. Business practices were low-status activities. The surplus acquired by rent-seeking strategies was simply consumed in financing artists and architects and maintaining a lavish lifestyle. The different strategies of the ruling elites in Reformation and Counterreformation Europe at the threshold of modernity resulted in distinctive cultural syndromes: incessant accumulation in the north of Europe and superconsumerism in the south. Each still affects the path to modernity taken by these two regions. Late Modernization Driven by the Italian Ideology Italy achieved political unification in the mid-nineteenth century, three centuries after most other European states. It was not a bottomup movement but an elite strategy promoted by the Savoy dynasty in Piedmont, the northwesternmost region of Italy, probably influenced by its proximity to France and Great Britain, then Europe’s two most advanced nations. In a series of diplomatic steps and military actions between 1860 and 1870, the Piedmontese court took over the other regional states, including the semifeudal Kingdom of Naples and the Papal state. That it was unification from above is the meaning of a famous quote attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio, Piedmont’s prime minister: “Having made Italy, we need to make Italians.” Southern bandits backed by landlords engaged in guerilla warfare with the national army, which responded with wholesale slaughter. The Catholic Church did not reach an agreement with the Italian government until 1929, denying legitimacy to the new state and contributing to a climate of distrust. Fortunately, modern institutions were already developed in most of the northern regions when unification took place, but cultural differences among regions long persisted. Linguists maintain that unification of the Italian language occurred only with the advent of television a century later.17 Economic historian Alexander Gershenkron notes that in no other European country was the push toward industrialization weaker than in Italy.18 The contemporary models of modernization like France and Great Britain were viewed with suspicion by Italian intellectuals. They feared that industrialization would bring class conflicts, unemployment in the handicraft sector, and displacement of peasants in the countryside, giving rise to political unrest. Some Italians claimed


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a moral superiority over Britons in virtue of Catholic doctrine, which emphasized human values rather than the maximization of profit.19 The Italian path to modernization has been an attempt to become modern without renouncing tradition, to industrialize without forgetting human values linked to the rural economy. Bollati sums up the Italian ideology: “Natural talent is superior to method, creativity to programs, emotions and drive to organization. The final result may be the illusion that Italy is the cultural mediator par excellence, in time and space, the bridge between the East and the West, between archaism and science fiction.”20 The Southern Question was a proving ground for this ideology. Since the northern and southern cultures were so different, national unification was a good test of the elite’s ability as cultural mediators. After unification the Kingdom of Italy instituted a deliberately harsh fiscal policy with the southern landlords and peasants. The agrarian surplus from the south was siphoned off by the national government to build infrastructure in the north, which was better located for trade with western Europe. This was a rational policy, since absentee landlords often wasted the agrarian surplus in luxury consumption, while the north was an incipient industrial economy. And indeed the northern economy took off right away. But the industrial divide between the two regions of the country deepened, causing resentment in the south at this “exploitation” by the north. The southern elite adjusted to the new situation opportunistically, shifting from the right, considered responsible for the “exploitation,” to the left. In 1876 the national government was ousted in favor of a leftist government, which inaugurated an era of political clientelism. By clientelism I mean a policy aimed at benefiting lobbies that can guarantee a politician reelection. Since the lobbies in the south were essentially clans made up of landlords and peasants linked by feudal relationships, institutions like the state, the rule of law, and economic policy were much affected by traditional habits. Both landlords and peasants believed that power was nothing but the use of force for personal interests. The local representatives of the state were supposed to be authorized, by law, to protect personal or clientelistic interests. The result was aptly summarized by two members of the Parliament visiting Sicily at that time, who concluded that “things like this would happen when modern institutions are brought in from outside to address social conditions from a different stage of civilization.”21 The contrast between formal and informal norms, modernity and


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tradition, could not be better stated. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when national policy shifted from “exploitation” to the injection of financial resources into the South, political clientelism rose to unprecedented heights. A new class of political entrepreneurs was born, which grew immensely during the course of the century, supported by both sides of the political spectrum.22 The “Economic Miracle” Twentieth-century Italy presented two types of economic constraints: a small market and entrepreneurs with the premodern attitudes of rent-seeking and luxury consumption. Together these made it difficult to accumulate the necessary surplus for investment and technological advance. Moreover, as noted earlier, Italians had an ideological aversion to industrialization, which they considered harmful to social relationships. For all these reasons, the state had to play a major role in the accumulation of capital, channeling investment toward corporations and initiatives of strategic interest for the national economy, like railroads, the military, and the steel industry. In all these sectors, large companies were created, sometimes directly by the state, sometimes through the private initiative of aristocrats imbued with modern ideas of business management.23 Under the Fascist regime (1922–1943), state intervention became even more pervasive. Not only were large state companies created; the entire economic system was controlled through the corporate model. Major economic decisions were made by the corporations, the government, and the unions allied to the totalitarian regime. Tariffs protected the national market from international competition, continuing the practice since national unification. In sum, the culture of the new Italy still demonstrated the three main characteristics: (1) conformism, by which the aristocratic elite tried to modernize the economy without competition and risk; (2) rebelliousness, represented by a long season of political unrest before the Fascist regime suspended democracy; and (3) opportunism, in the form of Mussolini, initially a radical socialist who banned leftist unions after gaining power. Only after World War II did things begin to change significantly. The abandonment of protectionism, promoted by the Marshall Plan, along with the creation of the European Common Market, made


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possible the “Italian economic miracle.” Italy became an exporter of high technology goods (e.g., Olivetti), as well as of luxury consumption goods like automobiles, household appliances, and fine leather and textile products. The surge of industrialization in the north of Italy fueled waves of immigration from the south, totaling perhaps five million people. The feudal system of latifundium, based on the exploitation of a surplus workforce, had ended. Land reform, irrigation, rural electrification, and the availability of credit nurtured genuine agricultural development. The most sweeping transformation occurred in the north-east-center (NEC) of the country: the industrialization of a rural area that is close to “the industrial triangle” of Turin, Milan, and Genoa. Rural industrialization spread rapidly, and local managers or workers started their own businesses providing goods and services for the major corporations. Capitalism had become a popular phenomenon. Particularly notable were the small size of firms and geographic specialization: ceramic tiles were made in Sassuolo, woolen clothes in Prato, specialty foods in Parma. Economies of agglomeration substituted for economies of scale.24 Why did this happen in the NEC and not in the south? Along with the geographic explanation (proximity to the “industrial triangle”), there is a cultural explanation: the latifundium system in the south had been exploitative and abusive. In the NEC, working households were provided with a house and the assurance of continuing employment, nurturing some entrepreneurial skills.25 In the south, peasants were treated almost as slaves. Presented with economic opportunity, NEC peasants were transformed,26 while those in the south remained dependent, this time not on the padrone but on state welfare programs.27 In any event, both north and south experienced a significant surge in per capita income as well as in public services. The introduction of refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, and television helped to change the role of women in society. A new middle class emerged as agents of modernization even in the deep south. The decline in the influence of the church, symbolized by the legalization of divorce in 1974, has contributed to the transformation. Young people now attend many more years of school than before. Like other European youths, they have been profoundly influenced by television and American culture. Youths and women appear to be the vanguard of


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a process of cultural modernization that is closing the gap between north and south.28 However, this “modernity” is often superimposed on a premodern value system, creating a mixed pattern that does not always favor progressive change, symbolized by the large number of Italians who continue to live with their parents long after other Europeans are living independently.29 This mixture of old and new patterns of behavior leads to a permanent tension between modernity and tradition, as we have seen in many other aspects of Italian political and economic life.30 The Future of the Economy The optimism ignited by the post-World War II economic miracle seems now to have evaporated. Globalization has been a wake-up call for the business community. Italians feel squeezed between the Asian miracle on one side and the technological surge of the United States and northern European countries on the other. A new international division of labor seems to be emerging, with Asian countries making better and cheaper goods in traditional sectors and Western countries specializing in cutting-edge technological advances. Countries like Italy, which had tried to produce a little of everything, feel threatened. The case of Fiat is illustrative. In 1990 Fiat was the second largest car producer in Europe, with a market share of about 14 percent. Today its market share in Europe has dropped to about 7 percent. Italy’s share of the world market in industrial goods like shoes, furniture, woolens, and jewelry has also dropped precipitously. And Olivetti is no longer in business.31 Why this decline? Labor productivity, an indicator of technical progress, has increased much more slowly in Italy than in France and the United States. This is usually attributed to the small size of Italian firms, since technological advances typically depend on larger-scale operations. Faced with aggressive competition from the Far East, based on the same strategy Italy uses but with much lower labor costs, the only way Italian industry can survive is through technological progress. A second cause of Italian industrial decline is the lack of free competition in the national market. I have already described the state’s


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prominent role in the origin of Italian capitalism. The 2003 and 2004 Reports of the Antitrust Authority make it clear that the Italian market is still affected by lack of competition and collusive practices. For example, energy costs in Italy are 44 percent above the European average.32 A third cause of decline is the brain drain that results from a stultifying, clientelistic academic/research environment in which obedience is preferred to merit. Consequently, many talented students go abroad to pursue their doctorates and do not return. Moreover, a recent report on the state of scientific research worldwide estimates that Italy devotes only about .5 percent of its GDP to research and development compared to 1.2 percent on average in the European Union and 2.1 percent in the United States.33 The Quest For a Civic and Entrepreneurial Culture In their seminal 1963 study The Civic Culture, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba defined Italian society as an environment alien to political participation and prone to polarization. These problems persist to this day, resulting in high levels of corruption, like those characteristic of the five decades when the Christian Democrats were in power, and intense hostility between the Berlusconi government and its opposition. Opportunism still reigns in Italian politics, as in Berlusconi’s convenient transformation of the campaign against corruption (including his own) into a campaign against investigative judges.34 At the root of the difficulty Italians have in finding a common ground may well be the lack of a “civic culture” as defined by Almond and Verba and later by Robert Putnam. These authors pay tribute to Edward Banfield’s seminal work The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Banfield coined the term amoral familism to define the dominant cultural syndrome of Italians, at least in the small village of Montegrano. The objections of Italian critics notwithstanding, the results obtained by the American writers are replicated repeatedly in contemporary surveys of values and attitudes, which document very low levels of trust throughout the society.35 Corruption, public inefficiency, monopolistic and corporative practices, the small size of companies, political fragmentation—all of these may be explained by lack of trust. But this pervasive distrustfulness is itself the outcome of a deeper cultural syndrome, that we have already met in Guicciardi-


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ni’s amoral particularism. If people believe that “those men succeed in life who always look out for their own interest,” then not only will they act accordingly, but they will also believe that everyone else is acting accordingly. Why cooperate, how can you cooperate, if everyone else is out for himself? What, then, are the values that can promote a progressive culture? David McClelland, in the middle of the last century, was among the first scholars to find a high correlation between economic growth and the “need for achievement”; he maintained that the latter is typically found in families who imbue children with a precocious desire for independence.36 On the other hand, he was also convinced that morality was necessary to remove market imperfections that slow economic progress. Recently McClelland’s hypotheses have been tested successfully using international data.37 In a representative sample of twenty-five countries around the world, a cultural attitude of “responsible autonomy” was found to be the best predictor of economic growth. Parents who teach their children the values of individual autonomy and of social responsibility are concentrated in the countries that had the highest rates of economic growth since the mid-1960s, China and Japan included. We note that in Italy only 18 percent of parents prefer “independence” as one of the most important values to transmit to the next generation, compared to 59 percent of Danish and 62 percent of German parents. The values of individual independence and social responsibility, which lie at the foundation of modernity,38 are very important but at the same time extremely fragile. Progressive values need to be protected and continuously reinforced by education as well as by good example, strong institutions, and the ability to learn from our own mistakes. The goal is an entrepreneurial culture that nurtures a deep respect for the rule of law. Entrepreneurial culture is rooted in the pleasure one derives from creativity, whether in a business or a government organization, in the quest for wealth or for other forms of achievement. The rule of law is a frame of constraint aimed at preserving the rights of the generalized other in a competitive entrepreneurial environment. Every time the blend of entrepreneurial culture and the rule of law takes hold, humankind takes a step forward toward higher ground.


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Resistance to Cultural Change Cultural change, however, is usually resisted. Material interests are obvious obstacles, but certain psychological drives can also hinder human progress. Human nature prefers stability to change; traditions are important social supports that contribute to a sense of belonging and a sense of stability. Risk aversion is the norm, risk propensity the exception. Change implies energy consumption, while nature tends to economize on the expenditure of energy. When Italy was exiting the Middle Ages at the threshold of modernity, it was unwilling to accept the challenges of the new times. The Protestant Reformation, with its worldly asceticism and free interpretation of sacred writings, was fiercely opposed by the Catholic hierarchy. Italian princedoms were unable to form nation-states like their neighbors in France and Spain. Italian elites took a defensive attitude toward cultural change. Resistance to modernization was so strong at the end of the eighteenth century that when a minority elite tried to introduce the ideals and institutions of the French revolution to southern Italy, it was defeated by a popular reaction that combined peasants, feudal landlords, and the Catholic hierarchy. The opening of Italy to international trade had a powerful influence on traditional culture and it contributed to rapid increases in per capita income. The parochial Italian culture of the 1950s and 1960s was confronted by modern ideas about politics, social welfare, family lifestyles, and youth entertainment, among many others. Through the usual cycle of rebellion vs. conservatism, typical of any dramatic turning point in Italian history, the nation’s modernization accelerated during the 1970s with the secularization of the church, the battle for civil rights, the legalization of divorce, extension of access to secondary education, and liberalization of access to universities. Italy was becoming more Western, more European. In the face of new economic challenges from East Asia and the high-tech countries of the West, Italian cultural traditions need to be fine-tuned again. Italy’s valuable traditions, such as its preoccupation with beauty and style, remain and will not be quickly overcome by foreign competitors. In fields like fashion, industrial design, food, tourism, and human capital, Italy enjoys major competitive advantages that derive from its unique history. Nonetheless, cultural change is necessary in order to adjust to the more competitive global


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environment. For example, the scale of production must be expanded, and here a cultural obstacle comes into play: the family that owns a firm may fear losing control over its own assets. Trust restricted to the inner circle of family members and close friends can be a serious obstacle to further advancement. Italian economic efficiency, however, is penalized not only by the small size of firms but also by the institutional environment in which they operate. The inefficient public sector, high levels of corruption, and the persistence of monopolistic practices place overwhelming extra costs on the economic system. Moreover, enduring institutional reforms aimed at modernizing a country are not possible if the people who are supposed to implement the reforms hold beliefs that go in another direction. This is a central message of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. In a culture of mistrust, it is very difficult to find people who are comfortable with and function effectively in modern institutions. It is likewise difficult in such a culture to build the kind of civic society on which effective democratic institutions depend. The Italians have a radical solution to the problems posed by their noncivic society: they try to avoid any form of competitiveness, especially economic. A recent example: when one more in an endless chain of public works scandals in the south exploded in the media, this one connecting favored construction firms to Mafia families, a minister suggested abolishing the competitive bidding process used around the world. In its place, he proposed a system of rotating contract awards to all construction firms to ensure an egalitarian distribution of public works. A related example is the generally negative attitude toward globalization. Because protectionism has been the norm since the nation was unified, the first reaction to the declining sales of Italian products in international markets has been a clamor for import tariffs, especially against China. The clamor subsided only when influential opinion makers succeeded in reminding people that the Italian economic miracle had occurred only because of openness to international markets, and that China’s growth presents a great opportunity for Italian products.


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Needed: Cultural Change In the polarized Italy of today, any call for unity and national cohesiveness is destined to fail. If the problem lies chiefly in a deep sense of distrust, as I believe it does, the only way to overcome it is to go directly to the core of the problem: the prevailing cultural system. Table 24.1 (at the end of this chapter) seems a useful place to start. In the predatory syndrome, competition for self-interest is accepted without restrictions, either institutional or moral. Because such behavior has disruptive effects, the communitarian response consists of restrictions against competition itself, which is wrongly believed to be the origin of the disruptive behavior. The situation becomes extremely polarized: one can either accept competition without any restriction, or use regulation to prevent competition. Of course no one today would openly acknowledge being a predator; everyone professes to agree with the rule of law. But in fact many economic strategies are aimed at bypassing the law, like the “informal” enterprises in the shadow economy in Italy and other Mediterranean countries.39 Similarly, no one admits being against market competition, yet many laws seek to curb competition on behalf of specific social groups (i.e. subsidies to agricultural sector in most advanced economies). As my table shows, both these traditional cultural syndromes, predatoriness and communitarianism, consider competition and the rule of law to be at odds. It was modernity that broke these traditional links between competition and the absence of regulation—predatoriness—on the one hand, and between regulation and aversion to competition—communitarianism—on the other. Modernity proclaimed, for the first time in history, that competition was good not only for specific individuals but for the whole society, provided that it was fair. To this end laws were introduced not to hinder competition but to protect it from monopolistic and oligopolistic outcomes. This is why, in Table 24.1, “modernity” accepts both competition and regulation. What usually happens in contemporary Italy is that the mediation between the two traditional cultural syndromes falls in the first quadrant, producing a neither–nor attitude in which public opinion opposes competition and is permissive toward those who break the rules.40 If Italy is to survive and continue its modernization, Italians will have to move to the fourth quadrant, learning to accept competition and to punish those who break the rules.


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Table 24.1 The Evolution of Cultural Syndromes (Steps 1-2-3-4) Avoiding competition

Accepting competition

Avoiding regulation

3. Clientelism/favoritism

1. Predatoriness

Accepting regulation

2. Communitarianism

4. Modernity

Cultural change does not happen easily. Italians are caught in a dilemma: Why act fairly if you expect everyone else to act unfairly? But cultural change is possible if political, intellectual, religious, business, labor, and other leaders recognize that a better future for their people depends on it and if the institutions in charge of early socialization—families, schools, churches, and mass media—promote progressive values. Notes 1. I am grateful to Roberto Cartocci, Mariano D’Antonio, Paolo Jedlowski, and Francesco Mainieri for reading this chapter and offering invaluable comments. 2. C. Tullio-Altan, La nostra Italia. Clientelismo, trasformismo e ribellismo dall’Unità al 2000, (Milan: Università Bocconi Editore, 2000). The word “trasformismo” has been translated as “opportunism” on request of the copy editors. 3. R. Gubert, ed., La via italiana alla postmodernità (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2000), 191. 4. This is not only the case in Italy but is a typical situation which S. N. Eisenstadt referred to as the “breakdown of modernization” (Modernization: Protest and Change [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966]). According to the author, “Breakdown is a marked discrepancy between the demands of different groups and the responses and ability of the central rulers to deal with these demands” (134). 5. G. Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1958). 6. M. L. Salvadori, Storia d’Italia e crisi di regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001). 7. R. Cartocci, Diventare grandi in tempi di cinismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002). Editor’s note: l’arte di arrangiarsi captures the same kind of semi-illicit but admired behavior as the Brazilian Portuguese word jeito. 8. See the model of the “flying geese” in S. Radelet and J. Sachs, “Asia’s Reemergence,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 6 (1997). 9. L. Gallino, La scomparsa dell’Italia industriale (Turin:Einaudi, 2003). 10. G. Bollati, “L’italiano,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 1, I caratteri originali (Turin: Einaudi, 1972). 11. F. Braudel, La Méditerranée (Paris: Flammarion, 1985). 12 C. M. Cipolla, Storia economica dell’Europa pre-industriale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994).


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13. L. Barzini, The Italians (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964). 14. To prove that amoral particularism is widely shared among Italians, a short list of traditional sayings can be cited here: “I come first, then the others.” “Curse on the man who trusts another man.” “Don’t lend, don’t give, don’t do good, ’cause all you’ll get is evil.” “Mine is mine; others’ is common good.” The list of sayings is extracted by Tullio-Altan, C. (1995), L’identità etnica in Italia, in Ethnos e civiltà, Feltrinelli, Milano, pp. 98–128. Considerations about the degree of distrustfulness in Italian society can be also found in a famous essay by the national poet Giacomo Leopardi (1824) Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costume degli Italiani (ed. by A.Placanica) Marsilio, Venezia, 1989. 15. R. D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 16. Mercury Inc., Decimo rapporto sul turismo italiano (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 2001). 17. T. De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (Bari: Laterza, 1993). 18. A. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996). 19. See V. Gioberti, “Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani,” in Scritti scelti di Vincenzo Gioberti, ed. A. Guzzo (Turin: UTET, 1974). (Orig. pub. 1846) 20. See Bollati, “L’italiano.” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 1, I caratteri originali (Turin: Einaudi, 1972). 21. L. Franchetti, Inchiesta in Sicilia (Florence: Valecchi, 1974), 81-84. 22. L. Graziano, Clientelismo e sistema politico. Il caso dell’Italia (Milan: F. Angeli, 1980), 190. 23. P. Grifone, Il capitale finanziario in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1971). 24. F. Pyke, G. Becattini, and W. Sengenberger, eds., Industrial Districts and Interfirm Co-operation in Italy (Geneva: International Labor Organization, 1990). 25. L. Bellicini, “La campagna urbanizzata,” in Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea, vol. 1. Spazi e paesaggi, ed. P. Bevilacqua (Venice: Marsilio, 1989). 26. A. Bagnasco, Tre Italie. La problematica territoriale dello sviluppo territoriale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1977); see also M. Paci, “Riflessioni sui fattori sociali dello sviluppo della piccola impresa nelle Marche,” Economia Marche 6 (1979): 7188. 27. C. Trigilia, Sviluppo senza autonomia (Bologna: il Mulino, 1992). 28. P. Jedlowski and C. Leccardi, Sociologia della vita quotidiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003). On the situation in the south see P. Jedlowski, “The New Class on the Periphery: Modernization, Professionalization, and Clientelism in Southern Italy,” in Hidden Technocrats. The New Class and New Capitalism, eds. H. Kellner and W. Heuberger (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992); see also M. Marini, “Cultura economica e cultura politica nel Mezzogiorno che cambia,” Il Mulino 48, no.5 (1999): 825–40. 29. Ninety percent of sons and daughters between twenty and twenty-four still live with their parents, compared to 58 percent in Great Britain, 52 percent in France, and 43 percent in Germany. Data from P. De Sandre, “Quando i giovani lasciano la famiglia,” Studi interdisciplinari sulla famiglia 7 (1986): 74–87. 30. P. Ginsborg, L’Italia del tempo presente (Turin: Einaudi, 1998).


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31. G. Bodo, G. (2002), “Fiat: una storia di investimenti sbagliati,” La Voce, http:// www.lavoce.it; R. Petrini, Il declino dell’Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1993; V. Castronovo, Le paure degli Italiani (Milan: Rizzoli, 2004). 32. G. Tesauro, (2003; 2004), Relazioni annuali dell’Autorità garante della concorrenza e del mercato, Roma; see also G. Nardozzi, Miracolo e declino. L’Italia tra concorrenza e protezione (Bari: Laterza, 2004). 33. “L’Italia Cenerentola della ricerca,” La Repubblica 29, no. 174 (2004), on a special report published by Nature on research and development. 34. Global Corruption Report 2003: The new Italian government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a case in point. Berlusconi was responsible for setting up the “Fight Against International Crime” working program of the G8 meeting in Genoa in 2001. At the same time, while he and a number of colleagues were facing several charges of corruption and false accounting, he transformed the fight against corruption into a fight against investigative judges. In late 2001 a new law was adopted by parliament that severely impedes their work. Declaring false accounts also ceased to be a criminal offence in Italy, a change that may create a strong incentive for money laundering. Other obstacles were placed in the way of magistrates working on corruption and mafia cases, including the removal of their security escorts. The Senate adopted a reform of the High Council of Judiciary, which has disciplinary powers over the judiciary. The reform will change the composition of the council and may impact on the independence of investigative judges. In 2002 the United Nations special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers made an appeal to Berlusconi, calling on his government to respect the UN basic principle on the independence of the judiciary. (V. Pujas, “Regional Reports: Western Europe,” in Global Corruption Report (2003, 69–70, www.globalcorruptionreport.org/grc2003) 35. For Italian criticism of Banfield and Putnam, see A. Pizzorno, “Familismo amorale e marginalità storica ovvero perché non c’è niente da fare a Montegrano,” Quaderni di sociologia 3 (1967): 247–61; see also S. Lupo, “Usi e abusi del passato. Le radici dell’Italia di Putnam,” Meridiana 18 (1993): 151–68; and L. Sciolla, Italiani. Stereotipi di casa nostra Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997). For recent surveys on civic culture in Italy, see Legambiente, Osservatorio sulla cultura civica in Italia, www.legambiente.org/com. According to the 2002 report, Italians rank “family” at the top of the most important aspects of life (95 percent of preferences), while “liberty” is only seventeenth in a list of twenty (52 percent of preferences), “social engagement” is nineteenth (37 percent), and “political engagement” is twentieth (10 percent). “Trust in the generalized other” scores only 44 percent of consensus, while northern European surveys on the same item usually get 85 percent. The most trusted institution in the country is the police (85 percent), while the least trusted are the unions (40 percent), the banks (33 percent), the Entrepreneurial Association (32 percent), the Stock Exchange (28 percent) and the political parties (19 percent). 36. D. C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1961). 37. M. Marini, “Cultural Evolution and Economic Growth: A Theoretical Hypothesis with Some Empirical Evidence,” Journal of Socio-Economics 33, no. 6 (2004): 771–90.


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38. As recalled by F. von Hayek,The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960): 71–76 “Liberty and responsibility are inseparable. . . . A free society probably demands more than any other that people be guided in their actions by a sense of responsibility which extends beyond the duties exacted by the law and that general opinion approve of the individuals’ being held responsible for both the success and the failure of their endeavors. When men are allowed to act as they see fit, they must also be held responsible for the results of their efforts.” 39. According to the International Monetary Fund, the incidence of the “shadow economy” in Italy is 29 percent and in other Mediterranean countries 22 percent, against 16 percent in northern Europe and 9 percent in the United States. 40. According to the 1995 World Values Survey, 46 percent of Italians consider competition socially valuable, compared to 56 percent in the rest of the EU and 64 percent in the United States. Only 30 percent of Italians consider individuals to be responsible for their own behavior, a percentage not far from that of the other Europeans (33 percent), but only about half that of Americans (58 percent).


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25 Culture and the Pursuit of Success The Case of Québec in the Twentieth Century DANIEL LATOUCHE

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, several American social scientists came to the conclusion that French-speaking Québec was likely to remain a backward society, only lightly industrialized and urbanized. A new ideal-type emerged: the “folk society” one which, although it lacked a peasantry and had been urbanized for some time—there had been an urban majority in Québec since 1921—exhibited all the signs of a tradition-dominated culture, with its emphasis on kinship, matriarchal family structures, rural ways, religion, and a general suspicion of all things new and different. This vision of a backward and priest-ridden province remained dominant until a new model—of a dynamic, change-oriented and prosperous society—succeeded in displacing the old one. In this chapter, I seek to explain this “great transformation,” to identify those elements in Quebéc’s cultural transformation that made socioeconomic change possible. Culture, I argue, can serve both to preserve the status quo and to catalyze economic growth that preserves a measure of equality and solidarity. The Culture Of Backwardness Accounting for under 2 percent of the North American population and 4 percent of the world’s French speakers, surrounded by 310 445


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million English speakers, the six million French-speaking Québeckers now enjoy one of the world’s highest standards of living. Since the mid-1960s they have made up most of the economic gap separating them from other Canadians, especially those living in neighboring Ontario, while preserving their language and even exporting their culture. Every night, Céline Dion and the Cirque du Soleil provide an essential part of the entertainment found in Las Vegas. In 2003 to 2004 a Québec film, The Barbarian Invasions, won both best foreign film at the Academy Awards and best scenario and best actress at the Cannes Film Festival. Montréal has more university students per capita than Boston, and Québec’s pharmaceutical, aeronautics, and information-technology sectors each rank among the top five in North America. Nevertheless, for most of the past century, academics and intellectuals were hard at work explaining why Québec was likely to miss the boat of development, progress, and change. In particular, the 1931 census results had an explosive impact, showing that the French-speaking population of Québec was being left behind as the province industrialized. Culture was presented as one possible explanation for this state of affairs. Most cultural interpretations dwelt on the French and Catholic nature of Québec society, which was believed to entail a number of development-unfriendly consequences, such as belief in an afterlife and consequent other-worldly orientation; excessive deference to tradition and hierarchy; clannishness; distaste for private enterprise; and an underdeveloped educational system. Others cited historical factors: the influence of the French centralist, Jacobin political tradition; the absence of a home-grown tradition of self-government; a garrison-state mentality resulting from Québec’s minority status in English-speaking Canada; even an obsession with Cartesian logic. The unfortunate consequences of these cultural characteristics were, the diagnosis continued, a rigid class system and a preference for status over achievement; the subordination of women, codified in the Civil Code; too much reliance on the family, and too little trust and solidarity outside it. Of course, if half these statements were true, it would be astonishing that Québec had made any progress at all. Still, all this selfscrutiny served a purpose: there can be no cultural transformation without a widely accepted belief that there is indeed something in the culture that needs fixing, and then a wide-ranging discussion about how to fix it.


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Québec Then and Now: Benchmarks For Change Whatever the reasons, the overall situation of French Québec around 1950 was distressing. On most indicators, Québec lagged behind Ontario and the rest of Canada. When Québec did score higher, it was the Anglo Québeckers—only 20 percent of the province’s population—who lifted the overall average significantly. The social and educational performance of the French majority was distressing. • Between 1901 and 1951, Québec had the highest birth rate in Canada (5.3 children per woman in 1921) and the highest rate of population growth, except for the four western provinces which were attracting newcomers. • Between 1901 and 1939 Québec workers earned 60 percent of the total wages and salaries of their Ontario counterparts; this rose to 69 percent during the war, and fell to 60 percent in 1950. • Mandatory schooling to age fourteen was made official only in 1943, twenty years later, on average, than in the rest of Canada. • In 1951 Francophones made up 80 percent of Québec's total working population but only 54 percent of its civil engineers and 25 percent of its chemical, structural, and electrical engineers. • On social issues, Québec had one of Canada’s best records in 1900 and one of its worst fifty years later; in 1939 its extremely stingy government passed a law denying any form of public aid to single mothers and unmarried couples. • In 1959 under 50 percent of those aged fourteen to seventeen were in school in Québec, compared to more than 80 percent in Ontario. • In 1957 only 10 percent of teachers in the Francophone educational system had university degrees, compared with 25 percent in the rest of Canada and 33 percent in the Anglophone educational system. Nowhere was the situation of French Québec more troubling than in the workplace. In 1966, researchers for the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Bilingualism and Biculturalism found that the total earnings of French speakers were next-to-last among all Canadians,


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behind even newly arrived Italians and ahead only of Indians. In Montréal, the wages of Anglophones were 32 percent higher than those of Francophones; even controlling for education, type of work, age, sex, and other variables, the difference remained around 10 percent. The impact of these findings, as of the 1931 census, was dramatic. Things changed considerably in the next thirty years. In 1970, a monolingual Anglophone worker in the Montréal region earned an average weekly salary 20 percent higher than did his equivalent Francophone monolingual, and 9 percent higher than a Francophone bilingual worker, controlling for age, educational level, and type of employment. By 1995 the situation had been reversed, with all bilingual workers receiving approximately the same premium for their language capacities, while monolingual Anglophones were being penalized— slightly—for their lack of skill in French.1 These figures, and many others, indicate the end of what one sociologist called a “situation of mutually satisfying institutional self-segregation,” where both Anglophones and Francophones lived in separate, isolated worlds, each with its own values, standards and reward system.2 Other data confirm that Francophone workers caught up economically. Real GNP per capita in Québec rose from 85 percent of the national average in 1950 to approximately 95.1 percent in 2000; it fell from 121 to 116 percent in Ontario.3 Real per capita disposable income in Québec is now 88 percent of Ontario’s, compared with only 75 percent in the late 1970s. Overall, the Québec economy is closing the gap with Ontario, which are among the fastest-growing regions in North America.4 In Québec infant mortality was 6 percent for boys and 5 percent for girls in 1950, but only 0.6 and 0.5 percent in 2000. Within fifty years, Québec went from the worst to the best record among the Canadian provinces; only Japan and the Scandinavian countries have lower rates.5 The number of children per woman of child-bearing age fell from 4.0 in 1960 to approximately 1.5 by the early 1990s. And in education, Québec’s performance has been phenomenal. Its students now have the nation’s best high school graduation rates, and the drop-out rate has fallen dramatically in the last twenty years: from 42, 36, and 26 percent for those aged nineteen, eighteen, and seventeen respectively in 1979 to 19, 17, and under 10 percent in 1999. In mathematics, Francophone high school students are the best


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in Canada, and are now more likely to obtain a secondary school diploma than students in any other OECD country. Clearly, between 1960 and 1980 Québeckers did something right. Geography has contributed to this success (although Québec’s meters of snow, two-week long summers, and bugs the size of golf balls probably have not). No doubt geopolitical factors contribute too: living beside the world’s largest market and strongest political power has its advantages. So does the fact that Québec was “conquered” by the British and has never fully achieved self-government. As we have seen, culture-based explanations for Québec’s failures and successes come in many shapes and forms. I will stress three: core cultural values were instrumentalized; state interventionism emerged in a support role; and Québec used nationalism strategically. Together, the three form a permanent accommodation system, which helped transform an unpromising cultural grid into a “development machine.” Some of these lessons may transfer well to other societies. Instrumentalizing Core Values Québec’s “cultural system” (norms, values, beliefs, institutions, practices) has attracted much attention.6 Québec has managed to instrumentalize certain value orientations initially in tune with conservative and traditional positions and make them into agents of change. I will consider four such orientations taken from Daniel Etounga Manguelle’s chapter in Culture Matters. A More Active Orientation Toward “Time” and Tradition Time-oriented societies are deemed to be at a disadvantage compared with less time-dependent ones, where spatial categories are more important than temporal ones. Etounga Manguelle reminds us that Africans have always had their own time. Anchored in their ancestral culture, they are said to have convinced themselves that the past can only repeat itself and that all attempts at shaping the future are necessarily futile. But is time-consciousness necessarily a tyranny? Can time be instrumentalized in a way that can foster change and development?


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The official motto of Québec is “Je me souviens” “(I remember” or “Lest we forget”) and is seen on all licence plates ever since 1976 when the newly elected Parti Québécois government chose to get ride of the definitively more sensuous but less political “La Belle Province.” But Québeckers’ obsession with the past has not deterred them from becoming equally concerned with the future. It sometimes seems that scenario building, especially of the catastrophic variety, is Québec’s third favorite topic of conversation (after hockey and the weather). In fact, demographic scenarios are regularly presented identifying the precise moment when the province’s population will begin its absolute decline; 2021 is now the best estimate for the first such decline since Québec City was founded in 1608. Counterscenarios appear almost daily. Today Québec’s past is in the midst of a reconstruction process, which involves the creation of new mythologies based on selective memory and whose purpose seems to be the creation of a post-modern self. For example, a large consensus now holds that more than 80 percent of French Canadians have Indian blood running through their veins—a far cry from frequent assertions in the 1950s about the ethnic purity of French Canada. Even the perception of a traditionally anti-Semitic Québec is being replaced by one, equally mythical, of a somewhat pro-Jewish society, the first to elect a Jewish member of Parliament. The fact that many Québeckers have Irish names is also put forward as a sign of Québec’s openness and tolerance. History and memory make for good guys and bad guys, a dangerous result if it only serves to maintain old animosities. But every society’s history includes such figures. Old rivalries and deep differences can be made to disappear only at the cost of cultural relativism. Creatively re-visioning such antagonisms is a more rewarding alternative, allowing all participants to proclaim with satisfaction how much things have changed. New myths can only be created on the basis of old ones. A Nonsubmissive Attitude Toward the Divine Order Can God, the Sacred, and the Divine Order also be made to contribute positively toward societal development and change? This raises the parallel question of the role of the church and of religion in social transformation. The religious orientation of “traditional” Québec so-


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ciety is one of those well-entrenched beliefs imposed from the outside that most Québeckers are happy to affirm, if only to show how much things have changed in what used to be a “priest-ridden” society. The precise nature of Québec clericalism is complex; here let me simply say it was not the same as in Spain or Poland. How then can we evaluate its contribution from a cultural perspective? Historically, the Catholic Church has played a dual role: mediating (“collaborating,” to some) with the British authorities in normal circumstances and resisting the same authorities when they seemed to threaten the survival of the French-speaking and Catholic community. The fact that until recently most Francophones were Catholic while a majority of non-Catholics were Anglophone also helped to identify religion and the church with the preservation of French language and culture. And because most non-Francophone Catholics were Irish, the French-speaking Catholic bishops could convince the British authorities that they had to keep the French language alive or risk seeing the French Catholic community fall under the influence of the Irish Catholic hierarchy. From roughly 1760 to 1910, the Catholic Church provided Québec with a set of alternate elites who supported the province’s development. There were costs, one being the delayed emergence of a local bourgeoisie. But in the absence of an intellectual, urban, cosmopolitan elite, a religious-supported one was better than nothing. A list of manifestations of modernity can be traced back to a clerical origin: university education, science, astronomy, feminism (yes), cinema, opera and classical music, medicine, regional development, banking, trade unionism. And, as in most clerical societies, nonclerical and even anticlerical elites have emerged out of such clerical institutions as classical colleges and teachers’ schools. The ease and swiftness with which Québec declericalized itself between roughly 1961 and 1966 indicates how weak the church’s control had become. This transformation, parallel to the one in Spain twenty years later, was beneficial in itself and also a lesson in how to negotiate such changes. In 1960, when the newly elected government decided to create a department of education, the Québec Conference of Bishops strongly objected, threatening to boycott the new measure and resist any attempts to remove crucifixes from the schools. But by the time the department was established, late in 1964, it became clear that the hierarchy’s opposition had no serious impact. The church was allowed the face-saving measure of having two deputy ministers,


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one for the Catholic and the other for the Protestant sector, included in the official organizational chart of the new department. This defeat with honor paved the way for the easy adoption of further laws concerning civil marriages, divorce, and abortion. Eventually, Québec’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms became the first such charter to protect gay and lesbian rights. Was the Catholic hierarchy more tolerant and open-minded in Québec than elsewhere? Probably not. What was different was that it was allowed an honorable and financially rewarding way out. Similarly, later in the 1960s the government decided to bring all religious schools and hospitals within the public domain—a de facto nationalization. It not only reimbursed religious orders for their loss but also offer to retroactively include members of all religious orders in its new public social security scheme. Attitude Toward Risks and Uncertainty Different ethnocultural and minority groups have different attitudes toward risk and uncertainty. Surveys and stereotypes seem to indicate that, compared to Americans and Anglophone Canadians, Québeckers are not risk takers. This would explain the low level of entrepreneurship in Québec and the tendency to oversubscribe to insurance of all sorts. During the 1960s and 1970s, fear was indeed an important element in electoral campaigns, as federalist parties claimed that a victory of the Parti Québécois would mean, among other things, a drop in living standards, a collapse of personal liberties, rising unemployment, and bankruptcy. But aversion to uncertainty can also be mobilized in support of change and transformation if the costs of not changing seem high enough. Québeckers’ obsession with being “left behind” (by modernity, postmodernity, new information technologies, highway construction, reality TV, open heart surgery, espresso coffee) has actually served to accelerate change. In the same vein, insecurity does not necessarily lead to a garrisonstate mentality. If you actually believe that “things usually go wrong,” then you may not only prepare for the worst but also engage in selfcriticism or calculate the most efficient ways of avoiding the worst. Insecurity can lead to a nationalism of excuses, recriminations, and self-justification; but it can also infuse this nationalism with a dose


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of realism and introspection. Nationalism can support either blindness or twenty–twenty vision. In short, there is risk aversion and risk aversion. Some aversion to risk is not only rational, it can also lead to new forms of cooperation and consultation. The extent to which the cooperative movement developed in Québec is both the result of such an aversion to financial risk-taking and of a willingness to cooperate lest economic domination be perpetuated. Individualism and Collectivism Much has been said about the negative impact of “collectivism” and, by inference, the positive impact of individualism as a cultural trait. Let us assume a relationship between progress and development on the one hand and those cultural systems that favor individual achievement. Is this individualism a source of the high level of U.S. development? All surveys bearing on the major differences between the American, Canadian, and Québec (French) value systems are clear: Americans are more individualistic than Québeckers, with Anglophone Canadians somewhere between the two but closer to the Québec-collectivist pole. On this point the anecdotal and “scientific” evidence is impressive, ranging from the importance of state expenditures in the GDP to the Québeckers’ strong attachment to their public health system. But, in the end, what matters most is not the relative strength of group or individual feelings but how much each is mobilized to serve the other. After thirty years of exchange and cohabitation, both individuals and the community appear to have made considerable progress. For example, without language policies, the new class of Francophone entrepreneurs, known as Québec, Inc., would likely not have had the chance to emerge. Of course, this rise occurred at a cost: a temporary exodus of Anglo talents from Québec. But as one former leader of the Montréal Anglo community pointed out, the departure of thousands of monolingual Anglophones was balanced by the increased bilingualization of those who stayed behind. In Québec, a collective orientation has not meant uniformity or state control over private destinies—although some of that has happened—but mostly an increase in the number of collective public goods. After all, the purpose of Bill 101, the Charter of the French language, is to create French as a new “public good,” to which all


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have equal access and which can serve as a sort of civic equalizer. The charter is strictly a language law; it deals exclusively with the French language and says nothing about the particular ethnocultural group who consider French an important trait of their identity. The charter aims to increase the use of French, not to promote the economic or political well-being of one group over others. In the end, the charter is about increasing, not decreasing, the social and cultural capital available to all Québeckers. Bill 101’s greatest achievement is having allowed a large proportion of immigrants to fully integrate themselves in society. There is nothing like playing baseball in French to make young Vietnamese feel part of the collective “we” (or “nous”). The charter, it should be said, treats all non-French languages and their communities equally. In theory at least, Québec’s Anglos are considered a minority to the same extent as the Italians or Pakistanis. Even Americans who immigrate to Québec must send their children to French-speaking schools (if they choose to make use of the public school system) where they will be given the possibility of getting most of their education in English if they choose to select an “international” curriculum with an emphasis on English as a foreign language. Institutions: The Québec State System as a Central Actor Culture is not only about values, beliefs, norms, and orientations; it is also about institutions. Property rights are usually singled out as crucial. They serve to reduce transaction costs by making sure that contracts will be respected; without such trust and confidence, development remains elusive. The emergence of a modern state sector was without any doubt the most important factor associated with what came to be known as the Quiet Revolution (1960–75). Even those who have come to decry the excessive predominance of Québec’s state or its alleged appropriation by the bourgeoisie will hardly dispute its central role. The figures speak for themselves. Between 1960 and 1968, the provincial state budget rose from $750 million to $3.4 billion and the number of civil servants from 29,000 to over 45,000. Dozens of departments, councils, and boards were set up including departments of education, natural resources, cultural affairs, and intergovernmental affairs, so that by 1970 the provincial administration looked like


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a medium-sized European state. In the 1980s, new departments were created for the environment, social affairs, tourism, external trade, social security, women’s issues, and Indian affairs, as well as an extensive network of paradiplomatic representatives to all continents. Public employment rose from 4.0 to 11.4 percent of total employment. Today the Québec state is taken for granted, its importance undisputed. Symbolically, it has allowed Québec to move from the rather parochial status of province to that of a state. Without a state of its own, even though a nonsovereign one, Québec society would have no doubt dissipated enormous energies in an exacerbated ethnicism, intolerant and suspicious, self-immolating, and incapable of moving forward. Québec has been particularly active in the arts and culture sector. It has shown itself capable of devising and enacting a wide range of cultural policies. Private funding for the arts is almost nonexistent in Québec, since most Toronto-based corporations and philanthropic institutions prefer to support Canadian cultural institutions. Established in 1960, Québec’s Department of Culture was the first of its kind in North America. In the late 1980s funding for the arts moved from the French model to the British “arms length” model, but with an increased preoccupation—borrowed mostly from Scandinavia— with the financial status of artists. Competition with the federal state, which is also anxious to show its support for French-speaking artists, has enabled Québec’s cultural community to obtain funding for many innovative projects. The Cirque du Soleil, the second largest “cultural” conglomerate in North America, was literally created by the Québec government. Within twenty years, a literature, a dance tradition, a theater culture, a museology school, and a Québec “sound” emerged out of nowhere. Artists have single-handedly transformed the symbolic and political landscape of Québec, turning Montréal into a vibrant cultural capital. Without state subsidies and dozens of cultural white papers, commissions of inquiry, committees, councils, policies, and policy reviews, this cultural explosion would certainly not have been possible. Also remarkable is the Québec government’s entrepreneurial propensity. In the 1960s large investment corporations on the model of the Belgian Société Générale de Financement were established, including the Caisse de Dépot et de Placement (CDP), a financial body managing the savings of all public and semipublic institutions. The


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CDP has been criticized for its capitalist methods, taking a controlling interest in corporations almost overnight and taking risks that even venture capitalists were reluctant to accept. A union-controlled venture capital fund, the Québec Solidarity Fund, established with the support of tax exemptions, has since become one of Canada’s largest such funds. Here again, opinions vary as to the real benefits of this form of collective capitalism. Without government leadership, Québec clearly would have evolved in the direction of Newfoundland or Alabama, largely ignored by foreign investors, with few attractive business opportunities and a welfare mentality. The recent decision by General Motors to close down Québec’s only automotive plant reminded everyone how peripheral Québec is to the rest of North America. Without Québec, Inc. there would simply be no aeronautics and biotechnology industries in Québec, no Hydro-Québec, no QuebécWorld and no Domtar. Compared to Catalonia, Québec has never developed an indigenous entrepreneurial class that could move out of or adapt the family business mode. The state has made Québec’s economic modernization possible, though at a relatively high cost. One important dimension of the Québec state system is the continuing importance of its neocorporatist practices: formal agreements between industrial and labor representatives under state auspices. Usually these agreements are only possible within a largely centralized system of labor relations where agreements are enforced by the state. None of these conditions are present in Québec: labor agreements are reached at the local level and the Québec state has none of the powers available to the French Ministry of Labor. Still, neocorporatist style “agreements” have been popular since the mid-1970s, and have proven useful in forcing agreements on reluctant negotiating partners. The corporatist culture, in many incarnations, has succeeded in turning Québec into a system of permanent negotiation. What made these agreements possible was a mixture of state intervention, capitalist self-regulation, nationalist appeals—and good luck. Since the mid-1970s, all Québec governments have used the “socioeconomic summit” formula: representatives of all sectors of civil society publicly debate a pressing issue and come to a gentleman’s agreement. In 1996 the left-wing and prosovereignty government succeeded in convincing the labor movement and representatives of the various employers’ associations and business councils to agree to


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a massive program of deficit reduction. In return for the state adopting a no-deficit law, the private sector agreed to a temporary tax hike to contribute to a poverty reduction package. Québec has been able to balance its budget for the past six years. Québec Nationalism: Its Strategic Use Québec’s nationalism, as it evolved in the past fifty years, is an important reason for its successes in the political, economic, social, and cultural realms. That nationalism was born in the mid-1840s and was associated at first with preserving the French language, promoting a rural way of life, and preserving Catholicism and a host of such “traditional” values as anti-industrialism, antiunionism, the sanctity of the family, submission to authority. This form of nationalism, with its defensive, anti-English overtones, remained dominant until the mid-1950s. Perceived threats to the nation’s integrity and its traditional ways occasionally led to outbursts of anti-Semitism and right-wing xenophobia. In both 1914 and 1939, nationalist leaders refused to fight “British” wars and on the whole remained outside party politics. In 1966 the National Independence Movement gained close to 9 percent of the vote—where it chose to offer candidates— on a platform of social justice, independence, nationalization, and assorted “progressive” policies. Four years later, the party had become the official opposition; in 1976, under the name Parti Québécois, it won control of the provincial government. Neonationalism was born. Since then, questions have abounded as to the real nature of this form of nationalism. If nationalism is the result of economic deprivation, why did Québec turn to it as economic conditions were improving and traditional income gaps with Anglophones were closing rapidly? If nationalism is the result of ignorance and frustration, why did Québec’s youth rally massively to the nationalist position at a time when they were achieving educationally and seeing the professions open up to them? If nationalism always leads to right-wing extremism, how can one explain the center-left and progressive leanings of this neonationalism? Every few years, Québec nationalism and its programmatic centerpiece, political sovereignty, as well as its institutional incarnation, the


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Parti Québécois, are pronounced close to disappearance. The latest such pronouncement came in December 2003 when the Liberal Party of Canada chose the French-speaking Paul Martin to succeed Jean Chrétien as Canada’s prime minister. The days of the Bloc Québécois, the federal wing of the Parti Québécois, were supposedly numbered, since this popular new leader would no doubt use the next federal election to put the final nails in the separatist coffin. But in the June 2004 elections, the Bloc scored its best performance since its creation in 1992. Among nationalist leaders similar pronouncements are made as to the imminent final victory of the independence option. The long-running debate among social scientists about the essential nature of nationalism tells us little as to how nationalism can be made to contribute to cultural adjustment. A strategic vision of nationalism, I suggest, is more useful. National sovereignty is what all nationalists everywhere and at all times have tried to achieve. A nation-state equals normalcy. In the absence of violent repression or demographic degradation, ethnic groups will naturally seek the status of nations and eventually of nation-states. Nationalism is also a great organizer. It provides an interpretive key, making sense of what has happened, is happening, and will happen. It reduces transaction costs, especially of the linguistic and ethnic variety, and increases group trust, without which “good governance” is impossible. This provides a group with a comparative advantage. In its political incarnation, nationalism imposes realism. Québec has had to accommodate itself to its self-proclaimed membership in the North Atlantic and North American political communities. There are certain things one cannot do and others that one must do if one hopes to become a sovereign state. Coming to terms with indigenous nations is one of these; promoting free trade and NAFTA is another. Patriotism, with its “my country right or wrong” mentality, offers little stimulus to self-criticism and self-analysis, while nationalism thrives on self-doubt. What Lucian Pye has called the ConfucioCalvinist sense of uncertainty in the face of salvation forces one to constantly reconsider one’s collective model. As shown in Québec politics since the mid-1980s, praise for the Québec model is invariably followed by questioning. Strategic nationalism implies that there is indeed a way to build a better mousetrap and that a group, your group, will find it.


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Conclusion: Cultural Accommodation in Ten Lessons Since the late 1980s much debate has involved the “Québec model”: a mixture of entrepreneurial push, state intervention, massive investment in R&D and education, and multiple partnerships between the public sector, labor, and the private sector. Some have argued that this model is simply a North American version of Scandinavian social democracy. Others have acknowledged its existence only to insist on its total failure or alternatively, to complain that it has been so successful as to rob the Québec nationalists of their favorite argument, that it is impossible for French Québec to prosper within the Canadian polity. I leave this debate to others and offer what I see as the lessons of the Québec experience. 1. Seize the time and put politics in charge. Without a minimum of good luck and appropriate timing, no program of massive social and cultural change can hope to succeed. In 1959 the prime minister of Québec, Maurice Duplessis, died suddenly just as the first polls suggested his National Union Party would soon be reelected. His successor, Paul Sauvé, immediately made clear that “from now on things would be different,” a slogan which pushed the party’s popularity even higher. Fortunately for the opposing Liberal Party, Sauvé died within months and was succeeded by a well-intentioned former train operator who insisted on reminding everyone that he had not gone to school past the primary level. In June 1960 the Liberal Party barely squeezed into power, and the Quiet Revolution had begun. 2. Never underestimate the power of critical analysis. Without vigorous, institutionalized debate about what is wrong in society, there can be little expectation of change. These debates must be politically grounded and open to outside participants. Of course, self-criticism and intellectual debates are always messy, and what the neighbors (in this case France and the United States) have to say is not always pleasant or pertinent. But the “they” represented by those outside voices actually helps a “we” to emerge. And to be able to say “we Québécois” (or “we Irish,” “we Botswanans” or “we Hondurans”) is a first step toward accumulating social and cultural capital. 3. Provide social innovations that will support cultural change. Changing a cultural paradigm is no easy task. Marketing campaigns


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and political pronouncements will not suffice. Most attempts at “cultural revolutions” have failed miserably. Why? Lack of political will and of communications skills are often blamed. But Mao, Stalin, and Castro all showed considerable political will and communications skills. Of course, the extent of Québec’s program of cultural change remains tame compared with, say, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and its most “radical” element, the transformation of Québec into a full-fledged nation-state, remains to be achieved. Still, its success so far shows the value of a host of institutionally grounded social innovations. Here I will mention two: Without the CEGEP, the twoyear colleges between high school and university, Québec would have been unable to transform its educational system. And without an integrated network of health clinics, the coming of a public and quasimonopolistic health-care system would have ended up a bureaucratic nightmare. 4. It’s education, stupid! Since 1960, Québec has experienced twelve electoral campaigns, six changes of government, and nine prime ministers. All have made education their top priority, and governments that appeared incapable of solving pressing educational problems have been defeated. Progress has been astonishing, especially considering that in 1960, Québec had no department of education. All schools—both Francophone and Anglophone— were denominational, and postsecondary education was considered an elite privilege, available mainly to those who indicated a preference for the clergy, medicine, or law. During the 1960s the Québec education budget increased on average 23 percent a year, and the province created a public university system (modeled on that of the American states), national science institutes (modeled on the French Grandes Écoles), a student aid system (in addition to the federal one), an original postsecondary institution (the CEGEP), and a host of other academic and pedagogical innovations. Few other jurisdictions have put the slogan “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” into practice with such determination. The positive results are widely associated, rightly or wrongly, with Québec’s growing prosperity. Some have surprised even the most optimistic, as when Québec learned that the percentage of its population fifteen or older with a postsecondary diploma rose from 20.5 percent in 1971 to 40.4 percent in 2001.


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In the end, the specifics of educational policy—whether or not to teach mathematics at an early age, whether repeating a failed year is a good or bad thing, whether universities should have quotas, whether technical schools should be run by industry —matter much less than a long-lasting commitment to education reform. 5. Replace church attendance with humanism. In 1959 church attendance in Québec was higher than in Italy. Ten years later, it was lower than in France. Of course church attendance is but one variable associated with clericalism, but during those crucial years Québec witnessed one of the most massive and rapid processes of declericalization in recent history—so rapid that the province did not even have time for a U.S.-style culture war. To this day, the incapacity of the religious right to re-create itself has remained a puzzle. Meunier and Warren have characterized the declericalization process as a sort of religious exit, made particularly easy by the fact that it folded into “personalism,” a form of Catholic humanism in which liberty, self-determination, and individualism are deemed central.7 At the center of any successful collective achievement, we may conclude, is a commitment, religious or not, to individualist values. 6. Social democracy and the welfare state can be made to work. In 1960 taxes in Québec were among the lowest in Canada. Among Francophones, inequality was low, perhaps because few Francophones were affluent. Predictably, inequality as measured by indicators such as the Gini Index has been on the rise since 1970, but this rise has been tempered by an effective tax and income-transfer system. The efficiency of Québec’s welfare system is not under discussion here; for all its defects, it does provide a safety net that helps reduce inequalities. From 1960 to 2000, inequality in Québec grew more slowly than in the rest of Canada, even while Québeckers were catching up economically in most respects.8 The number and percentage of the working-age population on welfare has not increased significantly; in 2003 it was the lowest since 1970. What explains these results? To some extent, Québec’s welfare system benefited from its late start: it could learn from mistakes made elsewhere. Equally important, the system was fine-tuned to local realities and marketed as a “made in Québec” public good. It is difficult to assess the effect of a dynamic and flexible welfare state on the performance of the economy since 1950. But it clearly provided a safety


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valve that induced the population to accept the rising inequalities that necessarily accompanied economic progress. 7. Make room for women. Feminism has a long history in Québec. The struggling colonies survived only because hard-nosed and enterprising women, both in and outside religious orders, took effective charge of their establishments. Many would argue that the surprising comeback of the Québec economy since the 1950s, and indeed the entire experience of the Quiet Revolution, was made possible by the massive influx of women into the job market and positions of authority. In 1960 women’s rate of employment was less than 40 percent that of men; in 2002 it reached 81 percent. During that period women not only compensated for a falling employment rate among men, due to changing job patterns and the age composition of the work force, but were entirely responsible for the 20 percent gain in total employment, going from approximately 50 percent of the total population of working age to 60 percent. Women working full time now make 80 percent of the total income of men compared with 60 percent in 1976 and under 50 percent in 1960. 8. Learn how to communicate with the rest of the world. Improved communication, at every level, is central to building cultural capital. In Québec’s case, well-devised language legislation contributed significantly to cultural change. In 1970 French-speaking elites realized that linguistic isolation no longer offered them enough protection and that French Québec was in danger of becoming an ethnolinguistic Disneyland. The percentage of bilingual Francophones was dropping, and the percentage of immigrants who sent their children to English schools was approaching 90 percent In short, French was in the process of becoming a dead language. Thirty years later, the situation has been reversed. Montréal now boasts the world’s largest concentration of bilingual French/English speakers. With French and English so widely used, Québeckers have access to two of the world’s major civilizations. 9. Promote the Arts. A well-developed cultural sector, including both high culture and the tourism and entertainment industries, makes attaining the economic take-off stage much easier. A literary tradition is no less important than an automobile industry, but of course one wants both. “Made in Québec” cultural industries now


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bring in more revenues than were ever projected in grandiose plans for steel, autos, and asbestos. Today, in fact, the latter have disappeared, while Québécois performers have invaded French airwaves, much as the Beatles and other English groups did in North America decades ago. 10. Promote a civic form of nationalism. Even a strategically sound ethnocultural nationalism has its dangers. What saved Québec nationalism was its entrance into the political and electoral realm: the Parti Québécois had to convince skeptical voters. As a result, Québec nationalism has evolved into a more civic form of nationalism with its inclusive slogan “We are all Québeckers” replacing the original “Le Québec aux Québécois.” At the core of this civic nationalism one finds a stated preference for inclusion, tolerance, and openness, as well as the belief that appeals to the nation only make sense if they are accompanied by open, non-Jacobin forms and styles of political organization. This kind of nationalism can lead to more rather than less citizenship, one that includes both formal political rights and obligations. A successful civic nationalism acts as a great equalizer. It creates a new “we”—as in “We the people”—which subdues previous differences, replacing resentment over past grievances with willingness to share in creating a new history. Notes 1. Nicole Béland and Pierre Roberge, “La fin de la discrimination salariale,” in L’Annuaire du Québec 2004 (Montréal: Fides, 2004), 255. 2. Hubert Guindon, Québec Society: Modernity and Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). 3. Taken from Le Québec en statistiques. Édition 2002 (Québec: Institut de la statistique du Québec, 2002). 4. Quoted in the Montréal daily, Le Devoir, February 17, 2000. 5. This data is taken from various contributions in Victor Piché and Céline LeBourdais eds., La démographique québecoise. Enjeux du XXie siècle (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2003). 6. While the World Values Surveys generally make little room for a distinct Québec value system, the Comparative Charting of Social Change Project has made Québec a key player in an international endeavor which includes seven nations. See Simon Langlois et al., Recent Social Trends in Québec, 1960–1990 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995); Simon Langlois et al., Convergence or Divergence (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994); Neil Nevitte, The Decline of Deference (Peterborough, ONT: Broadview Press, 1996).


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7. E.-Martin Meunier and Jean-Philippe Warren, Sortir de la Grande Noirceur. L’horizon personaliste de la Révolution Tranquille (Sainte-Foy:Les Éditions du Septentrion, 2004). 8. Simon Langlois, “Le Québec du XX1ième siècle. Une société en profunde mutation,” in L’Annuaire du Québec 2004 (Montréal: Fides, 2004), 136–230.


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26 The Spanish Transition 1975–82 CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER Translated by MARILU DEL TORO

The basic premise of the Culture Matters Research Project is that a society’s form of government (democracy, dictatorship, theocracy, militarism, etc.) and its economic performance are products of the prevalent culture, values, and world outlook of a substantial part of that society. I agree with this hypothesis. Spain, however, presents a singular case. Traditionally a Catholic nation with a turbulent history, especially since the early 1800s, it is commonly associated with dogmatism and authoritarianism, barbarism and backwardness. Still, in little over a quarter century, since the death in 1975 of dictator Francisco Franco, the country has transformed itself into a stable and democratic constitutional monarchy with a per capita income of almost $20,000 a year—the eighth highest in the world and 87 percent of the average for European Union countries—and is endowed with an exceptional quality of life that places it among today’s most advanced countries. What happened? Did some deep but unobserved cultural changes take place at the heart of Spanish society? Did the value system of the majority of Spaniards undergo a fundamental alteration? My impression is that as we analyze the political and economic behavior of nations we tend to overlook the tremendous impact of experience 465


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and learning on social change, especially as these factors apply to the ruling class. In deciding whether a society is democratic, possesses sufficient “social capital,” and conducts its economic affairs intelligently, our usual frame of reference is the Anglo-American model. We forget, however, that before it came to have a stable democracy, England underwent long periods of intolerance and persecution, including terrible civil and religious wars that saw the decapitation of kings and queens—something that never happened in Spain—until it finally arrived at the Glorious Revolution of 1689, the official beginning of a constitutional monarchy that gradually increased democratic practice and facilitated (or at least did not block) the Industrial Revolution. Did the English people change their culture and values from that moment? Or did the ruling class, after centuries of violence and abuse, finally learn its lesson and adopt civilized ways of solving its conflicts and transmitting authority? The same thing can be said of the United States. It is true that with victory in their War of Independence, Americans inaugurated the oldest and longest-lasting modern democratic republic. But was this because of a uniquely American cultural tradition, or was it because they had inherited the values and principles that England learned through that earlier history of violence and frustration? In this chapter I attempt to demonstrate that the democracy and prosperity that Spain enjoys today were consequences of that simple mechanism of learning and its effects on the ruling class. As the English did in 1689, and the Japanese and Germans did in 1945, the Spanish, in particular Spanish political leaders, learned their lesson. This interpretation of the facts, however, inevitably leads us to reverse the relationship between cause and effect: it is not always that a certain culture, rich in social capital, serenely leads us to democracy and prosperity. Sometimes it happens that society, captained by its leaders, realizes through trial and error that it must change its collective behavior. Beginning at that moment, the proven success of those new behaviors causes the new values and attitudes to coalesce. For Latin Americans, this is not just an academic issue. The Spanish transition to the democracy and prosperity of the First World is tremendously auspicious for Latin America. If the “Spanish miracle” could be understood, it could, quite possibly, be repeated. After all, several Latin American countries were much richer than Spain in the mid-twentieth century, including Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela,


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Chile, and Cuba. This fact is substantiated not only by statistics but also by the flow of migration. During the twentieth century, millions of Spaniards emigrated to those countries in search of a better life. In the early 1960s, this began to change. After a communist dictatorship was established in Cuba, Cubans began to emigrate to Spain. When the Cuban Revolution began, Cuba’s per capita income was double that of Spain, Today, Spain’s is eight times that of Cuba. Cubans were not the only Latin Americans who traveled to Spain in search of a better life: Ecuadorans, Argentines, and Colombians have also contemplated joining them. If only a few hundred thousand have crossed the Atlantic to the “mother country,” this is because rigorous Spanish immigration controls prevented a mass exodus. What made this “Spanish miracle” possible? I will offer several explanations, but first we must understand some of Spain’s history. A Bit of History November of 1975 was an especially tense month. Generalissimo Francisco Franco had been gravely ill for several weeks, and the nation waited anxiously for the death of the figure who had dominated Spanish politics for nearly four decades—more precisely, since the summer of 1936, when he led an uprising against the Second Republic and launched a bloody civil war. The anxiety they felt was understandable. During the long period of his government, Franco’s vast propaganda apparatus, which controlled almost all communications media, had repeatedly highlighted the virtues of the authoritarian model of government imposed by the victors of the Civil War (1936–39) and the almost biological or metaphysical incapacity of Spaniards to live according to more democratic standards. Franco had even coined an expression that summarized his pessimistic judgment of Spaniards’ psychological makeup: they were victims of “familial demons.” What were these “familial demons”? According to Franco, they were the Spanish propensities for anarchy, disunion, and separatism. Without a strong arm to control them, Spaniards would inevitably arrive at chaos and violence, creating an atmosphere that made social development and progress impossible. To some extent, Franco was a successor to Hobbes: an “enlightened despot,” an autocrat committed to the prosperity of his subjects, even if he had to impose it through drastic means.


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History justified Franco’s suspicions. Nineteenth-century Spain had been dominated by revolutions, civil wars—the Carlist wars— and military uprisings. In 1868, after 168 years in power, the Bourbon dynasty was dethroned and replaced by Amadeo de Saboya, a monarch imported from Italy. But this was only a brief preamble to the establishment in 1871 of the First Republic, which collapsed amid chaos only two years later. The Bourbons were restored to the throne in 1873, and until 1923, Spain enjoyed half a century of political stability within an imperfect model of a constitutional monarchy, tainted by authoritarianism and corruption, and embittered by colonial wars leading to the debacle of the Spanish-American War of 1898 in which Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. However, the increasingly frequent disorders, encouraged by the violent, anarchist left, led in 1923 to a military coup d’etat, headed by General Miguel Primo de Rivera and backed by King Alfonso XIII and a good part of the population, which called for a “firm hand” to put an end to the street violence. The liberal vision of the previous century had lost its appeal, and two related forces, both derived from socialism, were clashing violently in Europe: fascism and communism. After eight years of military rule, Primo de Rivera brought his dictatorship to an end and shortly afterward the socialists and republicans won several municipal elections. Once again the Spanish political model went into crisis and once again the Bourbon dynasty, and the monarchy, disappeared. King Alfonso XIII traveled to Italy accompanied by his family and would never again return to Spain, although he never formally renounced the throne. In 1938 in Rome, a grandson was born, son of Don Juan de Borbón y Battenberg, Count of Barcelona. They named him Juan Carlos. In 1931 the Second Republic had finally emerged. However, social conflicts began to multiply, frequently ending in violence. The Communist Party and the Socialist Party, which had a clear pro-Soviet wing at the time and was controlled by the strongest of the unions, promoted class struggle, generating savage strikes. To the “dialectic of class struggle” advocated by the communists, the Spanish fascists, or Falangists, responded in turn with the “dialectic of pistols,” as José Antonio Primo de Rivera, charismatic lawyer and son of the general, phrased it. Along with this battle between groups that supported two authoritarian models, the Spanish also faced a challenge


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from two other areas of conflict: the nationalist separatists and anticlericalism. Independence tendencies among Catalans and Basques were growing, while the attacks on priests, nuns, and Catholic churches also multiplied, with more than three hundred serious incidents in the eight-year life of the Second Republic. These were usually provoked by anarchist groups, who labeled the clergy as servants of the powerful and enemies of the oppressed. This convulsive atmosphere reached its climax in 1934, when an armed uprising, fostered by the most radical wing of the socialists, took place in Asturias, threatening the republican government. To suppress the uprising, Spanish authorities called on the most forceful of their generals, the young Francisco Franco, who extinguished the insurrection with his own brand of violence, quickly gaining a reputation as a man whose “hand did not shake” when he had to take draconian measures. But the Asturias episode was only the preamble to what would take place in the summer of 1936. The conservative parliamentarian José Calvo Sotelo was assassinated, probably by leftwing radicals. Franco, who two years before had helped save the republic, led a coup d’état that launched the country into a bloody civil war that cost several hundred thousand lives and was widely viewed as a rehearsal for World War II. Those siding with the nacionales and Franco included Mussolini’s fascists and Hitler’s Nazis. The “republicans” or “reds” received the help of leftwing democrats as well as Stalin’s USSR and communist groups from all over the world, whose members formed the famous International Brigades. In 1939, when “peace broke out,” as novelist José María Gironella wrote, the victors, who saw themselves as the last crusaders of Christendom with Franco at their head, shared a historical outlook that would persist for decades. With the uprising of 1936, they believed that they had saved the unity of Spain, and Catholicism, and had gained domestic peace. However, along with this evaluation, Franco harbored a somber diagnosis about his compatriots: the Spanish were simply not made to enjoy democracy, human rights, and civil liberties because history had “shown” that each time they were given some rein, the centrifugal forces that operated at the heart of society destroyed its coherence. This had occurred in 1808 after the invasion of Napoleon, in 1873 when the First Republic collapsed, and in 1936


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when the chaos of the Second Republic—which coincided with the worldwide depression of the 1930s—gave way to civil war. These “familial demons” that destroyed the coexistence of Spaniards could only be controlled by force for the nation’s own glory and benefit. Given this gloomy outlook, the regime that emerged in Spain after Franco’s victory was totalitarian, with only one political party, popularly called el Movimiento (“the Movement”). It had a conservative, Catholic ideology that no one could challenge publicly. And it embraced economic ideas derived from fascism and from a Spanish tradition, dating from the late 1800s, that included centralism, autarky, economic nationalism, and protectionism, with the state playing a prominent role as manager of the economy. On his deathbed, in his final statement to the Spanish people, Franco insisted that he had been the last Catholic crusader, the last defender of the homeland’s unity. He asked his compatriots to support the young monarch Juan Carlos, designated as his constitutional successor, and issued a final anxious warning: “Do not forget that the enemies of Spain and Christian civilization are alert.” The Decline of the “Familial Ghosts” What happened to that fatalistic vision that Franco and his followers held of Spaniards and Spanish history? Bit by bit, as the national and international scene changed, everyday reality for the Spanish grew increasingly distant from the perceptions and stereotypes of the Civil War victors and vanquished. Their leaders had experienced a change of heart and mind—a change of culture. The first blow to the old mindset was the defeat of the Nazi–Fascist Axis in 1945. Though Spain was officially neutral, the Allies saw Franco’s regime as a collaborator with Hitler and Mussolini. As a result, in 1945, Spain was subjected to a diplomatic quarantine: it was not allowed into the newly formed United Nations and received no funds through the Marshall Plan. Franco’s few friends included Argentine dictator Juan Domingo Perón and Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. But this international rejection began to slacken in 1953 as Madrid and Washington signed a pact to establish American military bases. Finally, in 1955, in keeping with the politics of the Cold War, Spain was accepted into the UN. But the Spaniards received a clear message that their authoritarian government was repugnant.


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The social and economic landscape of postwar Spain was dreary. Poverty was widespread through the 1950s, while the German and Japanese “miracles” dazzled economists. Even Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia outpaced Spain in economic growth. It became apparent that Franco’s autarkic solution for reducing poverty in Spain and achieving development was failing. Franco’s elite supporters and advisers began to see how backward Spain was in comparison with other countries of the Mediterranean basin, and they pressed for an opening to the outside world that quickly showed results. In the beginning, this change was limited to a reduction of state intervention in production. But 1957 saw an ideological turn. Falangist economic ministers were replaced by technocrats linked to Opus Dei who held far more modern views. In 1959, they formulated, and Franco approved, the Stabilization and Liberalization Plan, which broadened and deepened international ties. Spain opened up to the world market and further reduced state intervention. In essence, Spain began to look toward Europe and copy its model of economic management. In 1959, Spain’s Gross Domestic Product per capita was 58 percent of the Western European average. But with the “Spanish miracle” underway, in 1975, when Franco died, this figure had reached 79 percent. Was it only the wisdom of Franco’s technocrats that precipitated this spectacular change? No. The technocrats had the intellectual honesty to recognize the error of the economic theories that had guided Franco’s regime, while the Caudillo, as the general was called, was sufficiently flexible to recognize and deal with reality. A Country at Two Speeds: Economic and Political The economic opening between 1959 and 1975, which led to annual growth rates of up to 7 percent, was not paralleled by a political opening. Franco was much more willing to permit changes in the economic management of the country than in its politics. In reality, he had few clear ideas about the economy, but he was convinced he knew all about the psychology of his compatriots. He was not, like Mussolini, a fascist ideologue, but rather a military man from the barracks, one who loved order and believed that total submission to a vertically organized power would benefit society. He could turn over the key to the treasury, but he would not relinquish control of the prisons.


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Franco did not intend to let his regime disappear with his death. He wanted it continued in perpetuity, and in the 1950s he began designing the institutions necessary for this continuity. The first of these institutions was, of course, the leadership of the state. Who would replace him as the head of Spain when he was no longer around? Since he had triumphed against the republic, which to him was a recipe for disaster, it seemed that the most appropriate move was to restore the monarchy for a second time, despite the institution’s—and the Bourbons’—disrepute. But he faced an additional inconvenience: the natural heir to the throne, Count Juan de Borbón, son of Alfonso XIII, appeared too liberal and pro-Western, as he had demonstrated during World War II when he expressed clear sympathies for the Allies. Therefore Franco chose as his replacement the count’s firstborn, Juan Carlos, who was then a child of ten; he asked that the child be sent to him to be educated according to his regime’s historical vision and ideology. He believed that the young Bourbon, properly formed by wisely chosen teachers, would come to be a conservative Catholic, resistant to liberal values, and unfriendly to Western democracy. Franco, who had no sons, intended to “clone” himself to perpetuate his regime. When he spoke of the future, he assured others that it was “very well pinned down.” When Franco believed that the teachers and tutors had finished their formative task, he officially designated Juan Carlos, then thirty years old, as his successor as head of state. This took place in 1969. Franco was already elderly and suffering from several illnesses. However, as he saw his end grow near, in June 1973, he took some additional measures to guarantee his regime’s survival, naming Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, an unconditional Franquista who shared the same vision of Spain, to head the government. Franco was uneasy about the increase in terrorist acts committed by the radical Basque separatists of the Euzkadi Ta Azkatsuna (ETA) or “Basque Homeland and Liberty,” and assumed that Carrero Blanco would know how to confront these and other destabilizing dangers that he saw on the horizon. However, Franco’s plans for authoritarian continuity confronted a formidable enemy: the European Economic Community. The Western Europe that emerged after World War II, horrified by massacres at the hands of totalitarian governments, was unwilling to tolerate states in its midst that were not democratic and respectful of human rights. In


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1962, energized by the success of its economic reforms implemented three years earlier, Spain approached the EEC for membership. It was courteously but firmly informed that such a thing was not possible while the country had a political regime like Franco’s. For the ruling Franquista class, especially the younger members who were less ideological and had not lived through the Civil War, this rejection was key. They knew that without democracy they could not integrate into the powerful Europe they saw emerging. They also saw that their isolation, though partial, greatly limited the country’s possibilities for development. Consequently, the government witnessed the strengthening of a reformist and pro-European tendency, two of whose most prominent figures were José María de Areilza and Manuel Fraga Iribarne. A similar phenomenon began to take place in the opposition— which was then illegal, persecuted, small, and ineffective. Spain’s Communist Party, which until the mid- 1970s had been a docile follower of the USSR, became impressed by Italian communist Enrico Berlinguer’s “Eurocommunism” and began to adopt more moderate positions. Communists who lived in Western countries, they said, did not have to support the Soviet model and could accept the democratic rules of the game. With time, Santiago Carrillo, leader of the Spanish Communist Party, would come to write a book on the subject titled Eurocommunism and the State. The socialists and liberals also realized that integration into Europe could save the Spanish opposition. In their own way, socialists and liberals shared with Franco the idea that Spanish society lived under the permanent siege of “familial demons,” but the demons they saw were not the same as Franco’s. For the socialists and liberals, the demons that were tormenting Spaniards and preventing their harmonious coexistence were militarism, authoritarianism, and dogmatism. For them, joining Europe offered an effective way to check these antidemocratic tendencies. José Ortega y Gasset had written prophetically about it in 1910: “Spain is the problem; Europe the solution.” The Church and Catholics Change Another force responsible for the hostility and disunion that had afflicted Spanish society since the early 1800s was Catholicism. Spain was the last European country to abolish the Inquisition (1834) and


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slavery (1886), and it was the country where Catholics most vigorously opposed the secularization process that had taken place across the continent after the French Revolution. This resistance, which was often bloody, gave way to demonstrations of anticlericalism, also violent, which led Miguel de Unamuno to state that “Spaniards always marched behind priests, sometimes with candles and sometimes with axes.” Moreover, Franco had reached power at the head of an alliance that included Catholics, Falangists, and some liberals who had been disillusioned with the excesses of the republic. These excesses, which included the assassination of several hundred priests and nuns and the desecration of churches, created a strong alliance between Franco and the ecclesiastical hierarchy who had seen in the Caudillo the salvation of their institution. Naturally, this alliance between Franco and Catholicism was criticized by the opposition, but the ties began to weaken as the church began a vigorous turn toward the left. As had occurred in France in the 1950s, Spanish “worker priests” began to live among the poor in marginal neighborhoods. Many of them adopted ideas derived from Marxism which did not seem greatly different from a liberal interpretation of the church’s social doctrine. After the death of Pius XII in 1958, John XXIII was elected pope, and with him, the church’s ideological change deepened. He convened the Second Vatican Council with the precise purpose of modernizing the church’s position on social and political issues. John XXIII died in 1963 before the council had finished. His successor, Paul VI, published Populorum Progressio, which endorsed a vision of economic development not that different from the one the clandestine unions were forming in Spain. It is not at all strange, then, that in 1969, Paul VI named Bishop Enrique Tarancón as primate cardinal of Spain, a position that made him the de facto head of the Catholic hierarchy. This appointment had a clear political purpose: Tarancón represented an anti-Franco tendency within the Spanish clergy. Obviously, the Vatican wanted to distance itself publicly from the Spanish government. The old alliance between the Caudillo and Catholicism was shattered. A few years later, in 1975, Paul VI himself tried to intercede with Franco to stop the execution of some anarchist political prisoners, but the general would not take the phone call. Franco was in his last


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months, and he would not renounce his Catholicism. But he was convinced that the church had fallen into the wrong hands. Franco Dies and the Transition Begins On the night of November 20, 1975, every radio station in Spain began to transmit religious music. A nervous, emotional commentator announced the death of the Caudillo on all television channels. Head of the government Carlos Árias Navarro, a lawyer and former minister of the interior who had a reputation for repression, appeared tearfully before the cameras and asserted that, in homage to Franco’s memory, the regime he had founded would remain unaltered. Árias Navarro had become the head of the government after Carrero Blanco was assassinated by ETA terrorists in December 1973. Árias Navarro made his debut with a slightly conciliatory speech that only the most generous of observers would qualify as “reformist.” But if Árias Navarro was no reformer, other politicians close to the government were convinced of the need to push changes from the top as soon as possible, so reform would not emerge violently from the bottom. Among them were Manuel Fraga, José María de Areilza, Pio Cabanillas, and Alfonso Osorio. Months before Franco died, they had supported a reform that countenanced political associations that diverged from the government’s official line. At that time, a young and little-known lawyer, Adolfo Suárez, was named the president coordinator of the Union of the Spanish People—an apparatchik in the service of the totalitarian system. Immediately after Franco died, the Cortes, or Parliament, invested Juan Carlos as king of Spain. Among the mocking comments heard on the streets was the nickname “Juan Carlos the Brief,” reflecting doubt that he could keep himself in power. Forced to take an oath of allegiance to the fascistic principles of the existing system, he did so, but secretly he believed that the country’s stability and his own fate depended on founding a constitutional democracy, anchored by liberal values and firmly allied with the great Western nations. He probably owed this conviction to the influence of one of his brightest and most influential tutors, Torcuato Fernández Miranda, president of the Cortes and an unusually clear-sighted conservative with a talent for political intrigue.


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The first cabinet of the king’s government included several Franquistas of the reformist wing, and a major obstacle to their cause: Carlos Árias Navarro continued as president. They had to get rid of him if reform was to go forward. Fernández Miranda presented the king with a surprising candidate to replace the old Franquista: Adolfo Suárez. The canny Fernández Miranda had perceived in him the psychological qualities needed to lead the country’s political transformation. The king let himself be guided by his former teacher’s political instinct. In July 1976, Juan Carlos I asked Carlos Árias Navarro for his resignation and named Adolfo Suárez president. Suárez was viewed with skepticism by the reformers, who did not respect him on an intellectual level, as well as by the opposition, who thought he was only a variation on the authoritarian theme. But it soon became clear that they were all wrong. Suárez issued an amnesty that liberated more than five thousand political prisoners. He then began to persuade parliamentarians to accept a sweeping political reform that would end the old regime and lay the foundations for a pluralistic democracy. Finally, on November 18, 1976, ably guided by Fernández Miranda, the Franquista Cortes performed “hara-kiri,” as the media labeled it: more than three fourths of its members voted in favor of political reform, which included dissolving the Cortes and calling for general elections. Before they implemented these changes, the people had to approve the new constitution through a referendum; 94 percent of the population did so. It was still not possible, however, to speak of full democracy. Among other things, the Communist Party remained illegal. In April 1977, after several weeks of tension and street demonstrations, during which Franquista gunmen murdered several labor lawyers belonging to the Communist Party, the party was finally legalized. At the time, it was the largest and best-organized opposition party in Spain. The transition was moving at high speed. In June, general elections were held, and the winning group was the Union of the Democratic Center, created by Adolfo Suárez: a coalition of reformers, liberals, conservatives, and Christian Democrats, many of them former Franquistas. The socialists were comfortably in second place. The Communist Party entered Parliament with twenty deputies and 9 percent of the vote, already a part of the system having tacitly accepted the monarchy; a few months later, it would officially renounce Lenin-


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ism. Two years later, pressed by Felipe González, the socialists would break publicly with Marxist ideology. The political spectrum was converging toward the center. Union leaders, politicians, and businessmen met at the Moncloa— Spain’s government house—to seek a consensus. Franco’s death and the ensuing political changes coincided with an economic recession, which was exacerbated by the worldwide energy crisis of 1973 and the inflationary period that followed. Unemployment was increasing at an alarming rate, and the fiscal deficit was skyrocketing. Everyone understood that if the economic crisis got out of hand, the political reforms could well be aborted. Many members of the armed forces were dissatisfied with what they saw occurring, and there was reason to believe that subversive activity was being planned in the barracks. Faced with these dangers, the union and business leaders responsibly tried to moderate their demands, inflation began to come under control, and the country could breathe more easily. These agreements were called the “Pacts of the Moncloa.” After the nation approved the new Constitution, elections were again held in March 1979 with similar results. The Constitution facilitated a sweeping decentralization that established seventeen autonomous regions, each with its own parliament and bureaucracy. The “United Spain” of Franco was giving way to a federal Spain formed of autonomous entities that exercised control over local government. In this manner, Spain responded to separatist pressures, particularly in the Basque region and Catalonia. The divisions within his party dogged Suárez, however, and in January 1981 he offered his resignation. Replacing him was Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, the great-nephew of the conservative deputy José Calvo Sotelo who had been assassinated in 1936. During the ceremony of investiture, a dangerous attempt at a military coup d’état occurred. A unit of the civil guard took Parliament and held several parliamentarians, including Suárez and Calvo Sotelo. Other rebel units of the army moved in the provinces. But the king maintained a firm stance and denounced the seditious factions. It was the last blow to Franco’s vision of Spain. When the failure of the coup d’etat was announced, millions of jubilant Spaniards took to the streets in the greatest political demonstration the country had ever seen. The coup attempt accelerated the government’s plans to join NATO. The reasoning was very simple, although it would never be made public. Joining NATO would not only add Spain to the countries of


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the West confronting the Soviet threat. It would also constrain the Spanish armed forces within a military superstructure that would not tolerate antidemocratic behavior. In June 1982, Spain joined NATO. That same year, elections were held, and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party won an absolute majority. Felipe González became president, a fitting end to the cycle of transition. The reformist right had transferred authority peacefully to a left that did not intend to change the political model, but rather to perfect it. The ruling elite, right and left, had reached a consensus on how to manage the country for the good of all, and what was open to debate were the policies, not the fundamental ideological issues. It was an astonishing transformation worthy of the word miracle. Since 1975, the Crown had, unexpectedly, opted for democracy; the right had renounced Franquismo, militarism, and intolerance; the communists had abandoned Leninism; the socialists had abandoned Marxism; the unions had given up the class struggle; and the Catholic Church had offered its blessing. Of the old “familial demons,” only one threatening demon remained: nationalist separatism. But even this palpable threat was incapable of derailing the democratic process. What Made the Spanish Transition to Democracy Succeed? In summary, I suggest twelve elements that substantially explain Spain’s astonishing transformation. 1. Although the Civil War ended in 1939, its terrible scars were still vivid in the nation’s collective memory, and almost no one was willing to risk a recurrence of that catastrophic violence. 2. During almost forty years of Franco’s authoritarian governance, Spanish society grew more docile and obedient to authority and rules. 3. By 1975, the European confrontation between fascists and communists that had marked the 1930s had disappeared, and was replaced by a rivalry between capitalist democracies, led by the United States, and communist dictatorships, led by the USSR. Franquismo was a political anachronism without contemporary international ties when the caudillo passed from the scene.


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4. When Franco died, almost 80 percent of Spaniards were homeowners, the banks housed millions of private savings accounts, a broad middle class had emerged, there was almost no extreme poverty, and the country was enjoying the highest standard of living in its history. In other words, there were objective reasons to act with prudence and reject risks. 5. After sixteen years of vigorous growth following the Stabilization Plan of 1959, it was clear that the market economy was functioning efficiently, undermining the more radical proposals of the Marxists. Similarly, the failure of Franco’s earlier (1939– 59) statist and autarkic economic policies had discredited that model, so characteristic of fascist dictatorships. 6. The European Economic Community, later the European Union, served as a model and focal point that demanded democratic politics and capitalist economics of its members. If Spain wanted political stability and prosperity, it had to step over the democratic threshold and join the developed world. The United States also exercised its influence to this end. 7. King Juan Carlos understood that he had to legitimize his rule through a transformation of his own dynasty—the House of Bourbon—from the exercise of traditional aristocracy and authoritarianism to the fostering of democracy; in so doing he distanced himself from the Franquista origins of his authority. He had to stop being the symbolic head of the Spanish right and become the head of all Spaniards, including the left. Some well-informed sources have said that when the transition began, at a secret meeting between the King and Felipe González, Juan Carlos made the following observation: “Felipe, if you want to govern, you need me—as I need you to rule.” 8. The Spanish right, or at least the reformed and enlightened right, understood the alternatives very clearly: it could either encapsulate itself in an ideological and political bunker, clinging to Franquismo, or it could lead the transformation and reinvent itself within a democratic model. It chose the second option. 9. The communists faced a similar dilemma. If they insisted on seeking the destruction of the bourgeois state and installing a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” they would strengthen the recalcitrant wing of Franquismo and frighten a society that wanted agreements, not confrontations. They chose moderation and cooperation with the reformists and the Crown.


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10. The Spanish socialists, under the leadership of Felipe González, who had strong though discreet anticommunist convictions, withdrew from the more radical schemes of Spanish socialism of the 1930s and tried to model itself after the British Labour Party and the Swedish socialists. If the British and Swedish socialists had been able to coexist with a monarchy and a market economy, why did Spanish socialists have to be different? 11. The Catholic Church, which had played a divisive role by supporting Franco’s authoritarianism, became a cohesive force promoting democracy during the crucial transitional stage. 12. The unions also renounced extremist positions that endangered the market economic system. They responsibly negotiated benefits and salary increases with the owners’ associations, contributing to a social peace that allowed the economy to recover.

Two Final Conclusions The forces driving the Spanish transition were not related to the broad society’s predominant values and attitudes; they had more to do with common sense and the self-preservation instinct of the ruling class—both the government and the opposition. The international environment also played a crucial role, particularly the awareness by the Spanish elite of what was happening elsewhere in Europe. To be sure, in their earlier history, the Spanish elite had been noted neither for their common sense nor for their self-preservation instinct, as the Civil War demonstrates. Thus we may argue that the elite, right and left, experienced a cultural transformation after the traumatically destructive civil war and their country’s opening up to the rest of the world after 1959, a transformation they disseminated throughout the broader society. With democracy established, the rule of law consolidated, and the great majority of the Spanish people approving a market economy and the country’s opening to foreign markets, it is clear that many Spaniards had adopted the values and attitudes that are generally found in the advanced democracies. All the surveys conducted by the Center for Sociological Investigation, affiliated with the government of Spain, reveal that the immense


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majority of Spaniards value a democratic system over any other kind of government. They also abhor corruption, consider themselves tolerant, and have reasonable trust in the country’s institutions. The first proof of this profound transformation appeared in the early 1980s when millions of Spanish citizens took to the streets to protest peacefully against the army’s attempt to carry out a coup d’état and trample the newly unveiled Constitution. Also, possibly for the first time in Spain’s history, most Spaniards felt that the government under attack was their government, created and voted into existence to serve the people, and that the laws the coup supporters were trying to ignore or violate were their laws. Experience and practice had become deeply rooted convictions, beliefs, and values. They were already a part of the culture. It is from this moment that one can speak of a truly consolidated democracy.


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27 Strong Governance and Civic Participation Some Notes on the Cultural Dimension of the Swedish Model DAG BLANCK and THORLEIF PETTERSSON

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Sweden has been transformed from a comparatively poor country to one of the world’s most advanced welfare societies. To fully explain this development is not easy, as many different theoretical perspectives can help explain why some countries are rich and others poor. In this brief discussion of Sweden, we consider some factors related to culture. We also seek to illuminate how these factors have changed over recent decades, and what this may imply for the future development of Sweden’s socioeconomic and political landscape. Because these topics are interrelated in complex ways, we concentrate on only a few of the cultural factors behind Sweden’s development. From a Poor Country to a Rich Welfare Society In the middle 1800s Sweden was a poor country; its GDP per capita was among the lowest in Western Europe. It was also one of the most agrarian and least urbanized European countries. Around 1860 483


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the Swedish economy began a trajectory of remarkable growth. Today, with a population around nine million, Sweden is an advanced welfare society with a solid market economy. International statistics rank it as having one of the world’s highest standards of living. Since 1980, on average, Sweden has ranked fifth on the United Nations Human Development Index. Likewise, the Gender Empowerment Measure ranks Sweden as one of the most advanced countries in terms of gender equality. The Human Well-Being Index (HWI) ranks Sweden’s standard of living as eighth among 180 countries.1 An even broader index of social progress, the WISP index, ranks Sweden together with Denmark at the very top among all 160 countries ranked.2 This high standard of living is also fairly equally distributed among different social categories, with smaller economic gaps between the social classes than in most other countries. For instance, Sweden is ranked sixth worldwide with regard to equitable distribution of income.3 Not surprisingly, Swedes report comparatively high scores on various dimensions of subjective health and life satisfaction.4 Sweden also ranks high in environmental sustainability, especially considering its high level of economic development. The Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) places Sweden third out of 142 countries, following Finland and Norway. A combined Well-being Index (WI), which averages a Human Well-being Index and an Eco-System Well-being Index, ranks Sweden first out of 180 countries.5 Except for participating in some UN missions, Sweden has not been involved in any armed military conflicts for two centuries. Holding firmly to the doctrine of armed neutrality, Sweden managed to stay out of both world wars. It became a member of the European Union comparatively late, in 1995, and in a 1999 referendum declined membership in the European monetary union. Swedish skepticism about the European Union, however, does not mean the country harbors isolationist tendencies. In fact, the Swedes attach great importance to the UN system and its various programs for human rights, global development, and peace. It has even been claimed that this attachment to the UN and global development is part of a Swedish civil religion.6 Sweden is also a fully established democracy. According to data published in the United Nations Human Development Reports, Sweden ranks comparatively high on measures of the institutional factors necessary for democracy. It also scores high on the Freedom House ratings of political rights and civil liberties, as well as the World Bank


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measures of voice and accountability of governance, law and order, and the rule of law. The nation also does very well on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index: it is among the ten least corrupt countries in the world. Although some dimensions of the Swedish welfare society have been evaluated very differently by foreign observers, ranging all the way from praise to distaste, the facts remain that from a comparative perspective the Swedish standard of living is among the highest in the world. The Swedish environment is in good condition, the Swedish democratic system seems to work efficiently and openly, and the Swedish commitment to global governance and development seems strong. Although the Swedish welfare system has been under economic pressure, especially during the 1990s, and although some claim that the “Swedish model” has been abandoned and the country has become just one more Western market economy, this does not basically alter the comparative advantages of the Swedish standard of living. Sweden is not a paradise. Social problems do exist, and some of them, like the integration of immigrants, are severe. But Sweden’s welfare economy certainly merits analysis, and in this chapter we investigate some of its cultural roots. Swedish Sociopolitical Culture: A Balance Between Top-Down and Bottom-Up Forces Historians Per Thullberg and Kjell Östberg have pointed out a consensus that the 1930s were “a strategic decade in Swedish political history,” the decade when the Swedish parliament began enacting the social legislation that formed the basis for the Swedish model.7 In 1932 the Social Democrats won the general election, and through negotiations with the Farmers’ Party, reached an economic and political compromise that enabled the two to form a government. This occurred in the shadow of the Great Depression, and according to Thullberg and Östberg, paved the way for a long-term political stability that made social reforms possible. In 1934, for example, unemployment insurance was introduced, followed by a general pension reform, the first national law regulating vacation time, and the first step in providing financial assistance to families with children. Further waves of welfare legislation followed during the postwar boom years. The fact that the Social Democrats remained in power


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for an unprecedented forty-four years, until 1976, was of great importance in solidifying the political and social reforms that had begun in the 1930s. In his history of the twentieth century, Eric Hobsbawm has called the period 1945 to 1970 the golden years, when economic growth made social reforms possible in many Western countries and welfare reforms of various kinds were carried out. Still, Hobsbawm sees Sweden as a special case, as it led these developments and often became a model—or, to those who opposed the ideas behind the welfare state, a dangerous example—for the rest of the world.8 But the roots of the reform movement stretch back well before the 1930s, to at least the 1860s, when Swedish society began a gradual democratization. The constitutional reforms of 1866 abolished a parliament based on property, and restrictions on voting were gradually removed, so Sweden had full and equal suffrage by 1921. Together with industrialization and rapid social change, these reforms paved the way for new kinds of reforms. The growing liberal movement, for example, actively sought to promote social reforms long before the Social Democrats did. The social and economic conditions of Swedish society during the late 1800s also served as an important foundation for the Swedish model that developed in the 1900s. Political scientist Gøsta EspingAndersen has described Sweden’s social and economic structure in the earlier era as characterized by extreme concentration of wealth in a small group of very rich families, an unusually small middle class, and a very large class of small farmers, agricultural workers, and urban laborers. In such a relatively undifferentiated society, the burdens of poverty had to be borne equally, he argues, suggesting that the larger collective, rather than the individual, played a crucial role. He also says that a highly centralized state played an important role in carrying out the reforms.9 In discussing how “Sweden’s unusual history” is an important factor in the nature and success of the Swedish model, Esping-Andersen provides some examples from the 1800s and also alludes to earlier developments.10 During the mid-1600s, iron foundries were established throughout central Sweden and the manufacture of iron became highly significant to the Swedish economy. The iron was produced in small communities called bruk, where a paternalistic relationship developed between the foundry owners and the workers, which also entailed a genuine sense of social and economic responsibility among the owners. It is possible to identify some aspects of


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social and economic life in the bruk milieus that resemble certain features of the Swedish model of the twentieth century, and to argue that some sociocultural continuity exists between the two forms of social organization. Economic historian Maths Isacsson has pointed to three similarities between the bruk and the contemporary Swedish model. First, the owners of the bruk community had a sense of overall responsibility both for the planning of production and for the workers’ social and economic conditions, which they demonstrated through the physical layout of the bruk and the rationally planned housing for the workers. Moreover, even though the bruk was paternalistic, a sense of cooperation and consensus building was also characteristic. Social responsibility and some social programs constituted a final aspect of bruk life, all of which made conditions there quite different from the rest of Swedish society. The bruk became a part of a Swedish historic–cultural tradition that, in some form, survived into the twentieth century. When the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger visited a bruk in central Sweden in the early 1980s, he noted the connections: a person “had to be deaf and blind not to recognize the origins of the modern Swedish welfare state in this patriarchal utopia.”11 Two factors seem to be particularly important in explaining the cultural roots of the Swedish model: the role of the state and a strong peasantry. In the 1500s Sweden began its development toward modern statehood. One important characteristic of this process was the emergence of a strong, centralized state, given particular impetus by the country’s wartime experiences during the 1600s when Sweden played an active role in the European wars. The country’s resources were stretched to the limit in order to maintain the Swedish imperial state of that period, which some historians have characterized as a military state. An important dimension of this strengthening of the state was the establishment of a new administrative system, often associated with Axel Oxenstierna (1583–1654), chancellor of Sweden from 1612 to 1654. After the great wars ended in the early 1700s, the military aspect of the state became less important, but the centrality of the state in Swedish life has continued to the present. One very important feature of the strong seventeenth-century state is the centralized, relatively efficient, and at times quite independent civil service, simultaneously showing fairness and professionalism in its relations with the people, and loyalty and allegiance to the legal system and state superiors. This civil service is often seen as one


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of Oxenstierna´s contributions. The Swedish model of the twentieth century would likely have been less successful without a traditionally strong state and efficient bureaucracy to build on. A second important factor was the role of the peasantry. Unlike those in most other European countries, land-owning peasants occupied a strong position in Swedish society and were continuously represented in the Swedish parliament through their own (fourth) estate from the 1500s on. Historians point to the peasantry’s participation in the political process as a crucial factor in Swedish history from the middle 1500s to the late 1800s. That Sweden experienced relatively little unrest in the form of large popular uprisings during this period, at least by comparison with much of the rest of Europe, is probably related to the peasants’ early participation in politics. Although the Swedish peasantry faced nearly as difficult conditions as their counterparts in other European countries, they were, as Eva Österberg observes, able to redress some of their grievances through participation rather than insurrection.12 This participation occurred not only in the national parliament but also locally. One such arena was the parish meeting, or sockenstämma, which dealt not only with religious matters but eventually with social, economic, and political matters as well. During the 1600s, it acquired some legal functions. The parish meeting provided a setting where different social groups could meet, discuss, and interact, and it served as a point of contact between the state and the local communities, a connection through which the local peasantry was able to exercise influence. A Swedish political culture thus developed, characterized by relatively peaceful and consensual relations between different groups and interests as well as widespread participation from fairly broad strata of the population. In fact, it is possible to argue that the main fault line in Swedish society was not between the peasantry and a feudal aristocracy or between the state and the burghers, but between the state and the peasantry. An arrangement developed through which deliberations and compromises could take place, leading to agreements which the majority of people then found acceptable. The strong state was balanced by a people who were also strong. “It is in this mixture, in this perpetually changing dynamic that [the] Swedish political tradition is rooted—not only in a strong, interventionist state, and, equally, not only in popular power and collectivism.”13 The establishment of a working balance between the top-down authority of a strong


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state and the bottom-up power of a strong and independent people is an essential part of the background of the contemporary Swedish model. The role of religion should be noted in this context. The Reformation in Sweden was a gradual process, beginning in the 1520s during the reign of Gustav Vasa, the first king of the early modern era. The factors behind the Swedish reformation were complex, including politics and economics as well as religion. The final decades of the 1500s were characterized by political strife, in which religion played an important role. After a threat to reintroduce Catholicism, the Reformation was finalized in 1593 when the Augsburg Confession was adopted as the dogmatic foundation of the Swedish church; in 1595 Parliament banned Catholic masses and the last monastery was closed. The Reformation established a close relationship between the state and the church. During Gustav Vasa’s reign in the 1500s, the church began to be centralized and both rulers and state began to assert authority over it. Gradually the church became a vehicle of the state. In 1536 it became an evangelical national church. During the 1600s a strict Lutheran orthodoxy was established, and the church provided important ideological underpinnings for the Swedish empire. By 1700, both royal power and Lutheran confession had become integrating symbols of the unity of the realm. “Through the true, Lutheran orthodox faith and through obedience to the theocratic monarchy, the Swedish people were bound together into one community which united the subjects of the realm into one soul.”14 The church law of 1686 became the legal expression of religious unity and Lutheran orthodoxy. It also strengthened state control over the church, placing some local church structures under the control of the county governors, the representatives of the central state in the Swedish counties.15 As noted, the parishes and the vicars gradually acquired civil functions and the parish meeting eventually acquired some legal functions. The new church law also formalized the church’s system of population registers and records. Through its various registers, the church was charged with keeping comprehensive records of the Swedish population—a function which further linked it to the state’s administrative and secular needs. As a result, ministers in the church of Sweden came to serve both religious and secular society. To many parishioners the distinction between the two spheres was no doubt


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difficult to determine, thus further linking the religious and national identities. During the 1700s and 1800s the Lutheran orthodoxy was gradually challenged. Pietism in the eighteenth century and several revivals in the nineteenth century paved the way for greater religious diversity and new relationships between the state and the churches. Still, the connection between state and church remained strong. The Church of Sweden continued to play a role in shaping and defining a sense of national identity into the twentieth century albeit in very different ways than during the Lutheran orthodoxy of the 1600s.16 Full freedom of religion was not established until 1951, very late from a comparative perspective. Only in 2000 did a final devolution between the state and the church occur, following intense discussions that had lasted for well over fifty years. The church also played an important educational role both by making written religious texts available for laypeople and by teaching them to read these texts. Through systematic educational efforts by the church, an unusually high literacy rate developed among Swedes. Even though general primary education was not introduced until 1842, 90 percent of the adult population was literate in the 1850s, making Sweden one of the most literate countries in the world at that time. The high degree of literacy made an important contribution to popular efforts to balance the strong state, as well as to the temperance, the revival, and the labor movements. The Swedish Welfare Society as “The People’s Home” The Swedish form of advanced social welfare has become known as the “Swedish middle way,” the “Swedish third way,” or simply the “Swedish model.” But its significance is disputed. According to some, it is basically a forum for negotiations between employer and employee organizations on the labor market, with the goal of securing good working conditions and efficient production and avoiding disruptive conflicts. For others, it refers to a specific Scandinavian social-democratic welfare regime, with strong redistribution policies and large tax-financed general welfare systems for education, health care, child and elder care, parental insurance, and pensions. According to still others, it is a kind of governance which might serve as a model, especially for developing countries.


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What is the cultural component of the Swedish model? The model itself is closely related to a powerful concept in Swedish sociopolitical discourse of the twentieth century, especially during the formative period before the mid-1950s. This is the concept of folkhemmet, according to which the state and society are a home, hemmet, for the people, folk. This concept is closely associated with the former Social Democratic prime minister Per Albin Hansson (1885–1946, prime minister 1932–46). In an often quoted speech, Hansson described the “people’s home” in terms of solidarity, equality, consensus, democratic rule, and the avoidance of conflicts and abuses of power: The basis of the home is togetherness and common feeling. The good home does not consider anyone as either privileged or unappreciated; it knows no special favorites and no stepchildren. There no one looks down on anyone else, there no one tries to gain advantage at another’s expense, and the stronger do not plunder or suppress the weaker. In the good home, equality, consideration, co-operation, and helpfulness prevail. Applied to a home for all the citizens, this would mean the breaking down of all the social and economic barriers that now divide citizens into the privileged and the unfortunate, into rulers and subjects, into rich and poor, the glutted and the destitute, the plunderers and the plundered.

The metaphor of the “people’s home” influenced all the political parties, not only the Social Democrats. In one way or another they all had to acknowledge this powerful symbol in their programs and platforms. The metaphor signaled the conviction that society can be deliberately improved in order to meet people’s needs and preferences. It was also intimately linked with the names of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, Nobel laureates who promoted social engineering for a more equitable and fruitful society through enlightened social policies. It is easy to understand why the Myrdals admired Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States during the 1930s. Many Americans also admired the Swedish model, and New Dealers visited Sweden, seeking inspiration in the Swedish social reforms of the 1930s. Marquis Childs´s influential Sweden—The Middle Way (1936) is perhaps the best example of this.17 Interest in the Swedish model has continued in some U.S. political circles up to the present. The metaphor of Swedish welfare as the people’s home served as a “public myth,” which some believe is indispensable for a viable


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society. As William McNeill notes, “A people without a full quiver of relevant agreed-upon statements, accepted in advance through education or less formalized acculturation, soon finds itself in deep trouble, for in the absence of believable myths, coherent public action becomes very difficult to improvise or sustain.”18 The public myth of Swedish society as a people’s home can be thought of as a kind of a Swedish civil religion. It has been suggested that this metaphor rests on two crucial pillars: an optimistic belief in continuing progress toward a better society driven by public policy, and unquestioning confidence in the state’s efficiency and fairness. It is not far-fetched to associate these two fundamental convictions with the two balancing top-down and bottom-up forces that gave form to Swedish political culture. Since the early 1980s, the force of the “people’s home” metaphor has eroded somewhat, as economic and fiscal problems have constrained public-sector activity. But the metaphor may now be in a process of repair. In recent years Swedish political discourse has focused on the need to strengthen three of the most fundamental dimensions of Swedish welfare: medical care, public schools, and social care. Several analyses of Swedes’ attitudes toward welfare programs show that these core values have not been abandoned. A strong, protective state somehow continues to be seen as a necessary condition for individual freedom of choice, and not as a barrier. Swedish Political Culture: A Special Case Among Different Welfare Regimes? Are the values associated with the Swedish model peculiar to Swedish political culture or are they also found in other developed Western societies with other welfare policies? According to a cultural map built on data from the European Values Study and the World Values Survey data, Sweden, like the other Nordic countries (Norway, Finland, and Denmark), is exceptional in two basic value dimensions.19 The first of these is the traditional (e.g., God, fatherland, family) versus secularrational value orientation, the second the survival vs. self-expression orientation (e.g., trust, tolerance, subjective well-being, political activism). Sweden and the other Nordic countries score close to the top on both the secular-rational values and the self-expression values. In


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fact, no other country is as far from the center of the map as Sweden. Thus, there are good reasons to talk about an exceptional Swedish/ Nordic culture, marked by low adherence to traditional religious values and high appreciation of individual autonomy, horizontal social trust, social activism, and tolerance for minorities. Obviously, some casual relation between the advanced Swedish welfare model and this Swedish value profile can be assumed. Because this issue deserves further analysis, we chose to compare Sweden, Great Britain, France, and Italy, which represent different kinds of welfare regimes. Sweden is an example of a Scandinavian social democratic welfare regime, Great Britain of an Anglo-Protestant liberal regime, France of a conservative regime, and Italy of a southern European budding welfare regime. Social democratic welfare policies are widely believed to have developed the most extensive redistributive benefits systems, giving high priority to reducing inequality and unemployment through strong working-class mobilization. The liberal (British) model of welfare gives priority to economic growth and efficiency, employing stigmatizing—and modest—means-tested social benefits. This regime is associated with low levels of working-class mobilization. Conservative welfare policies emphasize social insurance instead of means-tested and private benefits; they give top priority to social stability, especially with regard to household income and social integration. Such policies are often associated with a conservative Catholic tradition. The budding or immature southern European welfare states are seen as building on a strong familial basis, with poorly integrated systems of income maintenance, little state penetration, and a variety of client–patron relations.20 In addition to their different welfare policies, Sweden, Great Britain, France, and Italy also differ in economic development as well as religious and sociomoral traditions, denominational cleavages, and democratic legacies and political systems. Sweden is massively Protestant, until very recently with a Lutheran state church to which most Swedes belong, often as a token of Swedish identity. Apart from membership rates, however, Sweden shows the lowest levels of religious involvement. France and Italy are both Catholic countries— and France has considerably lower levels of church participation than Italy. These religious differences are of interest, since they may constitute “an important factor in determining contemporary public policy outcomes across a very wide range of areas.”21


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Comparative Analyses of Swedish Political Culture As noted, the Swedish welfare model rests on the conviction that society can be deliberately improved through a combination of strong governance and equally strong civic participation. This view of society can be analyzed using the typology based on two key dimensions of citizenship: following the rules and participating in making them. Petersson, Westholm, and Blomberg summarize the thinking behind this combination. Democracy, seen as autonomy, is a kind of self-regulation. Democracy does not mean the absence of rules and coercive power. On the contrary, a state and a legal system is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for democracy. Thus, another key dimension of democracy is that its coercive rules and regulations are established by the citizens themselves. Citizenship is therefore a combination of two elements: Participation in the democratic establishment of the rules, and a willingness to follow the rules.22

High levels of participation in creating the rules, together with a strong willingness to follow them, can be said to constitute the kind of integrative democracy that is a basic element of Swedish political culture. This combination has also been interpreted as solidarity, another key value of the Swedish model. On the other hand, higher participation in creating rules, combined with a resistance to following them, can be described, perhaps generously, as a kind of innovative democratic activism. In the religious field, this would be seen as prophecy. Stronger willingness to follow the rules, combined with weaker participation in their creation, can be viewed as a kind of submissive conformism, whereas a less positive stance on both civic virtues can interpreted as a kind of anticollectivist escape from society, where people do not care much about the norms necessary to any collectivity.23 The two civic virtues can be tentatively analyzed using data from the European Values Study. As measures of willingness to follow the rules, we used two indices: (1) unwillingness to cheat on taxes, claim welfare benefits one is not entitled to, or take bribes; and (2) confidence in the institutions associated with preserving law and order: the church, army, and police. As indicators of participation in creating rules, we used two other indices: (1) active involvement in


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political parties and social movements, participation in social protests like boycotts and demonstrations, open and respectful relations with others, and participation in political discussions; and (2) confidence in the institutions that people tend to associate with democracy: the press, parliament, and trade unions. The data for the four indices from each of the four countries seem to fit the theoretical two-dimensional model for civic virtues fairly well. The four indices can therefore be used to calculate the mean scores for each of the two dimensions for each of the four countries for both 1981 and 1999. These scores illustrate how the four countries have changed over this period with regard to people’s adherence to the two civic virtues. Our findings indicate that Swedes have been more successful in achieving a positive combination of the two civic virtues than the citizens of the three other countries. This result is quite in line with the character of Swedish political culture we describe. France’s scores, on the other hand, indicate a kind of anticollectivist and escapist culture. The Italian and British results suggest a more conformist and submissive orientation, more concerned with following rules than helping make them. That Swedish political culture really is in some sense exceptional can also be demonstrated by other data. Findings from the recent European Social Survey show that Swedes are more confident than citizens of other countries in their ability to participate in the political system (internal political efficacy), and are also more convinced that this system is attentive to them (external political efficacy). In line with this, Swedes also demonstrate higher trust in the police, the legal system, the parliament, and the politicians. This is precisely what one would expect from our previous discussion of the cultural roots of the Swedish welfare model. From 1981 to 1999 the results for Sweden clearly show a decreased willingness to follow the rules but increased participation in the making of rules. Apparently Sweden has moved from “integrative democracy and solidarity” toward “innovative activism” and a more “prophetic” orientation toward society. The changes for the three other welfare societies are smaller and do not seem to imply noteworthy moves toward new combinations of the two virtues. That these changes were found only for Sweden may suggest that Sweden is a kind of forerunner in more general processes of value change, a result that has already been described for other value dimensions. However, the distinct Swedish pattern may also be a


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result of the many cuts and reductions in Swedish welfare programs caused by the severe economic crisis of the early 1990s. The more activist and innovative Swedish value profile that developed when Swedish welfare came under pressure might also be seen as efforts to regain the comparative merits of the earlier, more generous welfare policies to which Swedes were accustomed. In this sense, when high expectations for advanced social welfare are not met, activist interventions may result. Seen from this perspective, the recent changes in Swedish culture indicate that the culture around the Swedish model is enduring and deeply rooted. Conclusion Sweden developed from a comparatively poor country on the European periphery in the middle 1800s to a rich welfare society at the end of the 1900s, scoring very high on several worldwide indicators of well-being. The absence of feudalism and a long historical tradition of efforts to find balance and consensual agreements between a top-down strong state and a bottom-up popular power formed the cultural background of this development. The independent Swedish civil service, demonstrating fairness and professionalism in its relations with the people and loyalty and allegiance to the state, also helped shape this tradition. Another factor was the Swedish iron foundry, the bruk, which combined a paternalistic relationship between the foundry owners and the workers with a sense of social and economic responsibility on the part of the owners. Some of the social arrangements that developed in these milieus point toward the Swedish welfare model of the twentieth century. In the relatively undifferentiated Swedish society, with a large class of small farmers, agricultural workers, and urban laborers, the burdens of poverty had to be borne by all, giving primary weight to the collective rather than the individual. In the creation of the cultural background to the Swedish model, the Swedish state church came to play an important role. Controlled to a substantial degree by the state, the church became a tool for managing secular issues. The local parish meetings provided arenas where local peasantry could acquire experience and exercise influence. The parish meetings—oriented toward local practical matters, lending legitimacy to the agreements reached, and inculcating ethi-


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cal values and the habit of making and following rules—enhanced people’s capacity to participate actively and trustingly in civil society. Church efforts to promote literacy also played a significant role in empowering the people in their interactions with the strong state. During the early twentieth century, Swedish welfare doctrine was centered on the metaphor of Swedish society as the people’s home. This metaphor rested on two fundamental convictions: an optimistic belief in policy-driven progress toward a better society and firm confidence that the state would fairly distribute the fruits of this progress. Even if the public myth of the people’s home may be obsolescent, it persists strongly, seeking new expressions of core values. Swedes highly esteem two key civic virtues: (1) willingness to follow rules and regulations; and (2) readiness to participate in creating them. The last few decades suggest a change toward a more activist and innovative understanding of society. But do these changes signal an effort to regain the lost benefits of the Swedish welfare model, or instead point to a substantial change in it? This is an open question. Swedish political culture is intricate, multifaceted, and rich in nuance, reflecting the sociopolitical settings in which it has developed over the centuries. Although many find it inspiring, one may wonder how easily it can be copied in other contexts. We believe that at least some basic features of this culture merit the attempt. These include the fruitful combination of a strong state, good governance, a vital, open, and trusting civil society, and a competent and efficient civil service, where career options are based primarily on merit rather than on family connections. It is not very difficult to see that this culture is progress-prone rather than progress-resistant, resting on confidence that people can affect their destiny for the better by future-oriented planning. Notes 1. R. Prescott-Allen, The Wellbeing of Nations (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001), table 1. 2. R. Estes, At the Crossroads. Dilemmas in World Development at the Outset of a New Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer International). 3. UN Human Development Report 2002, table 13. 4. R. Inglehart et al., eds., Human Beliefs and Values. A Cross-Cultural SourceBook on the 1999–2000 Values Surveys (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2004). 5. Prescott-Allen 2001, table 27. 6. T. Pettersson, “The United Nations between Islam and the Secularized West,” Temenos (2004).


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7. Per Thullberg and Kjell Östberg, “Inledning,” in Den svenska modellen, eds. Per Thullberg & Kjell Östberg (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1994), 6. 8. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 411. 9. Gøsta Esping-Andersen, “Jämlikhet, effektivitet och makt,” in Den svenska modellen, eds. Per Thullberg & Kjell Östberg (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1994). 10. Ibid. 11. H. M. Enzensberger, Svensk höst. En reportageserie i Dagens Nyheter 1982 (Stockholm: Dagens Nyheter, 1982), 29. 12. Eva Österberg, “State Formation and the People. The Swedish Model in Perspective,” in Gemeinde, Reformation und Widerstand. Festschrift für Peter Blickle zum 60. Geburtstag, eds., Heinrich R. Schmidt et al. (Tübingen: Bibliotheca Academia Verlag, 1998), 117–18. 13. Ibid., 124. 14. Nils Ekedahl, Det svenska Israel. Myt och retorik i Haquin Spegels predikokonst (Uppsala: Studia Rhetorica Upsaliensia, 1999), 223. 15. Berndt Gustafsson, Svensk kyrkohistoria (Stockholm: Verbum, 1975), 95, 112. 16. Kjell Blückert, The Church as Nation. A Study in Ecclesiology and Nationalism (Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang 2000), deals with the different views of religion and nationalism among the two early twentieth-century Swedish church leaders J. A. Eklund and Nathan Söderblom. 17. Merle Curti, “Sweden in the American Social Mind of the 1930s,” in The Immigration of Ideas, eds. J. Thomas Tredway and J. Iverne Dowie (Rock Island, IL: Augustana Historical Society, 1968). 18. W. McNeil, “The Care and Repair of the Public Myth,” Foreign Affairs Fall (1982): 1. 19. Inglehart et al., Human beliefs and values. 20. These generalizations derive from W. Arts, J. Hagenaars, and L. Halman ,eds., The Cultural Diversity of European Unity (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 21. F. Castles, “On Religion and Public Policy. Does Catholicism Make a Difference?” Paper presented at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (Uppsala:, SCASSS, Uppsala University, 1994), 23. 22. O. Petersson, A.Westholm, and G. Blomberg, Medborgarnas makt (Stockholm: Carlssons, 1988), 264. 23. For a critical discussion of this interpretation, see T. Pettersson, “Folkrörelsefolk och samhällsförändring,” in Mot denna framtid, eds., S. Axelson and T. Pettersson (Stockholm: Carlssons 1992).


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Contributors

F. S. Aijazuddin is a Pakistani journalist and author. Recent books include From a Head, Through a Head, to a Head: The Secret Channel between the U.S. and China Through Pakistan, and The White House & Pakistan: Secret Declassified Documents 1969–74. Maria Lucia Victor Barbosa is a sociologist, columnist, and author. Her Most recent books are O Voto da Pobreza e a Pobreza do Voto: A Éìica da Malandragem and América Latina em Busca de Paraíso Perdido. Miguel Basáñez is president of the Global Quality Research Corporation and was executive vice president of MORI International from 1993 to 2000. He is the coauthor most recently with Ronald Inglehart of Human Values and Beliefs, and he is the founding publisher of the Mexican monthly magazine Este País, specializing in public opinion polls. Chua Beng-Huat is Professor of Sociology and leads the Cultural Studies research group in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. His most recent book, as editor, is Communitarian Politics in Asia, and he is the founding coexecutive editor of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies of Singapore. Peter Berger (co-editor) is University Professor and Professor of Sociology and Theology at Boston University, where he also directs the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture and the Institute on Religion and World Affairs. He is the author most recently of The Capitalist Revolution and co-editor with Samuel Huntington of Many Globalizations. Ann Bernstein is founding executive director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise in Johannesburg, South Africa. CDE is an independent and influential think tank working on critical national challenges for a newly 499


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500

Contributors

democratic country. More detail on her and the CDE can be found at http:// www.cde.org.za. Dag Blanck is a university lecturer in history at the Center for Multiethnic Research at Uppsala University and Director of the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. His research interests are in international migration and transcultural processes, with a special focus on Sweden and the United States. Archie Brown is Professor of Politics at Oxford University and has been a Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, since 1971. His recent books include The Gorbachev Factor and, as editor, Contemporary Russian Politics. Irakli Chkonia was an advisor to the Speaker of the Georgian Parliament from 1995 to 2000. He is a graduate of the Fletcher School. Gurcharan Das is a columnist for the Times of India and former CEO of Proctor & Gamble, India. He is the author of India Unbound. Yilmaz Esmer is a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Bogazici University, Istanbul. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the World Values Survey Association and, since 1990, Principal Investigator for the Turkish Values Survey. Mariano Grondona is the host of the weekly public affairs television program Hora Clave in Argentina. He is Professor of Government at the National University of Buenos Aires and a columnist for the newspaper La Nación. A contributor to Culture Matters, his most recent book is The Cultural Conditions of Economic Development. Lawrence Harrison (co-editor) is a senior research fellow and adjunct lecturer at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He is the author of “Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind,” “Who Prospers?,” and “The PanAmerican Dream,” and is co-editor, with Samuel Huntington, of “Culture Matters.” Between 1965 and 1981, he directed five USAID missions in Latin America. Robert W. Hefner is Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University. He is currently directing a multicountry, collaborative project on Civil Democratic Islam and completing a book, Muslim Politics and the Quandary of Modernity. David E. Hojman grew up in Valparaiso and Santiago de Chile, and completed his education at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently Professor of Economics and International Business at the University of Liverpool Management School. He has done research and published in areas including political economy, public choice, labor markets, poverty and inequality, trade, international development, and international business.


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Contributors

501

Janos Matyas Kovacs is Professor of Economics and Permanent Fellow at the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences and member of the Institute of Economics, Budapest. His recent publications on cultural issues inclued “Rival Temptations—Passive Resistance: Cultural Globalization in Hungary” in Peter Berger adn Samuel Huntington (eds.) Many Globalizations; “Approching the EU and Reaching the US? Transforming Welfare Regimes in East–Central Europe”: Rival Narratives, West European Politics, April 2002. Yoshihara Kunio is Professor of Asian Economic Development at the Faculty of Environmental Engineering in the University of Kitakyushu, Japan, and Professor Emeritus of Kyoto University. He has specialized in the economies of Southeast Asia and the influence of culture on their performance. His most recent book is Asia Per Capita: Why National Incomes Differ in East Asia. Daniel Latouche is Research Professor of Political Science at the Urban and Culture Studies Center of the National Institute of Scientific Research, affiliated with the University of Québec. He taught at McGill University from 1970 to 1987. His interests include Québec, Canadian politics, urban issues, and economic development and governance in Africa. Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. is President Emeritus and Professor of Economics at Carleton College in Minnesota. He has worked as an economist/consultant in a number of countries in Asia and Africa since 1963 and has served as economic consultant to the Government of Botswana since 1975. Matteo B. Marini is Professor of Economic Development Theories at the University of Calabria, Cosenza, Italy. He is currently the principal investigator in a research project on cultures and economic growth in three Italian regions. He is the author of “Cultural Evolution and Economic Growth,” published by The Journal of Socio-Economics. John McWhorter is Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and was Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, Authentically Black, The Power of Babel, and Doing Our Own Thing; has written for various national publications; and appears regularly on National Public Radio. Carlos Alberto Montaner is the most widely read columnist in the Spanish language. A contributor to Culture Matters, he is the coauthor, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Álvaro Vargas Llosa of Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot. His most recent book is The Twisted Roots of Latin America. Adil Najam, a Pakistanii, is Associate Professor of International Negotiation and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts


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502

Contributors

University. His recent books include, Civic Entrepreneurship and Environment, Development, and Human Security: Perspectives from South Asia. Nicolai N. Petro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island. In 1989–90 he served as Special Assistant for Policy in the State Department’s Office of Soviet Affairs, also as Political Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He is the author of Rebirth of Russian Democracy —An Interpretation of Political Culture and Crafting Democracy: How Novgorod Has Coped with Rapid Social Change. Thorleif Pettersson is Professor of the Sociology of Religion at Uppsala University. Previously he has worked as a researcher at the Stockholm Institute for Future Studies, the Swedish Council for Research in Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Stockholm Institute for the Sociology of Religion. He has also been a research fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and has been involved in the World Values Survey for many years. Elisha P. Renne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on fertility and reproductive health; gender relations; the anthropology of development; and religion and social change, specifically in Nigeria. Her most recent book, Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town, was published in 2003. Dick Spring was a member of the Irish Parliament for 21 years and is a former leader of the Labour Party. He served as Deputy Prime Minister and as cabinet minister for 10 years. He is chairman and director of numerous companies and leads Realta, an Irish Global HIV/AIDS Foundation. Bassam Tibi is Professor of International Relations at the University of Göttingen, Germany. He is alos the A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. He has been Visiting Professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, the University of California (Berkeley), Harvard University, and the National University of Singapore. Among his recent publications are The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder and Islam between Culture and Politics, both recently republished in updated editions. Luis Ugalde, S. J., is rector of the Catholic University Andrés Bello of Caracas, Venezuela, and president of the Association of Jesuit Universities of Latin America. Tu Weiming is Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confucian Studies at Harvard, where he is also Director of the Yenching Institute. He is currently working on the modern transformation of the Confucian


11/16/2005 10:41:00 AM

Contributors

503

tradition. He is author of several books in English. A five-volume collection of his works was published in China in 2002. Robert P. Weller is Professor Anthropology and Research Associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University. He works on the relations among culture, society, and political change in China and Taiwan. His most recent book is Civil Life, Globalization, and Political Change in Asia: Organizing between Family and State (editor), and Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan.


11/16/2005 10:41:00 AM


11/16/2005 10:41:00 AM

Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures or tables.

Age, key values, 293–295, 294 Al-Azhar University, 165, 166, 167 Egypt, 173 social change, 176, 177–178 Al-Jihad, 170 Alternate modernities, xxiii Japan, xxiv non-Western societies, xxiv Western civilization, xxiv Anglo-American model, 466 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, 66 Argentina, 235–251 history, 239–242 intolerance, 235–237, 239–242 matutinal culture, 248–249 Pact of San Nicolás, 251 structural change, 298 tolerance, 235–237, 239–242 vespertine culture, 249–250 Asia, see also Specific country Confucian ethics, 72–74 Association of Southeast Asian Nations, 104 Autocracies, 242 Autonomy, democracy, 494

A Affirmative action, 417 African Americans before 1960, 413 African and Caribbean immigrants, 413 alienation, 410–411, 412 Black English, 410 Black nationalism, 411, 416 Black vigilance against victimization, 415 children born outside of wedlock, 413 countercultural revolution, 414 criminality, 412 cultural relativism, 414 enshrinement of contrarianism, 415–416 ghettoes, 413 identity, 411, 412 music, 410–411, 412 norms of yesteryear, 416–417 paradigm for effective public advocacy, 417–418 poverty, 416 racial inferiority complex, 411–412 racial preference policies, 417 racism, 411–413, 414 as emotional crutch, 411–412 reparations movement, 413, 418 self-imposed impediments to success, 411–412, 413, 414, 417–418 taboo against acting white, 414, 415 victimization, 411–412 welfare, 413–414, 417 African Initiated Churches, 31 African National Congress, 15 African Renaissance, 27–28 Afrocentric management theory, 25–26

B Baltic states, 338 Bangladesh British colonial period, 212–213 gender, 211 independence, 203 Mughals, 212–213 Pakistan parallels, 211

505


11/2/2005 10:08:02 AM

506 Bangladesh (continued) relationship, 211–212, 213–215 population dynamics, 214 society, 213–214 Basques, 472, 477 Chile, 279–281 Bechuanaland, 3 British classic indirect rule, 7 South Africa, 3–4 Black Americans, see African Americans Bolivia, structural change, 298 Botswana, 3–21 agricultural development, 5 British colonial authorities, 9–10 cattle ownership, 5 constitution, 12, 13, 14 corruption, 6 currency, 16 diamonds, 5 education, 6, 8 elections, 5–6 foreign aid, 17 Four National Principles, 15–16 gender issues, 6 growth of per capita income, 4–5 historical beginnings, 3–4, 7–16 HIV/AIDS, 6, 17–18, 19, 21 Joint Advisory Council, 10, 11 leadership, 12–13, 14, 15, 18–19 Legislative Council, 11–12 military traditions, 9 overall progress, 5–7 policy-making process, 16–17 racial discrimination, 11 reform of chieftainship, 14 religion, 8 role of chiefs, 7–8, 13–14, 19–21 role regionally, 6 South Africa, 15 traditional culture, 7–8, 13–14, 19–21 tradition of consultation, 14 values, 9 Botswana Democratic Party, 5–6, 10, 12–15, 20 leadership, 12–16 role, 12–16 Brazil, 235–265 Brazilian mentality, 257–258 Catholicism, 256–257 anti-capitalist mentality, 260 cultural characteristics, 257–258 evangelicals, 263–264


Index formation, 255–256 history, 253–257, 259–262 Liberation Theology, 261 modernity, 264 patron-client society, 235–257 Pentecostalism, 262–263 poverty, 264 Protestant churches, 262–264 revolutionary change, 264 slavery, 254–255 Bulgaria, 333, 337 Business alliances, 92–93 C Capitalism Catholicism, 260 Georgia, 359–360 India, 153–154 values, xviii Case studies, xiv Caste system, 151, 155 Catalonia, 477 Catholicism Brazil, 256–257 anti-capitalist mentality, 260 capitalism, 260 Chile, 268–269 cultural change, 473–475 Franco, Francisco, 474–475 Ireland, 419–420, 421, 423–424 Québec, Canada, 451–452 Spain, 473–475 Central Europe, 330, 332–336 European Union, 335–336 Change Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria, 44 key values, 292 stimulus, failure and, 388 Chiang Kai-shek, 119 Chile, 267–285 Basques, 279–281 Catholic Church, 268–269 Chilean exceptionalism, 279–281 concept of national culture, 268–271 conflict, 270–271 Corruption Perceptions Index, 281–282 developments since 1990, 275–278 economic growth, 283 gender issues, female literacy, 272–273 Lagos government, 284 Manuel de Salas, 271–272 national culture

11/2/2005 10:08:16 AM

Index characteristics, 269–271 evolution, 283 historical origins, 269–271 model of change, 273–275 repression, 270–271 Salvador Allende, 284 Spain, 269–270 structural change, 298 upper-class values in 1796, 271–272 verticalism of social relations, 270–271 China, 65–82 contemporary, 79–82 academic community professionalism,80 freedom to address any issue, 79–80 intellectuals, 79–80, 81 technocratic mentality, 80 Cultural Renaissance, 65–66, 71–82 Confucianism, 72–74 cultural competence, 71 Cultural Revolution, 71–72 history, 65–66 intellectuals, 75–76 liberalism, 72–74 market economy, 72 official ideology, 74 party ideologues, 74 radical approach to political reform, 75–76 students, 75–76 Tiananmen Square, 75–76 Cultural Revolution, 67–69 China after, 69–70 Deng Xiaoping, 70–71, 75 opening policy, 70–71 intellectuals, 65–66 value-orientation, 66 Mao, 67–69 market behavior, 121–129 corruption, 129 education, 126–127 entrepreneurs, 128–129 individualism, 122–125 networked capital, 128 reliance on interpersonal ties, 128–129 savings, 125–126 structure of state, 128 work discipline, 125–126 work ethic, 125–126 Olympics, 77 Pakistan, 208 personality cult, 69 pluralism, 77–78, 81–82


507

political behavior, 130–134 civility, 130–132 effects, 134–136 social capital, 132–134 trust, 132–134 Taiwan, 121–129, 130–134 civility, 130–132 corruption, 129 education, 126–127 effects, 134–136 entrepreneurs, 128–129 individualism, 122–125 networked capital, 128 reliance on interpersonal ties, 128–129 savings, 125–126 social capital, 132–134 structure of state, 128 trust, 132–134 work discipline, 125–126 work ethic, 125–126 Tiananmen Square effects, 76–79 World Trade Organization, 77 Chinese Communist Party, 66–70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77–79, 81 Chinese immigrants, Indonesia, 186–189 Christianity Georgia, 350–351 South Africa, 31–32 Civic activism Novgorod, Russia, 371–372 Pskov, Russia, 371–372 Civic culture, Italy, 435–436 Civility, 130–132 Civilizational distinction, Georgia, 352–353 Collectivism, Québec, Canada, 453–454 Colonialism India, 145–146, 148–149, 153 Indonesia, 186–189 Venezuela, 308–312 Common Agriculture Policy, Ireland, 421 Communism culture, 391–393 Czechoslovakia, 339–340 Eastern Europe, 341–346 economic culture, 344 Georgia, 357–358 surviving Bolshevik modernity, 360–362 institutions, 391–393 modernization, 344 political culture, 389–391 Russia, transition from, 387–401 Spain, 473, 476–477, 478

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508 Community values importance, 98–99 Japan formal institutions, 89–90 frugality, 94 growth, 89–93 management practices, 90–92 stagnation, 93–96 vs. individualism, 99 Confidence, Pakistani, 210 Conformism, Italy, 425–426 Confucianism, 72–74, 121 Confucian humanism revival, 72, 73, 74 East Asia, 102–103 economic growth, 109 ethics, 72–74 familial relations, 109 pragmatism, 108–109 Singapore, 102–103 Consumer culture, South Africa, 32–34 Core modernity, xxv Core values, Québec, Canada, instrumentalizing, 449–454 Corruption, 129 Botswana, 6 Chile, 281–282 Italy, 425, 435–436 Corruption Perceptions Index, 281–282, 425 Costa Rica, structural change, 298 Countercultural revolution, African Americans, 414 Criminality, African Americans, 412 Croatia, 338 Cuba, 467 Cultural accommodation Novgorod, Russia, 378–380 Pskov, Russia, 378–380 Québec, Canada, 459–463 Cultural affinity, Eastern Europe, 345–346 Cultural change, xii Catholic Church, 473–475 fostering, 49–53 income, 98 Italy need for, 439–440 resistance, 437–438 Spain, 473–475 Cultural determinants, 312–315 poverty, 312 Cultural globalization, xxv Cultural identity, Georgia, 359–360


Index Cultural innovations, Islam, 177–178 Culturally congruent development, Novgorod model, 380–383 Cultural relativism, African Americans, 414 Cultural Renaissance, China, 65–66, 71–82 Confucianism, 72–74 cultural competence, 71 Cultural Revolution, 71–72 history, 65–66 intellectuals, 75–76 liberalism, 72–74 market economy, 72 official ideology, 74 party ideologues, 74 radical approach to political reform, 75–76 students, 75–76 Tiananmen Square, 75–76 Cultural restriction, 246–248 economic development, 247–248 majority’s values, 246 social development, 247–248 two rationalities, 248 Cultural Revolution, China, 67–69 Cultural values development role, 295–300 human progress, relationship, xi Mexico, 296 typology, xiv Cultural warfare, Georgia, 354–355 Cultural zones key values, 293–295, 294 religion, 300, 301 Culture assumptions, xii communism, 391–393 concept, 331, 387–388 definitions, 267 economic development, causal relationship, 331–332 historical flotsam, 415 institutions, 391–393 Japan, implications, 96–99 Novgorod, Russia, 373–377 poverty, 305–312 Pskov, Russia, 373–377 Venezuela, 305–312 Culture Matters, xii Culture Matters Research Project, xii basic premise, 465 goal, xii guidelines, xiii

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Index Czechoslovakia, 339–340 communism, 339–340 living standards, 388–389 Czech Republic, 338–339 economic development, 338–340 D Dada, Chief Samuel Ayoola, 48–49 Deep culture, South Africa, 34–40 age, 37 culture of friends and strangers, 39 dead ancestors, 37 entrepreneurial attitudes, 35–37 gender issues, 37–38 generation, 37 race, 39 sex, 38–39 time perceptions, 39–40 work discipline, 39–40 Definition, questions of, xviii Democracy autonomy, 494 India, 149–151, 153–154 market economy necessary but not sufficient, xix republican spirit, 238–239 Russia, 391, 396–397 self-regulation, 494 Spain, 475–472 Sweden, 484–485 values, xviii Democratic values, xviii Deng Xiaoping, China, 70–71, 75 opening policy, 70–71 De Salas, Manuel, 271–272 Development, values, 302 by level, 293–295, 294 Dissent key values, 288–293 measuring, 289–293, 290, 292 Divine Order, Québec, Canada, nonsubmissive attitude, 450–452 Dutch East Indies, see Indonesia E East Asia, Confucianism, 102–103 East-Central Europe, 330, 332–336 boundary between subregions, 337–338 European Union, 335–336 Eastern Europe after 1989, 329–346 assumptions, 330–332


509

boundary between subregions, 337–338 communism, 341–346 cultural affinity, 345–346 dominant narrative, 337–340 European integration, 329–330 European Union, 335–336, 345–346 pitfalls of justification, 337–340 subregions, 330, 332–336 Economic competition, Japan, 95–96 Economic culture, xvii communism, 344 Economic development culture causal relationship, 331–332 elements conducive to, xx restriction, 247–248 Czech Republic, 338–340 Georgia, 356–358 societal behavior, 356–358 values, 356–358 Indonesia, 182–185 crisis and collapse, 182–185, 189 Ireland, 419–424 Novgorod, Russia, 370–372 Pskov, Russia, 370–372 Spain, 471–472 Taiwan, 119 vanguards, xxi Economic growth Chile, 283 Confucianism, 109 education, 88 familial relations, 109–110 India, 141–142 Sweden, 484 Education, see also Specific type Botswana, 6, 8 economic growth, 88 Ireland, 421, 422 Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria, 44, 45–46 Japan, 86–89 school mass-production methods, 87 meritocracy, 111–113 policies, xxvii Singapore, for upward mobility, 110–113 social capital, 45–46 Sweden, 490 Egypt 19th century Muslim reformers, 165 Al-Azhar University, 173 future direction, 176–178 history, 163–164, 166

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510 Egypt (continued) imams, 170 Islamic interpretative monopoly, 176 Islamic Revolution in Shi’i Iran, 171–174 Islamist parochial model of development, 168 jihadist Islamism, decline, 175 liberalism, 173 mobilizing Islam, 174–176 as model of development for Islam, 163–179 modernity, 163–166 Islamic responses, 163–166 modernization, 166–171, 172–173 monarchy, 169 mosque, 170 Muslim Brothers, 172, 173, 178 Napoleon, 164 Nasserist praetorianism, 166, 169, 173 political Islam, 168, 174 populist expansion of universities, 175 reaffirming centrality, 178–179 reform Islam, 173 religion used for political legitimation, 169–170 secular Islamic liberalism, 167 social change, 174–175 Cairo’s urban growth, 174–175 Sunni Muslims, 165, 173 clerical organization, 168 mosque, 168 Ekiti Yoruba, 43–61 innovation, 43 thought, 43–44 Elites Novgorod, Russia, 371–372 Pskov, Russia, 371–372 Entertainment, Pakistani, 210 Entrepreneurial culture, 35–37 Georgia, 357 Italy, 435–436 Entrepreneurs, 128–129 Environmental sustainability, Sweden, 484 European Common Market, Italy, 432–433 European Economic Community, Spain, 471–473 European integration, Eastern Europe, 329–330 European Union Central Europe, 335–336 East-Central Europe, 335–336 Eastern Europe, 335–336, 345–346


Index Ireland, 421 Sweden, 484 Evangelicals, Brazil, 263–264 F Familial relations Confucianism, 109 economic growth, 109–110 Singapore, 109–110 Fawcus, Peter, 10–11, 12 Fertility, Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria, rethinking, 47, 52–53 Folk society, 445 Foreign aid, Botswana, 17 Fostering cultural change, 49–53 Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria, 49–53 blood relation, 51–52 reasons for, 50–51 rethinking, 52–53 social capital, 45 Franco, Francisco, 467, 469–470, 471–472, 474–475 Catholic Church, 474–475 plans for authoritarian continuity, 471–473 Freedom, introduced from outside, 164 Frugality, Japan, 85–86 G Gamsakhuria, Zviad, 363–364 Gana, Alberto Blest, 272–273 Gender issues Bangladesh, 211 Botswana, 6 Chile, female literacy, 272–273 India, 211 Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria, 46–47 Mexico, equality, 296 Pakistan, 211 Québec, Canada, 462 South Africa, 37–38 Sweden, 484 Turkey, 224 Georgia annexation by Russian Empire, 351 capitalism, 359–360 as catacomb society, 355 chivalry to capitalism, 359–360 Christianity, 350–351 civilizational distinction, 352–353 communism, 357–358

11/2/2005 10:08:16 AM

Index surviving Bolshevik modernity, 360–362 cultural identity, 359–360 cultural warfare, 354–355 economic development, 356–358 societal behavior, 356–358 values, 356–358 entrepreneurial spirit, 357 Georgian culture in modern times, 365–366 hedonistic style, 357 history, 349–352, 365 identity vs. modernities, 359–365 independence, 351–352 languages, 349–350, 361 layers of cultural influences, 350 modernization, 351 origins, 349–350 Orthodox Christianity, 350–351, 353–354 reforms, 352 reinventing collective self for national liberation and independence, 363–364 revolution of November 2003, 363–365 survival under occupation, 351 work ethic, 357 Globalization, India, 154 Good common good, 245–246 distant good, 245–246 vs. right, 243–244 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 399–400 Government characterized, 244–246 defined, 244–246 Guatamala, structural change, 298 H Hard work key values, 288–293 measuring, 289–293, 290, 292 Mexico, 300 Headscarf (or turban) issue, Turkey, 228–229 Hedonistic ethic, xxii Georgia, 357 Hinduism, India, 155–156 HIV/AIDS, Botswana, 6, 17–18, 19, 21 Housing, Singapore, 113–115 Human progress, cultural values, relationship, xi Hungary, 340


511

I Identity African Americans, 411, 412 Pakistani, 210–211 Imam, Egypt, 170 Import licenses, Indonesia, 188 Import-substitution industries, Indonesia, 188 Income, cultural change, 98 India, xxiii, 141–157 100-year trend, 141 after reforms, 151–152 agricultural society, 147 British Raj and Indian poverty, 145–146, 148–149 capitalism, 153–154 colonialism, 145–146, 148–149, 153 cosmological beliefs, 156 democracy, 149–151, 153–154 economic growth, 141–142 economic history, 143–152 Fabian socialist economic path, 149 gender issues, 211 globalization, 154 Hinduism, 155–156 independence, 149–151 industrial revolution, lack of, 147–148 languages, 152 leadership, 149–151, 154 leading manufacturer in 1700s, 144–145 licensing system, 150 material beliefs, 156 modernization vs. Westernization, 157 Mughals, 143–144 national confidence, 143, 152, 153 neoclassical economic theory, 152–155 poverty, 153–154 redistribution, 153–154 reindustrialization, 146–147 socialism, 153 weakening of democratic institutions, 154 Individualism, 122–125 Québec, Canada, 453–454 Indonesia, 181–197 Chinese immigrants, 186–189 colonialism, 186–189 economic development, 182–185 crisis and collapse, 182–185, 189 economic liberalization, 192–193 history, 186–189 import licenses, 188 import-substitution industries, 188

11/2/2005 10:08:17 AM

512

Index

Indonesia (continued) Islamist violence, 181, 195 Muslim business community, 189–191 New Order, 189–193 Pertamina crisis, 191–192 pluralist segregation, 187 policy on state, 191–192 rival Islamic cultures, 193–195 Suharto regime, 194–195 Sukarno era, 187–189 Industrial Development Authority, Ireland, 420 Industrialization Italy, 432–434 Italy, lack of industrial revolution, 147–148 Singapore, 105–107 Innovation, Ekiti Yoruba, 43 Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, xviii, xxv Institutions characterized, 242–244 communism, 391–393 culture, 391–393 defined, 242–244 Québec, Canada, state system as central actor, 454–457 Intellectuals, China, 65–66 value-orientation, 66 Internal pluralism, xix Intolerance, Argentina, 235–237, 239–242 Iran Egypt, 171–174 modernization, 172–173 political Islam, 171–174 Ireland Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement, 420–421 attracting industries, 421–422 Catholic Church, 419–420, 421, 423–424 Common Agriculture Policy, 421 economic development, 419–424 education, 421, 422 European Union, 421 exports, 421 First Program for Economic Expansion, 420 foreign companies, 421–422 history, 419–420 Industrial Development Authority, 420 industrial harmony, 422–423 Islam Azharites, 177


bipolar divide between Sunnis and Shi’as, 205 cultural innovations, 177–178 Egypt as development model, 163–179 identification of liberalism with Westernism, 205–206 Islamic orthodoxy, 177 Islamist parochial model of development, 168 Muslim business community, Indonesia, 189–191 Pakistan, 204–205 printing press, 222 Turkish conversion to, 218 Islamic Revolution in Shi’i Iran Egypt, 171–174 Political Islam, 171–174 Islamic solution, 165 Italy civic culture, 435–436 conformism, 425–426 corruption, 435–436 Corruption Perceptions Index, 425 cultural change need for, 439–440 resistance, 437–438 cultural matrix of amoral particularism, 427–430 economic miracle, 432–434 entrepreneurial culture, 435–436 European Common Market, 432–433 evolution of cultural syndromes, 439– 440, 440 Fascist regime, 432 future direction, 434–435 history, 427–430 industrialization, 432–434 instability, 427 modernization, 425–440 late modernization driven by ideology, 430–432 north-south divide, 429–430 opportunism, 426 persistence of traditional practices, 429 protectionism, 432–433 rebellion, 426 Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria change, 44 connection between fertility and progress, 43–44 demographic characteristics, 46–47 development, 47–49

11/2/2005 10:08:17 AM

Index education, 44, 45–46 fertility, 47, 52–53 fostering, 49–53 blood relation, 51–52 reasons for, 50–51 gender issues, 46–47 interpretation of development, 43–44 leadership, 48–49 out-migration, 46 primary education cultural change, 53–57 government policies toward, 53–54 social capital, 56–57 rethinking population and development, 55–56 social capital, 56–57, 57–61 culture of development, 57–61 extracommunity linkages, 58–59 intracommunity ties, 58 state institutions’ capacity, 59–61 state-society relations, 59 social characteristics, 46–47 “wealth in people” system, 44 J Japan 1990s, 84, 93–96 alternate modernities, xxiv community values formal institutions, 89–90 frugality, 94 growth, 89–93 management practices, 90–92 stagnation, 93–96 culture, implications, 96–99 decline in working hours, 93–94 decline of asceticism, 94–95 economic competition, 95–96 education, 86–89 school mass-production methods, 87 frugality, 85–86 industrialization, xxii leadership, 95–96 patience, 85 postwar economic growth, 83–99 savings rate, 85–86 self-discipline, 84–89 as growth factor, 84–89 values business alliances, 92–93 Quality Control (QC) circle, 91 work ethic, 84–85


513

Jiang Zemin, 79, 80 Jihadist Islamism, 170–171 decline in Egypt, 175 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 200–201 John XXIII, Pope, 474 Juan Carlos, King of Spain, 472–473, 475, 479 K Key values age, 293–295, 294 change, 292 cultural zones, 293–295, 294 dissent, 288–293 hard work, 288–293 levels of development, 293–295, 294 religion, 288–289 social capital, 288–293 structural change, 293–295, 294 trust, 288–293 World Values Survey, 288–293 Knowledge-driven economy, xxiii Koran L Langauges, 415 Languages Black English, 410 Georgia, 349–350, 361 India, 152 Pakistan, 201–202 Québec, Canada, 447–448, 453–454 Singapore, 111 Latin America, see also Specific country Mexico, compared, 298, 299–300 Spanish transition to democracy and prosperity, 466–467 Latvia, 338 Leadership Botswana, 12–13, 14, 15, 18–19 Botswana Democratic Party, 12–16 China, 66–70 India, 149–151, 154 Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria, 48–49 Japan, 95–96 Russia, 394–399 Seretse Khama, 15 Spain, 466, 472–473 Liberalism, 72–74 Liberation Theology, Brazil, 261 Licensing system, India, 150 Lithuania, 338

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514 Living standards Czechoslovakia, 388–389 Russia, 388–389 Local development Novgorod, Russia, 378–380 Pskov, Russia, 378–380 Locus of control, 313 Venezuela, 315–319, 317 Lutheran Church, 489–490 M Machiavelli, Nicolò, 428–429 Madrasas, 205 Malaysia, 102 Mao Zedong China, 67–69 Cultural Revolution, 67–69 leadership, 66–70 Market behavior Chinese culture, 121–129 corruption, 129 education, 126–127 entrepreneurs, 128–129 individualism, 122–125 networked capital, 128 reliance on interpersonal ties, 128–129 savings, 125–126 structure of state, 128 work discipline, 125–126 work ethic, 125–126 Taiwan, 121–129 corruption, 129 education, 126–127 entrepreneurs, 128–129 individualism, 122–125 networked capital, 128 reliance on interpersonal ties, 128–129 savings, 125–126 structure of state, 128 work discipline, 125–126 work ethic, 125–126 Market economy, 72 Matutinal culture, Argentina, 248–249 Meritocracy, education, 111–113 Mexico, 287–302 in 1930s, 287–288 in 1950s, 388 cultural values, 296 gender equality, 296 hard work, 300 Latin America, compared, 298, 299–300 modernization, 296–300


Index obedience, 300 religious value system, 300–301 Spain, 388 compared, 297–299, 298 structural change, 298 Military traditions, Botswana, 9 Modernity Brazil, 264 Egypt, 163–166 Islamic responses, 163–166 Modernization communism, 344 Georgia, 351 Italy, 425–440 late modernization driven by ideology, 430–432 north-south divide, 429–430 Mexico, 296–300 modernization theory, xxv Turkey, 220 history, 220 Moncloa pacts of 1977, Spain, 250–251 Mosques, Egypt, 170 Mubarak, Hosni, 174–175, 176, 178 Mughals, India, 143–144 Muhammed Ali, 167 Musharraf, Pervez, 206–207, 209 Music, African Americans’ alienation, 410–411, 412 Muslim Brothers, 170–171 Egypt, 172, 173, 178 Muslims, see Islam N Napoleon, Egypt, 164 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 167, 169, 173, 175 Nationalism, Québec, Canada, 457–458, 463 National Independence Movement, 457 Neoclassical economic theory, India, 152–155 Neo-Weberian renascence, xvii New International Division of Labor, Singapore, 105–107 Nigeria, Itapa-Ekiti, see Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria Non-government organizations Novgorod, Russia, 371–372 Pskov, Russia, 371–372 Non-Western societies, alternate modernities, xxiv Novgorod, Russia civic activism, 371–372

11/2/2005 10:08:17 AM

Index cultural adjustment, 378–380 culture, 373–377 economic development, 370–372 elites, 371–372 local development, 378–380 models of symbolic development, 369–383 non-government organizations, 371–372 Pskov, Russia, contrasted, 370–372 regional myths, 374–375 regional self-images, 374–375 Western aid, 372–373 Western investment, 372–373 Novgorod model, culturally congruent development, 380–383 Novgorod Myth, 376–377 O Obedience, Mexico, 300 Oil exploitation, Venezuela, 310–312, 320–321 Olympics, China, 77 Opportunism, Italy, 426 Opus Dei, Spain, xxi, 471 Orthodox Christianity Georgia, 350–351, 353–354 Russia, 393 Ottoman Empire, 217–223, see also Turkey modernizing army, 221–222 printing press, 222 Proclamation of 1839, 223 Westernization, 221–223 World War I, 223 Out-migration, Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria, 46 P Pact of San Nicolás, Argentina, 251 Pakistan, 199–215 from 1947 until 1971, 199–203 after 1971, 203–207 Bangladesh parallels, 211 relationship, 211–212, 213–215 bipolar divide between Sunnis and Shi’as, 205 British colonial period, 212–213 China, 208 confidence, 210 creation, 199–203 development, 207–211 difference between two wings, 200–203 entertainment, 210


515

financial system, 209 gender issues, 211 geophysical and geopolitical location, 209 identification of liberalism with Westernism, 205–206 identity, 210–211 Islam, 204–205 languages, 201–202 monoreligious theocratic state, 204 Mughals, 212–213 national unity, 203 population dynamics, 214 role of religion, 204–206, 212, 214–215 society, 213–214 Pan-Africanist Congress, 15 Patience, Japan, 85 Paul VI, Pope, 474–475 Pentecostalism, Brazil, 262–263 People’s Action Party, Singapore, 101, 103– 105, 107, 111, 115, 116 pragmatism, 107–108 People’s Republic of China, see China Perón, Juan, 241–242, 246 Pluralism, China, 77–78, 81–82 Poland, 338, 340 Policies capacity to change culture, xxvi education, xxvii Political behavior Chinese culture, 130–134 civility, 130–132 effects, 134–136 social capital, 132–134 trust, 132–134 Taiwan, 130–134 civility, 130–132 effects, 134–136 social capital, 132–134 trust, 132–134 Political change, Taiwan, 119 Political culture communism, 389–391 concept, 389–391 defined, 389 Sweden, 492–496 comparative analyses, 494–496 high levels of participation, 494 Political Islam Egypt, 168, 174 historical background, 174 Islamic Revolution in Shi’i Iran, 171–174 return in Sunni Eqypt, 171–174

11/2/2005 10:08:17 AM

516 Politicized culture, South Africa, 24–28 African Renaissance, 27–28 afrocentric management theory, 25–26 politicized ubuntu, 24–25 Popular culture, South Africa, 28–32 rural, 29–30 supernatural, 30–32 urban, 28–29 Population dynamics Bangladesh, 214 Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria, 55–56 Pakistan, 214 Singapore, 107–108 Portugal, 253–255 Poverty African Americans, 416 Brazil, 264 cultural determinants, 312 culture, 305–312 India, 153–154 Venezuela, 305–312 Power, 242–244 Pragmatism Confucianism, 108–109 Singapore, 107–109 Primary education, Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria cultural change, 53–57 government policies toward, 53–54 social capital, 56–57 Printing press Islam, 222 Ottoman Empire, 222 Progress, defined, xviii Progressive values, defined, xviii Prosperity, drivers, 301 Protectionism, Italy, 432–433 Protestantism Chile, 279–281 ethic, xx, 259 Protestant churches in Brazil, 262–264 Pskov, Russia civic activism, 371–372 cultural adjustment, 378–380 culture, 373–377 economic development, 370–372 elites, 371–372 local development, 378–380 models of symbolic development, 369–383 non-government organizations, 371–372 Novgorod, Russia, contrasted, 370–372 regional myths, 374–375


Index regional self-images, 374–375 Western aid, 372–373 Western investment, 372–373 Putin, Vladimir, 394–397 Q Québec, Canada in 1950, 447 in 1970, 448 in 1995, 448 Catholic Church, 451–452 collectivism, 453–454 core values, instrumentalizing, 449–454 cultural accommodation, 459–463 culture of backwardness, 445–446 demographics, 445–449 Divine Order, nonsubmissive attitude, 450–452 gender issues, 462 health, 448 history, 450, 457–458 immigrants, 454 individualism, 453–454 institutions, state system as central actor, 454–457 languages, 447–448, 453–454 nationalism, 457–458, 463 National Independence Movement, 457 neocorporatist practices, 456 risk, 452–453 social democracy, 461–462 “socioeconomic summit” formula, 456–457 time-oriented societies, 449–450 uncertainty, 452–453 welfare state, 461–462 Quett Masire, 12, 13 R Racial discrimination African Americans, 411–413, 414 as emotional crutch, 411–412 Botswana, 11 South Africa, 39 Rebellion, Italy, 426 Redistribution, India, 153–154 Religion, see also Specific type Botswana, 8 cultural zones, 300, 301 key values, 288–289 Sweden, 489–490

11/2/2005 10:08:17 AM

Index Reparations movement, African Americans, 413, 418 Republican spirit democracy, 238–239 mother of democracy, 238–239 Republic of Ireland, see Ireland Reverse causation, xxvi Right, vs. good, 243–244 Risk, Québec, Canada, 452–453 Roman history, 427–429 Romania, 333, 337 Russia, 369–383, see also Novgorod, Russia; Pskov, Russia; Soviet Union communism, transition from, 387–401 compared with prerevolutionary Russia, 388–389 democracy, 396–397 leadership, 394–399 living standards, 388–389 Orthodox Christianity, 393 postcommunist political experience, 393–399 reaffirmation of central state power, 395 Russification, 361 S Saakashvili, Mikhail, 352, 364 Saving, 125–126 Japan, 85–86 Self-discipline, Japan, 84–89 Self-regulation, democracy, 494 Serbs, 333 Seretse Khama, 10, 12, 14 controversial marriage, 10 leadership, 15 Sex, South Africa, 38–39 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 352, 363–364 Singapore, 101–117 “Chinese values” explanation, 102 Confucianism, 102–103 domestic politics, 103–105 education, for upward mobility, 110–113 familial relations, 109–110 future directions, 115–117 historical context, 103–105 housing, 113–115 Housing and Development Board, 113–115 industrialization, 105–107 languages, 111 legitimacy of state and government, 104–105


517

New International Division of Labor, 105–107 People’s Action Party, 101, 103–105, 107, 111, 115, 116 pragmatism, 107–108 population dynamics, 107–108 pragmatism, 107–109 social security savings system, 113 Slavery Brazil, 254–255 underdevelopment, 254–255 Social capital, 132–134 education, 45–46 fostering, 45 Itapa-Ekiti, Nigeria, 56–57, 57–61 culture of development, 57–61 extracommunity linkages, 58–59 intracommunity ties, 58 state institutions’ capacity, 59–61 state-society relations, 59 key values, 288–293 measuring, 289–293, 290, 292 Social change Al-Azhar University, 176, 177–178 Egypt, 174–175 Cairo’s urban growth, 174–175 Social class, Venezuela, 309–312 Social democracy, Québec, Canada, 461– 462 Social development, cultural restriction, 247–248 Socialism, India, 153 Social security savings system, Singapore, 113 Social welfare, Sweden, 490–492 “The People’s Home,” 491–492 Sociocultural change, Venezuela, 319–321 action toward, 321–324 oil exploitation, 320–321 South Africa, 23–40 Bechuanaland, 3–4 Botswana, 15 Christianity, 31–32 consumer culture, 32–34 deep culture, 34–40 age, 37 culture of friends and strangers, 39 dead ancestors, 37 entrepreneurial attitudes, 35–37 gender issues, 37–38 generation, 37 race, 39

11/2/2005 10:08:17 AM

518 South Africa (continued) sex, 38–39 time perceptions, 39–40 work discipline, 39–40 gender issues, 37–38 politicized culture, 24–28 African Renaissance, 27–28 afrocentric management theory, 25–26 politicized ubuntu, 24–25 popular culture, 28–32 rural, 29–30 supernatural, 30–32 urban, 28–29 race, 39 sex, 38–39 South Korea, 102 Soviet Union, 387–401, see also Russia democratization, 391–393 Spain, 465–481 backwardness, 471 Catholic Church, 473–475 Chile, 269–270 communism, 473, 476–477, 478 coup attempt, 477 cultural change, 473–475 democracy, 475–472 economic development, 471–472 economic recession, 477 European Economic Community, 471–473 familial demons, 467, 469–470 decline, 470–471 history, 465, 467–470 leadership, 466, 472–473 Mexico, 388 monarchy, 472–473, 475, 479 Moncloa pacts of 1977, 250–251 new constitution, 476 Opus Dei, xxi, 471 political reform, 476 rapid transformation, 465–466 structural change, 298 transition, 475–480 Venezuela, 308–311 Standard of living, Sweden, 484 State characterized, 244–246 defined, 244–246 origins, 245 Structural change Argentina, 298 Bolivia, 298


Index Chile, 298 Costa Rica, 298 Guatamala, 298 key values, 293–295, 294 Mexico, 298 Spain, 298 United States, 298 Sunni Muslims, Egypt, 165, 173 clerical organization, 168 mosque, 168 Sweden, 483–495 1930s, 485 bruk, 486–487 democracy, 484–485 economic growth, 484 education, 490 environmental sustainability, 484 European Union, 484 gender issues, 484 history, 483–484, 485–488 political culture, 492–496 comparative analyses, 494–496 high levels of participation, 494 from poor country to rich welfare society, 483–485 religion, 489–490 role of state, 487–490 roots of reform movement, 486–487 social welfare, 490–492 “The People’s Home,” 491–492 sociopolitical culture, 485–490 standard of living, 484 strong peasantry, 487–490 welfare legislation, 485–486 T Taiwan Chinese culture, 121–129, 130–134 civility, 130–132 corruption, 129 education, 126–127 effects, 134–136 entrepreneurs, 128–129 individualism, 122–125 networked capital, 128 reliance on interpersonal ties, 128–129 savings, 125–126 social capital, 132–134 structure of state, 128 trust, 132–134 work discipline, 125–126 work ethic, 125–126

11/2/2005 10:08:18 AM

Index economic development, 119 end of state of emergency, 120 market behavior, 121–129 corruption, 129 education, 126–127 entrepreneurs, 128–129 individualism, 122–125 networked capital, 128 reliance on interpersonal ties, 128–129 savings, 125–126 structure of state, 128 work discipline, 125–126 work ethic, 125–126 political behavior, 130–134 civility, 130–132 effects, 134–136 social capital, 132–134 trust, 132–134 political change, 119 Tiananmen Square, 75–76 intellectual changes after, 76–79 Time-oriented societies, Québec, Canada, 449–450 Time perceptions, 39–40 Tolerance, 235–238 Argentina, 235–237, 239–242 concept, 235–237 history, 237–238 Traditional culture, Botswana, 13–14, 19–21 Treaty of Karlowitz, 221 Trust, 132–134, 314–315 key values, 288–293 measuring, 289–293, 290, 292 Venezuela, 315–319, 317 Tshekedi Khama, 9, 10 Turkey, 217–230 1999 election, 227 electoral trajectory of Islamist parties, 226–228 ethnic rebellion, 225 example for other Islamic societies, 229–230 gender issues, 224 headscarf (or turban) issue, 228–229 history, 218 Islamic conversion, 218 Islamism, 225 modernization, 220 history, 220 modernizing army, 221–222 multiparty system, 226


519 reforms, 223–225, 224 secularism, 224–225 Turkish army, 221–222, 230 Western vs. Islamic values, 217–218

U Uncertainty, Québec, Canada, 452–453 Underdevelopment, slavery, 254–255 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, xii United States, structural change, 298 V Values, see also Key values Botswana, 9 capitalism, xviii definitions, 267 democracy, xviii development, 302 expiration date, xxii Japan business alliances, 92–93 Quality Control (QC) circle, 91 measuring, 289–293, 290, 292 obsolescence, xxii preferences, 314 Venezuela, 315–319, 317 Venezuela colonialism, 308–312 cultural types, 315–319, 317 culture, 305–312 independence wars, 311 locus of control, 315–319, 317 oil exploitation, 310–312, 320–321 poverty, 305–312 social class, 309–312 sociocultural change, 319–321 action toward, 321–324 oil exploitation, 320–321 Spain, 308–311 trust, 315–319, 317 value preferences, 315–319, 317 Vespertine culture, Argentina, 249–250 Victimization, African Americans, 411–412 W Weber, Max, xvii, xx, 121, 122, 258–259 Welfare, African Americans, 413–414, 417 Welfare state, Québec, Canada, 461–462 Western aid Novgorod, Russia, 372–373 Pskov, Russia, 372–373

11/2/2005 10:08:18 AM

520 Western civilization, alternate modernities, xxiv Western investment Novgorod, Russia, 372–373 Pskov, Russia, 372–373 Wildavsky, Aaron, 378–380 Work discipline, 39–40, 125–126 Work ethic, 125–126 Georgia, 357 Japan, 84–85


Index World Trade Organization, China, 77 World Values Survey, key values, 288–293 World War I, Ottoman Empire, 223 Y Yeltsin, Boris, 394, 400–401 Yugoslavia, 343 Z Zion Christian Church, 32

11/2/2005 10:08:18 AM

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