Extracts - are active citizens and effective states compatible?

The rise of strong states over the past two centuries is littered with famous names such as Napoleon (France), Cavour (Italy), Bismarck (Germany), Atatürk (Turkey), Mao Tse Tung (China), Stalin (USSR), Chiang Kai-shek (Taiwan), Jawarhalal Nehru (India), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), and Sukarno (Indonesia), as well as some not so famous ones like Seretse Khama of Botswana and Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico.

These leaders inspired a sense of national pride and identity, but their fame seldom stemmed from their commitment to democracy. The most notorious among them sought to establish total state control by crushing any independent action by citizens. Effective states in East Asia and elsewhere have typically taken off with little initial recognition of human rights or democracy, although this has often improved later on; in Latin America, active social movements and political organisations have rarely been accompanied by effective states. Are the two mutually exclusive? Or is this a case of ‘selection bias’ – those countries that have had both have already ceased to be poor, and so disappear from the development radar? Many of the most successful transformations in the past century, such as those of Sweden and Finland, have been triggered by social pacts within a democracy, showing what the elusive combination of active citizens and effective states can achieve. Data are limited and beset with measurement problems, but seem to suggest a positive correlation between active citizenship and effective states. Although this does not prove which came first, it at least suggests that they are not mutually incompatible.

In any case, backing authoritarianism in the hope that it could deliver economic growth was never a safe bet. For every Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore or Chinese Communist Party, there have been dozens of autocrats who ignored both citizens and business leaders and drove their economies into the ground. Moreover, the authoritarian road to development is getting harder. The spread of democracy makes it much harder for today’s autocrats to achieve legitimacy, either at home or in the eyes of the international community. Widespread awareness of rights means that economic growth alone, while necessary, will not guarantee legitimacy, much less bring about the deep transformations that constitute real development.