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Chapter 1: From "straight power concepts" to
"persuasion" in US foreign policy
In all societies ... two classes of people appear - a class that rules
and
a class that is ruled ... The first class, always the less numerous,
performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the
advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous
class, is directed and controlled by the first, in a manner that
is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent.
--
Gaetano Mosca [1]
There has been an explosion of human interaction and correlatively a
tremendous increase of social pressure. The social texture of human
life has become more complex and its management more difficult.
Dispersion, fragmentation, and simple ranking have been replaced by
concentration, interdependence, and a complex texture ... Because of
the basic importance of the contemporary complex social texture, its
management has a crucial importance, which raises the problem of
social control over the individuaL .. Because they (citizens) press for
more action to meet the problems they have to face, they require more
social control. At the same time they resist any kind of social control
that is associated with the hierarchical values they have learned to
discard and reject. The problem may be worldwide.
-- The Crisis o/Democracy (1975 Trilateral Commission Report)
[2]
How are we to understand our world? Our everyday experiences are
played out in milieus. These milieus are linked to institutions that
organize our lives and bind us to a great many people. Varied and
encompassing combinations of institutions and their interrelations
form social structures. History, or how social structures have changed
over time, tells us where we came from, how we have arrived at the
present, and where we are headed. To see our own personal existence
as bound up with history and social structure is to acquire what the
great modem sociologist C. Wright Mills called the sociological
imagination/
"the most fruitful form of self consciousness." Democracy, or
the ability to exercise a measure of control over the vital affairs of
our
lives as they are played out in personal milieus connected to historical
processes and social structures, is, I believe, the great problem of our
age. Humanity/s fate is now so collectively linked that the most
intimate personal milieu and the broadest global social structure are
one. In this chapter, we begin the inquiry into democracy with the
historic juncture that opened up after World War II and concluded at
the dawn of the current age of globalization, and which saw the United
States as the dominant world power. We will end the inquiry by
returning, in the final chapter, to democracy as the most pressing
problem of the human condition and the key to our collective survival.
The Cold War and US interventionism
The United States emerged from the ashes of World War II as the
dominant world power. The postwar global order was designed by top
US policymakers during a six-year period, 1939-1945, and then
implemented
in the immediate postwar years. The plan called for the
establishment of a "Grand Area" of US influence in Latin America,
Asia, and Africa, the reconstruction and integration of Europe and
Japan into a new world order under US domination, and the creation
of international institutions to stabilize this new order. Creating Pax
Americana involved filling the vacuum left by the collapse of the old
colonial empires by deploying its military forces and political agents
worldwide. From World War II to the end of the Cold War, the United
States employed military force across its borders more than 200 times,
became embroiled in large-scale wars in Korea and Indochina, and in
"small wars/" counterinsurgency campaigns, and covert operations
throughout Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.
Military and economic programs were developed to consolidate the
emergent order, and billions of dollars in investment and finance
capital flowed where US intervention assured a stable environment.
Global interventionism became a structural feature of the post-World
War II US empire.3
Much postwar literature on US foreign policy has erroneously
interpreted this interventionism as having been driven by Cold War
considerations. Perceived competition from the former Soviet Union
was an important factor, but it was not the driving force behind foreign
policy. The driving force was defense of a budding post-eolonial
international capitalism under US domination. Behind the "communist
threat" there has always been another, more fundamental threat: any
challenge to "patterns of relationships" which underpinned US domination
and prerogative derived from its privileged position in an
asymmetric international order. National Security Council (NSC)
Memorandum NSC-68, one of the key foreign policy documents of the
post-World War II era, stated, for instance, that postwar policy
embraced "two subsidiary policies." One was to foster "a world
environment in which the American system can survive and flourish";
the other was "containment of the Soviet Union," which "seeks to
foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system." The
Memorandum
went on: "Even if there was no Soviet Union we would face the
great problem" of achieving "order and security" for US global
interests. It concluded by calling for "a rapid buildup of [US]
political,
economic, and military strength" around the world.4 And the whole
focus of President Roosevelt's Advisory Committee on Postwar
Foreign Policy was not a "communist threat" but control over the
world's resources, and in particular, securing US access to the raw
materials, markets, and labor power of the Third World. Behind East-
West relations, therefore, North-South relations were always intrinsic
and
central to the whole Cold War era.
Although democracy often entered the foreign policymaking vocabulary,
it was not the dominant form in which the United States
exercised its domination, especially in the post-World War II years.
As the historical record shows, the principal form was the development
of strategic alliances with authoritarian and dictatorial regimes.
The outcome of intervention, whether intentional or as a by-product,
was the establishment and defense of authoritarian political and
social arrangements in the Third World as a support for the
maintenance of international order and stability. The United States
promoted and supported a global political network of civilianmilitary
regimes and outright dictatorships in Latin America, white
minority and one-party dictatorships in Africa, and repressive states
in Asia. Authoritarian arrangements were judged to be the most
expedient means of assuring stability and social control in the Third
World.
But by the 1970s, mass popular movements were spreading against
repressive political systems and exploitative socioeconomic orders
established during the years of the Cold War. The structures of
authoritarianism and dictatorship began to crumble, above all, in US
client regimes, and a general crisis of elite rule began to develop in
the
South.s As the "elective affinity" between authoritarianism and US
domination unravelled, "democracy promotion" substituted "national
security" in the US vernacular. A "democracy promotion" apparatus
was created in the policymaking establishment, including new
governmental
and quasi-governmental agencies and bureaus, studies and
conferences by policy-planning institutes, and government agencies to
draft and implement "democracy promotion" programs. Where it had
earlier supported dictatorship, such as in Chile, Nicaragua, Haiti, the
Philippines, Panama, Southern Africa, and elsewhere, the United States
now began to "promote democracy." By the mid-1980s, the intellectual
community had joined the fray. University presses churned out a
whole new class of "democratization" literature and democratization
courses sprang up on campuses.
"Democracy promotion" has a crucial ideological dimension, given
that democracy is a universal aspiration and the claim to promote it
has mass appeal. Under the rubric of "democracy," new policies set
out not to promote, but to curtail, democratization. Democratization
struggles around the world are profound threats to US privilege and to
the dominance of core regions in the world system under overall US
leadership. If the objective of US interventionism in the post-World
War II years was control of the world's resources, labor, and surpluses,
then logically the end of the Cold War should not eliminate
interventionism.
But the policies pursued during the Cold War years to
confront challenges to domination have proved increasingly ineffective.
This has led policymakers to a shift in the dominant form through
which the United States seeks to assure stability under the hegemony
of an emergent transnational elite, from promoting authoritarian to
promoting "democratic" political and social arrangements in Third
World countries. Behind this shift in favor of ostensibly democratic
arrangements is the replacement of coercive means of social control
with consensual ones.
This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first, I combine world
system theory and a Gramscian model in international relations into a
framework for understanding the new political intervention. In the
second, I explore the relation between intellectual production and US
foreign policy, discuss democracy as an essentially contested concept,
and provide a theoretical explanation for the shift to promoting
polyarchy.
The world system and a Gramscian model of
international relations
The foreign policy of nations and the world
system.
Much foreign-policy literature is based on the realist axiom that the
foreign policy of nations is designed to secure the perceived interests
of
the states from which that policy emanates. But the axiom raises a host
of questions: What are US interests, and how (and by whom) are they
defined? What is the relation between interests and policies? Is there
(or under what conditions does there exist) a convergence, or a clash,
of interests between the United States and nations which become the
target of US foreign-policy operations? Are nations, in fact, the
appropriate
units of analysis in looking for convergence and clashes of
interests? Or are social groups and classes across national boundaries
the more appropriate focus?
Much of the contemporary literature affirms that the search for
stability drives US policy.6 This emphasis on stability fails to raise a
question crucial to understanding policy: the stability of what? US
foreign policy is aimed at assuring the stability of a given set of
economic, social and political arrangements within each country in
which the US intervenes, and in the international system as a whole.
The stability of arrangements and relations which girder an
international
system in which the United States has enjoyed a dominant
position is seen as essential to US interests, or "national security."
When these arrangements are threatened US policy attempts to
undercut the threat. And when these arrangements are altered in ways
that are perceived as detrimental, the United States attempts not to
pursue stability, but to destabilize. In the Western Hemisphere alone
the
United States pursued destabilization rather than stability in Guatemala
(1954), Chile (1970-1973), Grenada (1979-1983), Jamaica (1977-
1980), Cuba (1959-present), Panama (1988-1989), and Nicaragua
(1979-1990), among others? In identifying US interests abroad, analysts
often focus on a linear relation between specific interests (an
economic investment in one country, a fear of "communism" in
another, an anti-drug campaign in a third, geo-strategic considerations
in a fourth, and so on) and resulting policies. This disaggregation of
interests and consequent policies conceals the greater sum in an
analysis of its component parts. Historian Lloyd C. Gardner identifies
an interventionist impulse as a constant in US policy abroad.s The term
"interventionist" refers to involvement abroad - military, economic,
political, or otherwise - pursuant of interests, and "impulse" connotes
precisely that enmeshing of economic, political and strategic factors
that drives foreign policy. This aggregation of distinct policy
considerations
into a policy impulse that drives US policy is important but not in
itself enough to explain policy.
There is both a foreground and a background to policy. The foreground
is the aggregate of considerations weighed by a policymaking community.
Many foreign-policy analysts, particularly those from pluralist
and realist paradigms, limit their work to an exploration of this
territory, thus conflating human perceptions and public discourse,
which are not causal explanations of policy but structurally contingent
variables. The background is an international political economy and a
world system in which nations and social groups interact, and which
constitutes the structural underpinning of policymakers' perceptions
and policies, and their evolution. The critical linkage between the
background and the foreground are asymmetries and inequalities in the
international political economy and cross-national relations of power
and
domination. Both realists and Marxists identify an organic and symbiotic
relation between the wealth of nations and the power of nations, and
great
disparities in power and wealth among nations. This asymmetry is the
bedrock upon which international relations unfold. For Marxists (in
distinction to realists), asymmetric relationships are both between
nations
and between social classes and groups within nations and across national
boundaries, although it is more accurate to speak of relations of
asymmetric interdependence than of dependency. More insightful studies
on international political economy focus neither on the internal nor on
the external dimensions, but on the interaction between internal and
external, between social groups within and among nations.
A thorough discussion on international political economy, world
system and related theories is beyond the scope of this study.9 In sum,
a world system came into being in the past 500 years as a consequence
of the genesis and expansion of the capitalist mode of production,
which gradually linked the whole world into a single system. The
linkage of social formations on a global scale brought with it an
international division of labor. The central dynamic of the "modern
world system" is a process of global capital accumulation, the benefits
of which accrue unequally among nations and among social groups
within and between nations. The formation of a world system has
brought about a division of the world into "center" (or "core") and
"periphery," (or satellite and metropolis, or developed and
underdeveloped),
despite considerable diversity and a process of uneven
development. The production, circulation and appropriation of surplus
on a global scale are central to understanding world-historic dynamics.
Superimposed upon the process of surplus extraction (the appropriation
of wealth) from certain social groups or classes to others is a
process of surplus extraction from one nation or region to another, or
from peripheral to core regions within a single world economy. Social
struggles over the control of wealth, therefore, take place within
nations and across national boundaries, and national struggles over the
circulation and appropriation of surpluses take place in the context of
a
transnational environment and the dynamic of international relations.
World system theory, in particular its theoretical proposition that the
development of international society is constituted by the spread of a
social system at the international level, forms a powerful
macrostructural
framework for analyzing world events, including US foreign
policy and "democracy promotion." There are three general assumptions
which I posit on the basis of world system theory and which are
later woven into the analysis. First, political systems in the periphery
have, seen through the long-historic lens of the modem era, been
penetrated and influenced, if not entirely imposed, by the core.
Changes in general core-periphery relations have consequences for
peripheral political systems. Modem colonialism created political
systems outright or transformed existing ones, which then gained
newfound
autonomy following decolonization. The relationship between
changes in general core-periphery relations and changes in peripheral
political systems should be viewed as a legitimate unit of social
scientific inquiry. The global economy is fundamentally redefining
North-South general relations, economic as well as political. Second,
globalization is a new phase of capitalism which involves a transition
to a qualitatively new stage in the world system. My application of the
world system framework differs from the more orthodox approach
advanced by sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein in historical periodization,
in the Weberian definition of capitalism as a market rather
than a production relation, and in the view of the state and its
relation
to nations and social groups. The assumption here, regarding
periodization
and production relations, is that the modem world system was
characterized in an earlier period by a dominant capitalist mode,
headquartered in the core, which articulated itself with distinct semior
pre-capitalist modes in peripheral regions. Under globalization,
capitalist production relations are displacing, rather than merely
becoming articulated with, all residual pre-capitalist relations.
Regarding
the state, the assumption is that globalization is separating the
state, conceived as a theoretical abstraction, from the nation-state as
a
concrete sovereign territorial unit. Third, a key disjuncture in the
globalization process is the internationalization of productive forces
within an institutional system still centered around the nation-state.
This contradiction helps explain why outdated nation-state-centered
approaches persist among scholars whose objects of inquiry are
transnational phenomena. The increasing separation of classes from
territoriality and class power from state power involves a dispersal of
global decision-making away from specific core states, even though
transnational groups continue to filter policies through existing state
apparatuses. In elaborating a policy of "democracy promotion," the
United States is not acting on behalf of a "US" elite, but playing a
leadership role on behalf of an emergent transnational elite.
Asymmetry in international relations and
hegemony
There are three dimensions, or levels, in analyzing policy development.
One is intentional human agency, intersubjectivities clustered in a
polity - a community which makes foreign policy. Social scientific
analysis which operates at this level is practical-conjunctural, or
alternatively,
behavioral. At this level, it is important to draw the distinction
in policy between means (which are policies) and ends (which are
interests), and to recognize the tactical nature of many disputes within
policymaking communities and view them as debates over the most
effective means of achieving ends. The second level is the underlying
global structure in which states and groups engage with the broader
world system. Analysis at this level is structural analysis. Structure
frames and conditions events and activities in the behavioral realm,
often independently of intentionality. Intersubjective perceptions are
structurally contingent and the two levels cannot be homogenized.
Rather, we need to develop conceptual methodologies which problematize
boundaries. Identifying a third mediating level of analysis
contributes to methodological clarity and cognition of the phenomena
under o~servation. This is the structural-conjunct ural. It refers to
processes in the social universe which do not lend themselves to easy
cognition either at the structural or at the practical-conjunctural
levels,
but straddle the two and involve a mix of agency and structure.
Structural analysis frames practical-conjunctural analysis, while
structural-
conjunctural analysis interfaces "backwards" and "forwards"
with both and allows us to identify "feedback mechanisms" that keep
in check functionalist teleology. Much literature on policy,
international
relations and world events tends to operate at either the
structural or the behavioral level. A more useful approach, and one
which I believe essential to properly understand the subject of this
book, is a combination of both with the third, mediating level.
If world system theory provides a framework for a structural
analysis of the background to US foreign policy, and aggregates of
policymakers' considerations, for a behavioral analysis of the
foreground,
a Gramscian model of international relations provides a
theoretical nexus between the background and the foreground. Gramscian
concepts, particularly of hegemony and the extended state, help link
propositions drawn from structural and behavioral levels of analysis.
The concept of hegemony is not generally used in the social sciences,
including in most world system and Marxist models, in the Gramscian
sense. The commonplace usage refers broadly to domination, rooted in
the original Greek meaning of hegemony as predominance of one
nation over another. The United States exercised global "hegemony" in
the post-World War II era, or Great Britain was the "hegemonic"
world power in the nineteenth century. Gramsci's notion of hegemony
is more circumscribed, positing distinct forms, or relations, of
domination,
in brief: coercive domination and consensual domination. Hegemony
in the Gramscian sense may be defined roughly as a relation between
classes in which one class or fraction of a class exercises leadership
over other classes and strata by gaining their active consent.lO A
Gramscian hegemony involves the internalization on the part of
subordinate classes of the moral and cultural values, the codes of
practical conduct, and the worldview of the dominant classes or
groups - in sum, the internalization of the social logic of the system
of
domination itself. This logic is imbedded in ideology, which acts as a
cohesive force in social unification (in Gramsci's phrase, "cement").
But hegemony is more than ideology, and is not reducible to Marx's
"false consciousness." Hegemony is a social relation which binds
together a "bloc" of diverse classes and groups under circumstances of
consensual domination, such that subordinate groups give their
"spontaneous
consent" to "the direction imposed on social life" by the
dominant groups.
A social order in which hegemony has been achieved is one which
takes the form of consensual ("democratic") arrangements in the
political system and in society. These arrangements are characterized
by a given set of juridical relations as the arbiter of social relations
and
procedural mechanisms for the resolution of group and class conflict.
Hegemony mediates relations between dominant and subordinate
groups, and also relations among dominant groups. The same consensual
processes for the reproduction of a given constellation of dominant
social forces also involve mechanisms for consensus among
dominant groups themselves through consensus-creating processes.
Stated in admittedly simplified terms, dictatorship or authoritarianism
may be conceived as the exercise of coercive domination and hegemony
refers to consensual domination. However, it should be stressed
that hegemonic (consensual) domination does not mean the absence of
coercion, much less the absence of conflict in a social formation,
whether conceived as national or transnational. It is better conceived
as
the reproduction of social order through the salience of consensual
means of social control. As Gramsci put it, hegemony is consensus
protected by the "armor of coercion," and the political superstructures
of a coherent social order (whether authoritarian or "democratic")
always combine both coercive-based and consensual-based elements.
These two forms are (in Gramsci's Hegelian language) distinct
"moments" in the social relations of domination, separable only in
theoretical abstraction for methodological purposes.
A critical element in the Gramscian construct is the distinction and
unity of political and civil society. Social control takes place on two
levels: in civil society and through the state (political society),
which
are fused in Gramsci's extended state. "These two levels correspond on
the one hand to the function of hegemony which the dominant group
exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of 'direct
domination' or command exercised through the State and 'juridical'
govemment."l1 The hegemony of a ruling class or fraction is exercised
in civil society, as distinct from its coercive power exercised through
the state. Civil society is the arena of those social relationships
which
are based on consent - political parties, trade unions, civic
(voluntary)
associations, the family, and so forth.
Gramsci originally developed the concept of hegemony in its application
to relations among classes and social groups within a nation.
But the premise can be applied to international relations, as has been
advanced elsewhere in recent international relations and development
literature, and an "Italian school" has begun to emerge. However, a
Gramscian theory of international relations remains sparsely developed,
and most work has emphasized intra-elite relations over those
between elites and subordinate classes, and has focused on intra-core
and not on core-periphery relations.12 In contrast, I wish to highlight
hegemonic relations between dominant and subordinate classes in the
core-periphery context. This emergent "Italian school" is heterogeneous
in interpretations of Gramsci and in application of his concepts
to international phenomena, but here is not the place to take up
debates on Gramsci.
My application is as follows. Hegemony is exercised in relations
among nations and among classes or groups in a transnational setting.
The structures of asymmetry in the international political economy are
sustained and international relations of power and domination exercised
through variants of coercive or consensual mechanisms of
transnational social control. Hegemony applied to international
relations
is not synonymous with the application of power by one nation
over others; this is domination, or, as specifically concerns
coreperiphery
relations, imperialism, understood as the transfer of surpluses
from one country or region to another and the military, political, and
ideological mechanisms which facilitate such transfer. Such power may
be gauged as the relative ability to influence events and their outcomes
in a transnational arena. Cross-national relations of domination
express given correlations of international force. A critical mass of
asymmetrical power in international relations may be applied in a
myriad of ways that create or sustain asymmetries, such as colonial
conquest and direct military intervention. During its "American
century," the United States applied such a critical mass of power, both
direct (political-military) and indirect (economic), flowing from its
location in the world system, to construct global empire and to exercise
worldwide domination, just as Great Britain did in the nineteenth
century. Relative power may be exercised in numerous ways, and the
means with which it is applied can become as important as the degree
of such power. A more effective means may require less application of
power, or offset an absolute or relative decline. More importantly,
changes in the nature of power itself may necessitate changes in the
form in which it is exercised.
Hegemony is one form in which nations or groups in a transnational
setting may exercise their domination in the international arena. The
foreign policy of core states may be conceived, in the broadest sense,
as
international engagement by groups operating through states to maintain
or extend the advantages accrued from a dominant location in an
asymmetrical international order, including the supression of groups
that challenge those advantages. Mass movements for the democratization
of social life are threats to dominant groups in a transnational
setting. Yet the earlier authoritarian arrangements are increasingly
unable to manage such threats. New modalities of intervention have
emerged to face more complex threats. Transnational dominant classes
and groups and the state apparatuses which they manage may sustain
core-periphery relations of domination through coercion ("straight
power concepts"), such as direct colonial control, an invasion, or a
CIA-orchestrated coup d'etat, and more characteristically, through the
promotion of dictatorial or authoritarian social arrangements. Or,
transnational social control may be achieved through foreign-policy
undertakings intended to bring about spontaneous consent through
the political and ideological incorporation of subordinate groups.
A Gramscian construct allows us to synthesize the structural and the
behavioral levels of analysis. Hegemony is not simply something
which happens, a mere superstructural derivative of economic structures.
It is, in large part, the result of a permanent and persuasive
effort, conducted through a multiplicity of "superstructural" agencies
and instances. However, the possibility of hegemonic order is
conditioned
by the structure of production and social relations that flow
from political economy. Therefore, policy ultimately flows from the
dialectic of agency and structure, but analysis requires a
methodological
distinction.
Regarding first the behavioral level of analysis, the US policymaking
community has analyzed the dramatic changes in the international
correlation of forces between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, and
in the domestic political landscape in which foreign policy is
constructed,
which provided the basis for a reformulation of US policies
and helped to consolidate the shift towards "democracy promotion."
State managers have perceived that absolute power has declined, and
have sought to adjust policies, even if they are not cognizant of the
underlying structural and historical processes at work which account
for this decline. Greater cognizance on the part of policymakers of the
need to develop policies calibrated to actual power and potential, as
well as the perception of decline in absolute US power, conceived in
nation-state terms, has been an important part of the thinking among
those who have developed "democracy promotion." However, international
asymmetries no longer correlate to nation-states and their
relative power, although the disjuncture between transnationalization
and an institutional system still centered around the nation-state can
produce seemingly contradictory phenomena, and even illusions
among state managers, most of whom do not theorize on Gramscian
concepts.
Regarding now the structural level of analysis, the decline in the
relative power of the US nation-state and other core states in recent
decades, the gradual separation of class power and state power (or the
structural power of capital and the direct power of states), the
disbursal
of global power to geographically diffuse classes and groups operating
in a transnational environment, and the requirement of democratic
legitimation are all factors accounting for the decreased effectiveness
of
traditional military power and the absolute coercive capacity of the
core in the world system. Debate over whether the United States is
losing or merely reconfiguring its position as the dominant world
power reflects an outdated state-centered approach which fails to
appreciate changes in the nature of power under globalization, and
which therefore obscures our understanding of the relation between
economic and political change in global society.
How is US foreign policy made? The state, civil
society and power
Great power in America is concentrated in a tiny handful of people. A
few thousand individuals out of 238 million Americans decide about
war and peace, wages and prices, consumption and investment,
employment and production, law and justice, taxes and benefits,
education and learning, health and welfare, advertising and
communication,
life and leisure.
--
Thomas R. Dye, Who's Running America? [13]
To understand US foreign policy we must analyze the nature of foreign
policymaking and draw out the linkage between politics and power
and between state and society as central concerns of political
sociology.
14 Pluralist (liberal) interpretations, rooted theoretically in
Durkheimian-Parsonian structural-functionalism, maintain that power
is diffused throughout society and the state is a neutral arena or
arbiter
whose policies are determined by competition among multiple "interest
groups," or ToqueviIIian "voluntary associations." Accordingly,
foreign policy reflects the interests of pluralist majorities. Most
realists
share with pluralists the dichotomy between state and society. But the
state is less an institution instrumentalized by pluralist majorities
than
a corporate entity independent of society - a "state-in-itself" or a
"state-for-itself" - a view drawn from Weberian and managerial
models of political sociology.15 Foreign policy is managed by state
actors who, operating independently of backward linkage to society,
face a competitive state system in an anarchic world.
However, the empirical evidence weighs heavily in favor of elitist
and class models of political power. These models, whether they lean
towards the "instrumentalist" or the "structuralist" side in theoretical
conceptualization of how the state performs the functions that it does,
or whether power rests in control over institutions or over the means
of production, share the view that the state serves the interests of
those
groups and classes which are dominant in society.16 The state is
conceived as institutionalized social relations, not as an independent
unit linked externally to society through its functions but as an
organic
expression of the social structure itself. Many well-documented
studies, among them C. Wright Mills's classic The Power Elite, Ralph
Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society, and more recent works by
sociologist G. William Domhoff and political scientist Thomas R. Dye,
have shown that the foreign policymaking process is tightly controlled
by an inner circle of political, business, and intellectual elites,
scattered
throughout the organs of the US state, the corporate echelons, and a
handful of elite policy planning institutes,17 Dye summarizes this as an
oligarchical model of power. Foreign policy reflects the interests of a
small elite, which also controls the domestic political economy, and
which is generally not accountable to mass constituencies and their
interests. States do possess varying degrees of autonomy in
policymaking.
However, foreign policy is in large measure the outcome of
the conflicts among dominant groups within each society, and dominant
classes utilize foreign policy in their interests. There are no such
things as US "national security" or "national interests." There are
interests and security considerations (albeit shifting and conflicting)
among dominant classes and groups, distinguishable from those of
other classes and groups. These dominant groups exercise inordinate
influence over the instruments of foreign policy in pursuit not of
"national" but of class or group interests. This does not preclude
circumstantial convergence of interests among different classes or
groups, or foreign-policy development that is influenced, although not
determined, by subordinate classes and groups.
State policy is developed in broader linkage to society and political
economy. The linkage of the state, from where policy is actually
managed, to society is crucial. Most pluralist/liberal and managerial!
realist analyses of foreign policy assume that society and the state
form
a unitary entity and that foreign policy is determined by an objective
national interest. Policies are attributed simply to the perceptions and
decisions of those who actually occupy government posts: government
officials or policymakers-proper, whose activities attract the attention
of analysts and who appear to be the makers of policy. Dye refers to
these government officials as "proximate policymakers" that constitute
only the final phase of a complex policymaking process largely
determined
by forces in civil society. These forces structure the options
available for the formal law-making institutions through which formal
policymakers operate.18 G. W. Domhoff dissects the mechanisms and
processes by which dominant forces in civil society (at whose apex are
the agents of corporate capital) come to utilize the state and
policymakers
in their own interests. Domhoff identifies a core of policy
specialists which extends beyond the proximate policymakers themselves.
These specialists, operating out of policy groups, foundations,
think-tanks, university research institutes, and government agencies,
bring long-range political considerations and issues concerning social
stability to the attention of the dominant classes and their inner core
in
the corporate community.19 This group of private and public
"specialists,"
including but not limited to "proximate policymakers" operating
within formal government structures, forms what I refer to as the
extended policymaking community and constitutes the crucial mediating
link between agency and structure in the development of policy
and the construction of hegemony.
An "immediate policymaking community" is comprised of state
managers and government agencies, and is often referred to as an
"administration" - a particular and temporary group of elected
officials and their appointees. Much policy analysis tends to focus on
this immediate community, yet policy is best analyzed as it flows from
the extended policymaking community. This community extends backwards
into civil society, goes well beyond specific elected administrations,
spans the panoply of institutions in which power is exercised,
and brings together the formal state apparatus with the network of
universities, think-tanks, corporate groups, and so forth. It conducts
ongoing and regenerative processes of policy formation and
implementation
over extended periods. This extended policymaking community
is the appropriate locus of behavioral analysis of foreign policy.
Gramsci's concept of the extended state clarifies the intricate
interpenetration
of state and society and overcomes dualist notions of the
two. Hegemony is exercised in civil society itself, and power is
exercised through the state only on the basis of a given constellation
of
forces in civil society. In turn, as Karl Marx noted in 1859, "the
anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy."20 Once a
given "historic bloc" (a constellation of social forces with a hegemonic
class or class fraction in the leadership) has achieved hegemonic order,
those classes or groups who have achieved hegemony in civil society
effectively exercise state power, whether directly or indirectly. The
correlation of forces in civil society is at least as important as who
actually holds state power, maybe more so. Gramsci's distinction
between civil society and the state is purely methodological; the state
and civil society are fused, or "intertwined," as are the mechanisms of
consent and coercion for the purpose of rule. Gramsci's extended state
is thus "political society plus civil society." Political society
corresponds
to the formal state apparatus, which is what most literature
refers to when it discusses "the state."21 The rise of civil society,
once
the capitalist mode of production has become consolidated, is at the
core of the historic process. The complex of "private" but national
(social) organizations, such as mass political parties, trade unions,
mass media, and civic associations, integrates subordinate classes and
groups into the capitalist society. The state is the means through which
the dominant class "not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but
manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules."22 The
state is not simply "negative and repressive," but also "positive and
educative," encompassing repressive organs such as the military and
police, but also legislatures and educational systems. The state unites
with the "trenches of civil society" to organize and structure interests
in accordance with the preservation of the social order.
This is relevant to "democracy promotion" on two accounts. First, as
I shall draw out below, the understanding on the part of US policy-
makers that power ultimately rests in civil society, and that state
power is intimately linked to a given correlation of forces in civil
society, has helped shape the contours of the new political
intervention.
Unlike earlier US interventionism, the new intervention focuses much
more intensely on civil society itself, in contrast to formal government
structures, in intervened countries. The purpose of "democracy
promotion"
is not to suppress but to penetrate and conquer civil society in
intervened countries, that is, the complex of "private" organizations
such as political parties, trade unions, the media, and so forth, and
from
therein, integrate subordinate classes and national groups into a
hegemonic
transnational social order. Since social groups vie for control
over the levers of state power (and to put their agents into positions
of
proximate policymakers), and since the strength of social groups in
civil society is a determining factor in this struggle for control, it
is not
surprising that the new political intervention emphasizes building up
the forces in the civil society of intervened countries which are allied
with dominant groups in the United States and the core regions of the
world system. This function of civil society as an arena for exercising
domination runs counter to conventional (particularly pluralist)
thinking on the matter, which holds that civil society is a buffer
between state domination and groups in society, and that class and
group domination is diluted as civil society develops.
Second, viewing power through the lens both of the state apparatus
and formal policymakers and the correlations of force in civil society
further clarifies a complex new convergence of interests between
certain groups in countries where the United States has intervened to
"promote democracy" and those who exercise effective power in the
United States. Insofar as we are dealing with democratization around
the world, there has been circumstantial convergence of interests
between dominant US groups and majoritarian groups in some Third
World countries (including elites and popular sectors) around the
strategy of "democracy promotion," such as in Chile and the Philippines.
In other instances, the convergence is not between US policy and
majority groups, but a conspiratorial convergence against majorities, as
in Nicaragua and Haiti. Under "democracy promotion," US foreign
policy links up with specific groups in other countries. The location of
these groups in the state apparatus and in the civil societies is of
prime
importance. These transnational political processes involve a complex
matrix of relations between social groups, classes, and institutions
within nations and between nations.
Gramsci analyzed "historic blocs" in individual societies, within a
specific constellation of class and social forces, whose "glue/" or
binding element, is ideological hegemony. With the shift from coercive
to consensual forms of social control, the importance of ideology in
maintaining social order increases dramatically. Coercion is the glue
that sustains and reinforces social control and oppressive social
relations
in a dictatorship, and ideology is reduced to crude rationalization
of repression. Ideology constitutes the glue that sustains social
control
under consensual arrangements.23 Ideology is more than an
anthropological
belief system and is not equivalent to mere illusion. It is a
material force insofar as it orients and sets limits on human action by
establishing generalized codes of conduct which organize entire
populations.
24 Consciousness is the medium between structure and agency,
mediating between objective conditions and social action as subjective
response to those conditions. Dominant ideologies therefore tend to set
circumscribed frames of reference in which subordinate groups
politically
challenge the dominant. Under a hegemonic social order, embedded
in ideology are definitions of key political, economic and
philosophical concepts and the ideological framework establishes the
legitimacy or illegitimacy of the demands placed on the social order. I
argue later that one particular definition of the key
political/philosophical
concept of democracy, the polyarchic definition, has become
hegemonic, and that this serves hegemony by filtering out as
illegitimate
demands that actually call into question the social order itself.
Hegemony in the world system is transnational consensual domination
in a structural situation of international asymmetries in which
neither power and wealth, nor politics and economics, are separable or
dichotomous. Gill characterizes hegemony at the transnational level as
the fusion of ideological dominance by class or group fractions with
structural dominance in the international political economy. In the
world system perspective, the center countries enjoy structural
dominance
in the international political economy. My notion of international
hegemony is distinct from most world system theorists, for
whom it is equated with structural domination alone. However, it also
differs from Gill, Cox/ Augelli and Murphy, and others from the
"Italian school/" who focus on ideological consensus within dominant
groups across nations, or transnational intra-elite consensus. I suggest
that transnational domination, in order to be hegemonic, requires the
ideological incorporation of both dominant and subordinate groups in
the center and periphery. Prior to globalization leadership in the world
system shifted from one core power to another over time, a process
involving periodic swings between conflict and consensus among core
powers and a fairly constant relation of coercive domination of the
periphery. A hegemonic world social order has only become possible
for the first time in human history in the current age of globalization.
Elaboration rests on a structural analysis of globalization.
Global economy, global society and transnational
political processes
The shift from authoritarian to consensual mechanisms of social
control corresponds to the emergence of a global economy since the
1970s and constitutes a political exigency of macro-economic
restructuring
on a world scale.25 Globalization comprises two interwoven
processes. First is the culmination of the process begun several
centuries
ago, in which capitalist production relations are undermining
and supplanting all pre-capitalist relations across the globe, in those
areas specializing in manufacturing or services and those in primary
production. Second is the transition over the past several decades from
the linkage of nations via commodity exchange and capital flows in an
integrated international market, in which different modes of production
coexisted within broader social formations and national and
regional economies enjoyed autonomy despite external linkages, to the
globalization of the process of production itself. This involves the
restructuring
of the international division of labor and the reorganization of
productive structures in each nation. It has major consequences for the
social and political texture of every society and for the world polity.
The general international division of labor was based in earlier
periods on the production of manufactured goods in the centers of
world capitalism and primary goods in the peripheral areas, often
under semi- or pre-capitalist relations. This "colonial" division of
labor
has been transformed with the appearance of the multinational
corporation as the principal agent of international economic activity
and several consecutive waves in the scientific and technological
revolution (STR).The first STR began during or soon after World War
II and focused on capital-intensive technologies (nuclear energy, new
automation techniques, synthetics, computers and electronics, etc.).
The second STR began in the late 1960s and includes a second
generation of computerization, electronics, and synthetics, and new
communications technologies. The first constituted a shift from
laborintensive
industrial production to capital-intensive production as the
core of accumulation on a world scale; the second from capitalintensive
to technology- (and knowledge)-intensive. Several clusters of
completely new industries based on high technology and scientific
content - advanced electronics and computerization, telecommunications,
robotics, cybernetics, aerospace science, biotechnology, and so
forth - are coming to dominate in the North.
These profound transformations in the technological and material
structure of human society facilitate global economic restructuring,
transforming the very nature of the industrial production process and,
along with it, the role of human labor. It has allowed for the
decentralization across the globe of complex production processes
simultaneous with the centralization of decision-making and management
of global production; the complete separation of the site of
management from the site of production and the geographic fragmentation
of production and of capital. This new ability to set up what
Barnetand Muller describe as the" global factory" has allowed capital
to realize across the globe what, at one time, it had to restrict to
national borders: total mobility in the search for the cheapest labor
and
the most congenial conditions for the different circuits of production
and distribution, without regard for national borders. The rich
countries
of the North are increasingly based on control of technology,
information and services (including finances), whereas the
labor-intensive
phase of international production, and in some cases whole
manufacturing processes, shift to the South through the "comparative
advantage" of abundant, cheap labor.
The globalization of production involves a hitherto unseen integration
of national economies and brings with it a tendency towards
uniformity, not just in the conditions of production, but in the civil
and
political superstructure in which social relations of production unfold.
A new "social structure of accumulation" is emerging which is for the
first time global. A social structure of accumulation refers to a set of
mutually reinforcing social, economic and political institutions and
cultural and ideological norms which fuse with, and facilitate, a
successful pattern of capital accumulation over specific historic
periods. A new global social structure of accumulation is becoming
superimposed on, and is transforming, all existing national social
structures of accumulation. The agent of the global economy is
transnational
capital, organized institutionally in global corporations, in
supranational economic planning agencies and political forums, and
managed by a class-eonscious transnational elite based in the core of
the world system. In his analysis of the structural changes in the
international political economy from the late 1960s to the late 1980s,
Gill argues that the international economic turmoil of that twenty-year
period was not, in fact, reflective of the breakdown of world capitalism
nor of the accelerated division of the centers of world capitalism
(Westem Europe, North America and Japan) into competing trade and
financial blocs. Rather, it was precisely the rough bumps of the
emergence of transnationalized capital, concentrated in international
finance capital, as the hegemonic fraction of capital at a world leveL26
The concentration of capital and economic power around this
transnational elite in core countries has a transformative effect on
arrangements between social groups, class constellations, and political
systems in every country of the world system. Political and economic
power tends to gravitate towards new groups linked to the global
economy, either directly or through reorganized local state apparatuses
which function as "transmission belts" for transnational interests. In
every region of the world, in both North and South, from Eastern
Europe to Latin America, states, economies, and political processes are
becoming transnationalized and integrated under the guidance of this
new elite. Barnet and Muller have shown how transnational capital
integrates local elite groups in the centers of the world economy into
"transnational circuits."27 Cox identifies transnational class fractions
which coalesce out of specific national class fractions exhibiting a
strong congruence in a cross-national setting. The internationalization
of production involves the transition from nationally defined class
structures to a global class structure "alongside or superimposed upon
national class structures," in which "class action penetrates countries
through the process of the internationalization of the state."
Transnational
fractions of capital have become dominant in center countries,
and a "transnational managerial class" appears at the apex of the
global class structure.28
This transnational elite has its exact counterpart in each nation of the
South, in a new breed of "technocratic" elite in Latin America, Africa
and Asia - what economists Osvaldo Sunkel and Edmundo F. Fuenzalida
have called "transnational kernels" in peripheral countries.29
These elites in the South, the local counterparts to the global elite,
are
overseeing sweeping processes of social and economic restructuring.
However, analysis of transnational kernels in the periphery has lagged
behind analyses of the emergence of a transnational Northern-based
elite. Domhoff has analyzed the ties that bind dominant elites in
advanced capitalist societies, in which ideological affinities and
social
cohesion is developed through formal and informal socialization
processes and institutional interlocks in "private" institutions, the
economy, and the state.3D Gill, in his analysis of the Trilateral
Commission,
elevates the binding process to a transnational setting as regards
class fractions drawn from the United States, Western Europe and
Japan.31 Writing from the perspective of dependency theory, sociologist
Peter Evans explores "problems of integration" and identifies
some of the concrete mechanisms by which local (Southern or peripheral)
and multinational (Northern or core) capital has become interdependent
and interpenetrated in the accumulation process.32
I wish to take the analysis of global class formation a step further.
Relations of dependency and asymmetry are not superseded by
globalization. Control over the accumulation process increasingly rests
on technology and its diffusion, on decision-making in a worldwide
(spatial) distribution of productive resources, and the global (as
distinct
from local) management of these resources, which remains in general a
monopoly of core country elites. And the most dynamic centers of
capital accumulation on a world scale - technology, management,
finances, and knowledge-intensive services - remain concentrated
generally in core regions. However, I submit that the
transnationalization
of civil and political society is performing an integrative function
in cohering a dominant transnational social group that is linked in
overlapping North-North and North-South class constellations. Evans
analyzes a contradiction between "national rationalities" of Southern
elites whose interests lie in national accumulation processes and the
"global rationality" of multinational capital. But the global economy
provides the material basis for the supersession of this contradiction.
The logics of local and global accumulation increasingly coincide. The
central concern of this study is to show how new instruments of
political intervention, originally developed in the United States and
then applied around the world in the name of "democracy promotion,"
are aimed at suppressing the demands of popular sectors in the
South. However, it will become clear through the empirical evidence
presented, and class analysis applied, in the case studies that these
same instruments are also integrative mechanisms which forge North-
South social and political cohesion among elites operating in the new
global environment. These instruments help bridge the gap between
the logic of local and of global accumulation by cultivating
transnationalized
kernels in each intervened country, helping place these local
class fractions into direct state power, and linking them to the
transnational
elite under a single global logic.
By a "transnational elite," therefore, I refer to class fractions drawn
around the world that are integrated into fully transnationalized
circuits of production, and whose outlook and political behavior is
guided by the logic of global rather than local accumulation. However,
relations of asymmetry and dependency are not superseded by
globalization,
such that the transnational elite brings together "junior partners"
in the South who are involved in local decisions and the local
management of global capital and "senior partners" in the North who
are involved in global decisions and global management. Southern
contingents of the transnational elite are agents, in their respective
countries and regions, of the interests of hegemonic transnational
capital. These southern contingents are "technocratic" elites because
they apply, through both the formal state and "private" institutions,
the technical criteria of capitalist production efficiency in managing
the
operations of transnational capital, in distinction to earlier "crony
elites," leaders of populist projects in the Third World, and other
competing elites whose criteria and outlook tend to differ from that of
transnational capital.
The transnational elite has an economic project and a political
counterpart to that project. The economic project is neo-liberalism, a
model which seeks to achieve conditions for the total mobility of
capital. This model includes the elimination of state intervention in
the
economy and of the regulation by individual nation-states of the
activity of capital in their territories. Neo-liberal structural
adjustment
programs sweeping the South seek macro-economic stability (price
and exchange-rate stability, etc.) as an essential requisite for the
activity
of transnational capital, which must harmonize a wide range of fiscal,
monetary, and industrial policies among multiple nations if it is to be
able to function simultaneously, and often instantaneously, across
numerous national borders.
Globalization upsets the ability of individual states (in both North
and South) to regulate economic activity within national borders, to
capture and redistribute surpluses, to harmonize conflicting social
interests, and to realize their historic function of sustaining the
internal
unity of a nationally conceived social formation. Globalization reduces
the need capital has for each individual state to serve the accumulation
process. The result is a dramatic intensification of what Barnet and
Muller called the "managerial dilemma of the state," or what James
O'Connor, with more precision, referred to as "the fiscal crisis of the
state." According to O'Connor, the capitalist state has dual and
ultimately contradictory functions: that of providing the conditions for
capital accumulation (its class function), and that of legitimating the
social order by representing the nation (its general function) and thus
assuring social harmony and a reconciliation of class interests. The
globalization process triggers, in particular, spiralling crises of
legitimacy.
33Transnational capital requires that states perform three functions:
(1) adopt fiscal and monetary policies which assure macroeconomic
stability (2) provide the basic infrastructure. necessary for
global economic activity (air and sea ports, communications networks,
educational systems which impart the specific skills among labor
which capital requires in different spatial locations, etc.), and (3)
provide social order, that is, stability, which requires sustaining
instruments
of direct coercion and ideological apparatuses. In a nutshell, we
are not witnessing "the death of the nation-state" but their
transformation
into neo-liberal states. The "commanding heights" of state
decisionmaking
are shifting to supranational institutions, such as the IMF, the
World Trade Organization, and the Trilateral Commission. Gill and
Law refer to the imposition of the "structural power" of transnational
capital over the "direct power" of the state,34 which redefines the
historic relation between the power of nation-states and the power of
formerly nation-based classes. The result is a changing correlation of
forces at the international level not correlative to changes in the
relative
power of nation-states.
The economic and political planks of the the transnational elite
project are reciprocal. Neo-Iiberal restructuring makes more porous
national borders and deepens the subordination of each nation's
internal productive process to external economies. It modernizes
capital accumulation by creating conditions under which the capitalist
production process can take place in the global economy (hence
neoliberal
restructuring is often called "modernization"). This restructuring
is "efficient" to the extent that it regenerates the circuit of capital
accumulation in the new global environment. The adjustment process
facilitates a simultaneous contraction in overall demand and a transfer
of income and resources from workers and small-scale producers to
large producers and bureaucratic personnel who are subordinate to
transnational capital. Restructuring brings about a regressive redistri-
bution of income and a concentration of productive resources in the
hands of smaller groups. Absolute and relative poverty has escalated
and real wages have plummeted in the South (and much of the North)
simultaneously with increased growth and increased external debt.35
There is no objective correlation between economic growth and living
conditions and the two are distinct variables. The opening of Third
World economies facilitates the transfer of resources from the domestic
to the external sector within national economies, and from these to the
exterior, strengthening in the process transnational pools in each
nation. Thus any effort at a more equitable distribution of political
power through democratization runs up against the further concentration
of economic power. Shifts in the relative economic weight and
power of groups bear directly on the capacity of different sectors to
intervene in political processes. By deepening asymmetries between
the North and the South and social and economic inequalities within
Third World nations, neo-liberal restructuring also redistributes
political
power locally and globally.
In close correlation to neo-liberalism, the political project of the
transnational elite is the consolidation of political systems that
function
through consensual mechanisms of social control. The new elites in the
South have entered into alliances to "promote democracy," or to
develop "democratic" consensual forms of social control in their
countries in contrast to the earlier forms of authoritarian or
dictatorial
control. But why consensual over coercive control? Authoritarianism
and dictatorship had become a fetter to the emergent patterns of
international capital accumulation corresponding to the global
economy. Globalizing forces have been disintegrating previously embedded
forms of political authority. As Gill points out, the "globalizing
thrust of internationally mobile capital [contradicts] the more
territorially
bounded nature of political authority in the late 20th century."36
Transnational capital has become sufficiently disruptive and intrusive
as to break down barriers that earlier separated and compartmentalized
groups in and between societies, while mass communications are
integrating what were once secluded social and cultural experiences of
different peoples within the world system. The communications revolution
has penetrated even the most remote and isolated regions of the
world and linked them with an increasingly global civilization. On the
one hand, even the most isolated communities are broken up and their
members dispersed. The old bonds of social cohesion dissolve and
individuals are reintegrated into new national spaces. In turn, mass
communications combine with generalized social dislocations to create
new intersubjectivities and link national to international spaces. This
globalization of social life has brought with it new social movements
and revolutions in civil society around the world. In short, people have
been pushed by the global economy into new roles as economic and
social protagonists, and in this process, have been demanding from
below the democratization of social life.
This is what the Trilateral Commission, in its 1975 report The Crisis of
Democracy, referred to as "the explosion of social interaction, and
correlatively a tremendous increase of social pressure." Social and
economic developments in the world over the past several decades
"have made it possible for a great many more groups and interests to
coalesce. .. the information explosion has made it difficult if not
impossible to maintain the traditional distance that was deemed
necessary to govern."37 The report noted that "democratic ethos make
it difficult to prevent access and restrict information, while the
persistence
of the bureaucratic processes which have been associated with
the traditional governing systems makes it impossible to handle them
at a low enough level." Authoritarian political systems are unable to
manage the expansive social intercourse associated with the global
economy. Social interaction and economic integration on a world scale
are obstructed by authoritarian or dictatorial political arrangements;
under the hegemony of transitional capital, they require consensual
arrangements and their mechanisms of ideological hegemony. It
should be recalled that the Trilateral Commission brings together the
highest echelons of the corporate, government and intellectual elite in
the developed capitalist countries, and represents the thoroughly
transnationalized fraction of capital which has become hegemonic on a
world scale.
The emergence of a global economy provides the material basis for a
global civil society. Gramsci noted that the consolidation of the
capitalist
mode of production in the center countries in the nineteenth century
shifted the locus of power firmly and fully into a rising civil society.
Similarly, the emergence and consolidation of the global capitalist
economy signals the rise of global civil society as the locus of global
power and the dispute for hegemony in a transnational setting.
According to Cox, power at the global level should be gauged by
"state-civil society complexes" not in anyone nation, but in an
international correlation of force in which Great Powers have the
maximum degree of external autonomy, whereas the subordinate
powers are penetrated by the former. "The hegemonic concept of
world order is founded not only upon the regulation of inter-state
conflict but also upon a globally conceived civil society, i.e. a mode
of
production of global extent which brings about links among social
classes encompassed by it."38Democratization movements around the
world thus develop within the context of transnational political
processes
and an extended civil society which transcends national bounds.
The globalization of civil society provides the basis for the first time
in human "history for a global order based on hegemony or consensual
domination. Gramsci saw the mechanisms of hegemony tied to consolidation
of capitalist production relations, which separates political
and civil society into distinct spheres of the social totality. Both
Karl
Polanyi and Nicos Poulantzas elevated this observation to theoretical
status with their respective analyses of the formal (apparent)
separation
of the political and the economic under capitalism.39 With the
transnationalization of capitalist production and the extension of
commodification to the most dispersed and remote communities
around the globe civil society emerges on a global scale. Hegemony is
a form of domination exercised through civil society. Only in the age of
a global civil society can we speak of a global hegemonic social order.
Until globalization, transnational hegemony was limited to relations
between nations and their complexes of the state and civil society
among the industrialized capitalist countries. Cox argues that the
liberal world order under Pax Britannica achieved world hegemony,
since Great Britain had the coercive capacity to enforce obedience and
thus achieved global consent to its rules of free trade, the Gold
Standard, etc.40 But this hegemony was among the Great Powers of the
center of the world system, whereas the relations that mediated center
and periphery - colonial and neo-colonial - were ones of coercive
domination. While subordinate classes in the center were drawn into
consensual domination, the colonized populations of the peripheral
regions, drawn into the world system by European and US powers,
never gave their "spontaneous and active consent" to imperial
domination.
41 In contrast, in the current epoch, globalizing processes affect
all elements (dominant and subordinate groups), directly and indirectly,
of each society inserted into the global system, through labor
markets, socializing agencies, the mass media, and other institutions.
Emergent transnational pools in the South liaise in diverse ways,
"inwards," with national and local populations, and "outwards," with
their senior Northern counterparts. These pools are therefore transmis-
sion belts, located on the boundaries of the national and the
transnational,
for the penetration of global society and hegemonic incorporation
of world majorities.
With the externalization and transnationalization of civil societies,
correlations of force at the international level are gauged as much by
the power of states and wealth of nations as by power exercised in an
increasingly global civil society. Globalization also tends to
transnationalize
and to integrate national political processes. Prior to globalization,
the civil societies and political systems of specific nations could
enjoy varying degrees of autonomy, so long as linkage to the world
system was through the state and the main actors in the international
arena were, in fact, states. In other words, the existence of an
authoritarian
political system in one country and a "democratic" system in
another was not consequential to the linkage of these two countries via
trade and financial flows, in distinction to an organic linkage via the
integration of production systems. Just as earlier in history it was not
possible to have two separate political systems and civil societies
within the boundaries of a single, integrated national economy,
globalizing
pressures break down national autonomies and make it increasingly
impossible to sustain distinct political systems in an integrated
global economy. Economic globalization generates pressures for
integration
into a single "political regime." Polyarchy is the emergent
global political superstructure of the emergent global economy.
Promoting polyarchy should be situated within the model of
"transnational
practices" (TNPs) proposed by sociologist Leslie Sklair in
Sociology of the Global System. Sklair argues that the global system as
the
starting point "is increasingly necessary for the analysis of a growing
number of rapidly changing phenomena" and may provide a way out
of the impasse into which, in his view, globalizing processes have led
international relations and development studies. Sklair's model involves
TNPs at three levels: the economic, whose agent is transnational
capital; the political, whose agent is a transnational capitalist class;
and
the cultural, involving a "culture-ideology of consumerism":
The global system is made up of economic transnational practices and
at the highest level of abstraction these are the building blocks of the
system. The political practices are the principles of organization of
the
system. They have to work with the materials on hand, but by
manipulating the design of the system they can build variations into
it. The cultural-ideological practices are the nuts and bolts and the
glue that hold the system together.
[42]
But Sklair limits exploration of "transnational political practices"
largely to instrumental political pressures exerted by corporate agents,
such that transnational corporations and their activity are seen as
representing a new political order. What must be problematized is the
relation between economic globalization and political processes and
systems as linkages which mediate structure and agency. The new US
political intervention can be conceived, in the broadest sense, as a
transnational political practice by dominant sectors in the United
States, acting as the political leadership of an increasingly cohesive
transnational elite, for the purpose of installing and stabilizing
polyarchic
political systems in the South.
US foreign policy and intellectual production:
competing definitions of democracy,
democratization theory, and reconstituting "democracy" for transnational hegemony
Organic intellectuals: the link between academia
and US foreign policy
Whether it is possible for intellectuals to remain above the social
conflicts which engulf society, or whether any intellectual activity is
neutral in status, is highly questionable. Karl Marx argued that
intellectual production cannot be separated from the social relations
under which it is produced, and that thought itself flows from the
material conditions of life. Karl Mannheim went further: an element of
social conflict is that people "think with or against one another."
Mannheim claimed that the "intelligentsia" are not a class, have no
common interests and are incapable of common and concerted action.
They are, he insisted, ideologues of one or another class but never
speak
for "themselves."43 It is Gramsci's concept of organic intellectuals
that
does the most to clarify the relationship between US foreign policy and
mainstream US academia. This concept is multidimensional and open
to distinct interpretations. It concerns the relation of intellectuals
to the
dominant classes and also their relation to subordinate classes. My
concern here is with the former, and in particular with the role of the
intellectualstrata in developing a relatively coherent worldview rooted
in philosophy, science, sociological theory, law, and so forth, in the
function of domination.
A class or class fraction that makes a bid for hegemony must acquire
intellectual and moral leadership. Gramsci described organic
intellectuals
as "experts in legitimization" who do the political and theoretical
thinking of the dominant groups, thereby constructing the ideological
conditions for hegemony. But organic intellectuals also make essential
practical and technical contributions to social order. They theorize on
the conditions of existence of a social order as a whole, suggest
policies
and their justifications, and even participate in their application. The
activity of organic intellectuals constitutes a key element of mediation
between the structural and the behavioral levels of analysis (and
analysis of intellectual production may be seen as structural-conjunctural
analysis). The Trilateral Commission report, for instance, is
properly seen as reflection by organic intellectuals upon structure in
order to orient policy. Organic intellectuals provide the theoretical
understanding of historical processes and of structure necessary for
dominant groups to engage in the social practice of domination, and
for the construction of hegemony as a fit between power, ideas, and
institutions.44 The immediate policymaking community has demonstrated
a cognizance and intentionality in policy formation without
necessarily theorizing on the social activity in which they are involved
and the structures with which they interact. However, "backward
linkage" between this community and the scholarly community is
realized in the intellectual activity of mainstream US academia, where
such theorization does take place.
There has been a close "fit" in the post-World War II period between
US foreign policy and the mainstream academic community. In particular,
modernization and political culture/development theorists provided
intellectual guidelines and legitimization for foreign policy, and
also contributed important theoretical and practical elements -
including
developing a new generation of democratization theory - to
the development of the new political intervention. These theories
should be seen as intellectual movement parallel to and deeply
interpenetrated
with US policy. In a scientific sense, this intellectual activity
is deceptive insofar as (a) value-laden intellectual production steeped
in
assumptions is presented as objective, scientific and value-free, and
(b)
there are antinomies internal to these theories which can be exposed
and positively associated with real social and political contradictions.
The relation between the scholarly community and the action of
dominant groups in US and other state apparatuses, and in supranational
institutions, is not merely one of theoretical abstraction. There
are organic ties which subordinate intellectuals to dominant groups,
ultimately on the basis of the latter's control over the material life
of
society. Dye documents the role of universities and intellectuals in the
policymaking process. "While university intellectuals working
independently
occasionally have an impact on the policy-making process,
on the whole intellectuals who would be heard must respond to policy
directions set by the foundations, corporations, and government agencies
that underwrite the costs of research" and set overall academic
and public agendas.45 It is worth quoting Cox at some length in this
same regard:
Intellectual production is now organized like the production of goods
or of other services. The material basis of networks is provided by
formal (usually nongovernmental) organizations as mobilizing and
coordinating agencies with research directors and funds (from
sources sometimes more, sometimes less visible) for commissioning
studies, financing conferences, and symposia or informal lnncheon
discussions ... The material basis of networks allows for a selection of
participants which guarantees a certain homogeneity aronnd a basic
core of orthodoxy. However, since the object of the exercise is
consensus-building, narrow orthodoxy or exclusiveness would be a
self-defeating criterion, and the activators of each network extend
their search to those whose ideas reach the outer bonndaries of what
might ultimately be acceptable. Above and beyond material support,
the organized network holds out to the intellectual the prospect of
political influence, of being listened to by top decision-makers and
even of becoming part of the decision-making team.
[46]
Ideology and its production are generally spontaneous (intellectually
reflexive) and should not be confused with deliberate falsehood. It is
not necessary to assume a conspiracy among scholars in the service of
hegemony. Such intellectuals need not be conscious of their role in
relation to ideology and the structures of domination. Some
intellectuals
are indeed quite conscious of their role as ideologues and their
participation in the structure of power, and they routinely alternate
between academia and positions in the formal state apparatus.
However, what is pertinent is not the subjective status or conscious
intent of intellectuals but the objective significance of the
scholarship in
question, independent of its agents, in the ideological rationalization
of
the new political intervention as the "promotion of democracy" and in
the provision of technical solutions for effectively carrying out this
intervention. Insofar as hegemony is problematic and not given it is
constructed and must constantly be reconstructed. The evolution of
modernization and political development theory into the new
democratization
literature parallels the reconfiguration of US-Third World
and North-South relations over the past few decades.
From modernization and political development to
democratization: theoretical development in the
function of policy development
The shift from supporting authoritarian regimes to promoting polyarchy
led many intellectuals and academicians who had previously
distanced themselves from policies seen as hypocritical or morally
objectionable into an enthusiastic embrace of the new modalities of
intervention. At the same time as "a democratic miracle sweeping the
world" became standard phraseology in US foreign policymaking
circles, "democratization" became a veritable boom industry on US
campuses and for academic publishers. By the early 1990s, a whole
new body of literature on "transitions" and on US "democracy promotion"
had become established in government circles, policy planning
institutions and mainstream academia.47 Much of this literature is
value-laden and steeped in implicit analytical and theoretical
assumptions
in such a way that the distinction between those who are writing
from the outlook of a policymaker or power-holder, and those who are
writing from the viewpoint of social science inquiry, often becomes
confused.48 A critique of "democratization" literature, particularly
those works which interface closely with the policymaking community,
sheds important light on theoretical and practical aspects of the new
political intervention, and also demonstrates how ideology and political
practices become rationalized in intellectual activity, which in
turns forms the basis for developing the ideological dimensions of
hegemony.
There is an underlying continuity between modernization and
political culture/political development theories of the 1950s and 1960s,
and democratization theories of the 1980s and 1990s. The former
constitute the theoretical forerunners of the latter and the development
of both has involved a close association between the US state and US
academia. Links include generous government funding for research
projects, conferences which bring policymakers and intellectuals faceto-
face, and studies which either originate in universities and become
standard materials used by policymakers, or which originate in policy
planning institutes tied to the policymaking process and become
standard materials used in universities. This is the case, for example,
with two of the most widely cited and circulated volumes: Transitions
from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, a four-volume
collection,
edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Philip C. Schmitter, and Laurence
Whitehead, and Democracy in Developing Countries, another fourvolume
series, edited by Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour
Martin Upset. Both were commissioned with the intent of informing
US policy and policymakers, and are considered standard references in
government and academia on "transition to democracy."49 There are
direct and indirect mechanisms which mediate the relations between
organic intellectuals and state policies, including, but not limited to,
a
revolving door between posts in universities, posts in the US
government,
and posts in government-linked but nominally private policy
planning institutes, similar to (and overlapping with) the
corporategovernment
revolving door. In turn, literature originating in the
government-university nexus has a natural advantage in establishing
dominance and authority in the field. It sets the frame of reference for
general treatment of the issue, defines the parameters of debate and
circumscribes research agendas. In this way, it achieves a certain
intellectual hegemony. 50
It was no coincidence that John W. Burgess, founder of the first
department of political science in the United States, explained in 1890,
at the beginning of a decade which began extra-territorial US expansion,
that the new discipline of political science would help "the
civilized states" to "undertake the work of state organization" for the
populations of the colonial and semi-eolonial regions who were "in a
state of barbarism or semi-barbarism."51 The "manifest destiny" and
the "civilizing mission" to which Burgess referred reflected racial and
colonial theories that provided crude justification for the imperial
policies of the United States and the other Great Powers in the era of
modem colonialism, from late last century through to the World War
II. But the relation between intellectual labor and policy development
became considerably more sophisticated after the War. Modernization
theories that emanated out of the US social sciences were closely
associated with the rise of the United States as the dominant world
power and with the emergence of "Third World" protagonists on the
world stage, involving simultaneous processes of decolonization and
of the reconstructionof world order after the War.
Modernization theory, and its twin cousins, political culture and
political development theories, were grounded in the
structural-functionalism
of sociologist Talcott Parsons and political scientist David
Easton that dominated the US social sciences in the postwar years,
with its embedded system-maintenance and social order biases.52
Modernization theory argued that all societies were moving along a
continuum from "traditional" to "modern," and "development"
meant the process of movement down this continuum. The more
developed countries were seen as further advanced along the road,
while the underdeveloped countries were "late comers" who were
behind but on the same path as the developed countries. The sharp
inequalities between nations in an asymmetric international order were
to be explained by factors internal to each country and region,
particularly to the "traditions," the "anti-modern" attitudes and other
impediments located in the cultures of the backward regions, while the
colonial experience was not of consequence. Third World countries
would be helped along the felicitous path of capitalist economic
development with US (and other Western) aid and investment.
Political development and political culture, as concomitants of
economic modernization, were seen as two sides of the same coin.
The first was the ensemble of political roles, institutions, and
actions,
and the second, the attendant values, beliefs, and attitudes that
underlie political behavior. Modernization would bring about a
change in the "political culture" of the developing population,
defined along the lines of Parsons's "pattern variables," away from
"traditional" values which impede progress and towards "modern"
values which facilitate development. As agents of "modern" values, a
"modernizing elite" would steer countries down the road to development.
This "enlightened" elite, by definition, would need to hold
power and be insulated from any popular pressures from below. "The
need for elite power requires that the ordinary citizen be relatively
passive, uninvolved, and deferential to elites," explained political
scientists Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba in The Civic Culture.53
And just as a country modernizes economically by moving through a
continuum of economic stages, it would move through a continuum
of political stages which the developed capitalist countries had
already passed through, in the build-up of political structures,
particularly
of state structures.
An analysis of the political development literature reveals that the
emphasis, at times explicit, at times implicit, was on order, and on the
capacity of political institutions to perform the function of the
maintenance
of order. David Easton's "input-output" model constituted the
basis for political development theory: inputs are demands and supports
for the political structure and the social system, and outputs are
the consequent system performance (taxes, legislation, etc.).54 In the
middle there are Easton's "capabilities" and "conversion process" and
Parsons's "maintenance" and "adaptive" functions of the political
system. The goal is to develop the capacity for the political system to
absorb demands, prop up supports, and augment "output." This is to
be based on two "developmental processes" - structural/role
differentiation
and the secularization of values. The normative end goal is to
maximize the capacity for system maintenance (social order). The
political system has the function of compelling compliance in a social
order, and political science assumes as its primary problem the
establishment
and maintenance of political structures capable of assuring
the stability of a social order. The questions addressed in Easton's
construct are: How might the political system, the instrument which
compels compliance, survive? How might it fulfill its function most
effectively? How might the political system absorb "stress" from the
larger "social system" in such a way that social order is not
threatened?
Political development becomes the study of how to manage or change
the political system in such a way as to maximize the ability of the
state
to reproduce the social order and the relations of domination therein.
The political development literature sought to dissect how political
systems in the Third World could be constructed which would most
effectively perform the role of shielding the prevailing social order
from demands that could not be met from within that order.55 This
involved "state-building," "nation-building," "institution-building,"
"bureaucracy-building," and so forth. Subordinate groups who challenged
elites were responsible for disorder. But if the goal of political
development was to achieve stability, the concept of social order was
not neutral. Social orders involve winners and losers. Stability is not
necessarily a condition in the general welfare; it places a normative
premium not on order per se, but on maintenance of the prevailing
social order. Strong governments and political institutions, which were
the objective of political development, were not just better able to
create declared "public interests," but also to thwart, or deny,
collective
interests of popular classes.56 Political development theories
approximate Mannheim's notion of "bureaucratic conservatism,"
whereby specific social interests are attained through forms of
political
organization, yet these interests are concealed under the implicit
assumption that a specific order is equivalent to order in general.
Modernization theories guided the thinking of policymakers at the
State Department's Agency for International Development (AID) and
the non-military aspects of such US undertakings as the Alliance for
Progress and economic development programs in Vietnam, in which
economic development through US aid and investment was to have
removed the political basis for radical movements and for more
fundamental changes. Political development theory also became
incorporated
into foreign policy through development programs in the
Third World. "Political development is anti-Communist, pro-American
political stability," explained an AID official.57 The assumptions of
modernization theory continue to provide theoretical guidance for,
and legitimization of, the economic dimensions of US foreign policy,
and particularly the neo-liberal model and its notion that the
unfettered
operation of transnational capital will bring about development.
However, political development theories have undergone major
modifications
which have helped to theoretically inform the shift to
"democracy promotion." The problem with the earlier political
development
strategizing was that it focused almost exclusively on the state
as the locus of social power and the arena for the reproduction of the
relations of domination. Gradually, in the social sciences, the focus
began to shift to civil society as the principal site of social control.
This
new focus was congruent with the shift in US policy towards the new
political intervention. I return to this point later.
From power of the people to polyarchy
Definitions of concepts are not theoretically neutral and are not
simply the result of individual taste or preference of the writer...
Definitions of concepts are also mandated by the dominant usages in
a group or society, made authoritative by dictionaries, by sanctions
against the "wrong" usage. And definitions are also part of the
hegemony of language itself,the "deep structure" of meanings buried
in the foundations of social order. To broaden the classic statement of
Marx, the ruling ideas of an age are not only the ideology of its ruling
class but also the vocabulary of dominant elites.
--
Robert Alford and Roger Friedland [58]
Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of
accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.
--
Joseph Schumpeter [59]
Democracy is what philosopher W. B. Gallie terms an essentially
contested concept.60 This refers to a concept in which different and
competing definitions exist, such that terms themselves are problematic
since they are not reducible to "primitives." Each definition yields
different interpretations of social reality. In and of themselves, these
terms are hollow and their meaning is only discernible from the
vantage point of the social and theoretical context of their usage. By
their nature, these terms involve implicit assumptions, are enveloped
in ideology, and are therefore subsets of broader discourse which sets
the framework of the social-political or theoretical agenda in question.
Each essentially contested concept comes to have multiple and internally
contradictory meanings which are given to it by specific class and
group interests with a stake in its definition. Ideological positions,
or
more precisely, the intersubjective expression of vested class and
group interests, are often ensconced in what is presented as scientific,
objective discussion of democracy. Analysis should thus uncover these
assumptions and their relation to interests.
What US policymakers mean by "democracy promotion" is the
promotion of polyarchy, a concept which developed in US academic
circles closely tied to the policymaking community in the United States
in the post-World War II years (the word was first coined by Robert
DahI61). Polyarchy refers to a system in which a small group actually
rules and mass participation in decision-making is confined to
leadership
choice in elections carefully managed by competing elites. The
pluralist assumption is that elites will respond to the general
interests
of majorities, through polyarchy's "twin dimensions" of "political
contestation" and "political inclusiveness," as a result of the need of
those who govern to win a majority of votes. It is theoretically
grounded in structural-functionalism - and behind it, the positivist
focus on the separate aspects and the external relations of things - in
which the different spheres of the social totality are independent, each
performing systems maintenance functions and externally related to
each other in a larger Parsonian "social system." Democracy is limited
to the political sphere, and revolves around process, method and
procedure in the selection of "leaders." This is an institutional
definition
of democracy. Political scientist Samuel Huntington notes that the
classic definition of democracy as power/rule by the people - rooted in
the original Greek, power or rule (eralos) of the people (demos) - and
"its derivatives and applications over the ages" have "sharply declined,
at least in the American scholarly discussions, and have been
replaced by efforts to understand the nature of democratic
institutions."
Huntington concludes: "Democracy has a useful meaning only
when it is defined in institutional terms. The key institution of
democracy is the selection of leaders through competitive elections."62
In turn, polyarchy has been conflated to the staple definition of
democracy in both "democratization" and "democracy promotion"
literature.63
The concept of polyarchy is an outgrowth of late nineteenth and
early twentieth-century elite theories developed by Italian social
scientists
Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. On the one hand, these
theories were developed to legitimize the rapid increase in the
concentration
of wealth and political power among dominant elites, and their
ever-greater control over social life, with the rise of corporate
capitalism.
On the other hand, democracy, by the late nineteenth century,
had ceased being an instrument of this industrial elite against the old
feudal oligarchy and was instead becoming a vehicle for the demands
of those it dominated. In the latter part of their careers, Mosca went
on
to argue that "democratic" rather than fascist methods are best suited
to defend the ruling class and preserve the social order, whereas Pareto
went on to embrace fascism as the best method. This split, on the basis
of a shared commitment to preserving the social order, constitutes an
historical analogy to the debate in US foreign policymaking circles over
whether "democracy" or authoritarianism in the Third World is
actually the best method of preserving international order. "In
perceiving
the insight underlying the apparent paradox that democratic
methods prudently used can enhance the strength and stability of a
ruling class, Mosca solved his problem," notes political scientist Peter
Bachrach. "But before his theory could be successfully integrated
within the context of modem democratic theory, the theory of democracy
itself required a radical revision."64 That radical revision took
place in US academia in the post-World War II years.
The institutional definition embodied in polyarchy came to substitute,
at the level of mainstream Western social science, the classic
definition of democracy. Despite the emergence of the earlier elite
theories, the classic definition had been fairly well established until
the
post-World War II period. This redefinition thus coincided with a
worldwide upsurge of democratic aspirations and movements in the
wake of the defeat of fascism and the breakup of the old colonial
system. Behind the birth of dozens of newly independent nations, the
spread of democratic and national liberation movements, and several
successful Third World revolutions were struggles over what new
social and political systems would replace the crumbling colonial
order. The redefinition of democracy also took place alongside the
postwar construction of a new international system and the emergence
of the United States as the undisputed world power. It began with
Joseph Schumpeter's 1942study, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, in
which he rejected the "classical theory of democracy" defined in terms
of "the will of the people" and "the common good." Instead, Schumpeter
advanced "another theory" of democracy: "institutional arrangements
for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire
the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's
vote."65 This redefinition gave "democratic" content to the
anti-democratic
essence of Mosca's and Pareto's earlier elitism theories, thus
providing for their legitimization. According to Huntington, the debate
between the institutional and the classical definition of democracy
went on for several decades after World War II, and was concluded
with the publication of Robert Dahl's Polyarchy in 1971.
In its Parsonian-Schumpeterian version, the polyarchic definition of
democracy is equated with the stability of the capitalist social order.
By
definitional fiat, power is exercised in the general welfare and any
attempt to change the social order is a pathological challenge to
democracy. "The maintenance of democratic politics and the
reconstruction
of the social order are fundamentally incompatible," states
Huntington.66 There is no contradiction in this model in affirming that
"democracy" exists and also acknowledging massive inequalities in
wealth and social privilege. The problem is posed as to how these
inequalities might negatively affect the maintenance of "democracy."
Therefore, the notion that there may be a veritable contradiction in
terms between elite or class rule, on the one hand, and democracy, on
the other, does not enter - by theoretical-definitional fiat - into the
polyarchic definition. At best, the polyarchic conception leaves open
the possibility as to whether "political democracy" mayor may not
facilitate "social and economic democracy." In contrast, I am arguing
that polyarchy as a distinct form of elite rule performs the function of
legitimating existing inequalities, and does so more effectively than
authoritarianism.
Historian Raymond Williams holds that a class perspective on the
politics of language is necessary, since "many crucial meanings have
been shaped by a dominant class."67 Sociologists Robert Alford and
Roger Friedland argue that "concepts come to be part of dominant or
subordinate paradigms. Clusters of terms come to control discourse
when a particular school of thought dominates a university department,
a professional association, or a government agency." As such,
"paradigms of inquiry become part of the substructure of meanings,
which may disappear into the underpinnings of a discipline as its
ideology."68The polyarchic definition of democracy, which is only one
variant of an essentially contested concept, has come to enjoy hegemony,
in the Gramscian sense, in social scientific, political, and mass
public discourse.
Separating the political system from the
socioeconomic order: promoting polyarchy and
promoting free markets
Ideological development is a process in which ideological positions are
constantly modified in an effort to render them internally logical and
seif-eonsistent in the face of logical inconsistencies and
contradictions
in material reality (empirical fact). The labor of organic intellectuals
involves resolving logical inconsistencies and offering solutions to
real
social contradictions. Uncovering the inner ideological core of
intellectual
production is not achieved by focusing on the reasoned forms of
this thought, but rather on the unreasoned assumptions and
preconceptions
that underlie - and belie - its own external (surface) logics.
Creating an institutional theory of democracy was an intellectual
and ideological attempt to resolve once and for all the intrinsically
contradictory nature of democratic thought under capitalism, in which
one side stresses the sanctity of private property, and therefore
legitimizes social and economic inequalities and privileges which rest
on the monopolization by minorities of society's material resources,
while the other side stresses popular sovereignty and human equality.
A similar effort to resolve ideological contradictions springing from
real social contradictions took place in the evolution of modernization
and political development theory into democratization theory. This
intellectual movement paralleled change in policy, from promoting
dictatorship to promoting polyarchy, as a response to the real material
contradiction of the crisis of elite rule in the Third World. But
democratization theory exhibits manifold logical and empirical
inconsistencies
which become glaring once we study each of its component
parts in their interconnections and uncover its antinomious essence. In
this way we are able to demonstrate the relation between democratization
theory, the promotion of polyarchy, globalization, and real social
contradictions in emergent global society.
The antinomy in democratization theory is located in its theoretical
construct, in Alford and Friedland's "superstructure of meaning," but
not in substructure of meaning. The antinomy disappears once we
uncover the ideological discourse concealed in the construct or in the
political practice which it legitimizes. For example, Adam Przeworski
describes democracy as "a particular system of processing and
terminating
intergroup conflicts." Democracy "thus constitutes an organization
of political power ... as a system, it determines the capacity of
particular groups to realize their specific interests." He separates the
political from the socioeconomic system by positing the former as a
neutral forum theoretically capable of pendular swings between
antagonistic
social and economic interests. "The distribution of the probability
of realizing group-specific interests - which is nothing less than
political power - is determined jointly by the distribution of resources
that participants bring into conflicts and by specific institutional
arrangements."69 The political system and the state become chameleons,
or clothes that fit any class or group which tries them on. Society
is multi-class but power is determined in a "classless democracy" as
process: political power is deposited in a democratic state through
which classes and groups may withdraw or utilize their share of power
in accordance with their resources and their organizational capacity.
But the distribution of material resources is determined in the
socioeconomic
sphere, and the particular distribution will determine the
relative strength of groups and group access to political power. The
extent of democracy should therefore directly correlate to the extent in
which material resources are distributed in an egalitarian fashion, but
this proposition is excluded by definition from the construct.
Przeworski acknowledges that democracy is a means for securing
ends, an organizational form of the dispute for power as the ability to
realize social and economic interests. What makes this "democracy" is
that intergroup conflict is processed and terminated by established
rules of procedure and a juridical structure. Internal coherence would
require the construct to demonstrate how procedure and juridical
structure are in the first place established, since these are not
pre-given.
Such established rules and procedures are, in the Gramscian explanation,
those which the dominant classes are able to impose once they
have achieved hegemony. Having achieved this hegemony, consensual
arrangements are at play for the resolution of conflict without
transgressing
a given social order. To demonstrate a fit between internal
logic and empirical reality, and therefore achieve consistency,
Przeworski's
construct would have to problematize how the distribution of
material resources and the arrangements for the resolution of intergroup
conflict are derived. This remains theoretically external to the
construct itself and its implicit consensus theory. Its substructure,
hence, legitimizes as "democratic" immanent inequalities in the social
order.
The antinomy in democratization theory is the separation of the
political system from the social order, in turn justified by the
institutional
definition of democracy and theoretically grounded in structural-
functionalism, which separates the "internal" from the
"extemal," and the political from the social and economic spheres of
society, conferring a functional autonomy to each subsphere. For
instance, Diamond, Linz, and Upset affirm that democracy "signif[ies]
a political system, separate and apart from the economic and social
system... Indeed, a distinctive aspect of our approach is to insist that
issues of so-called economic and social democracy be separated from
the question of governmental structure."70 An antinomious argument
is one in which its inconsistencies or contradictions become apparent
only when conclusions are drawn from the synthesis of two propositions
which are reasonable in isolation from one another. The separation
of the political from the socioeconomic allows for apparently
reasonable propositions regarding either sphere; the inconsistencies in
both only become apparent in the synthesis.
Central to democratization theory is an inconsistent argument: first,
it separates the social and the economic from the political sphere, and
then it turns around and connects the two by claiming an affinity
between democracy and free-market capitalism! Huntington argues,
for example:
The exit from power of rulers who lose electionsmeans that limits
must existon what is at stake in controllinggovernment.If winning
or losing was an all-or-nothingaffair, those in power would have
overpoweringincentivesto suppress opposition,to rig elections,and
to resort to coercionto remainin power if it appeared theyhad lostan
election. Hence government cannot be the only or even the principal
source of status, prestige, wealth, and power. Some dispersion of
control over these goods - what Dahl calls "dispersed inequalities" -
is necessary. The most important issue here concerns economic
power... In all democracies, private ownership of property remains
the basic norm in theory and in fact... The existence of such private
power is essential to the existenceof democracy... Politicaldemocracy
is clearly compatible with inequality in both wealth and income, and,
in some measure, it may be dependent upon such inequality...
Defining democracy in terms of goals such as economic well-being,
social justice, and overall socioeconomic equity is not, we have
argued, very useful.
[71]
Huntington unambiguously connects the economic and the political
spheres: dispersed inequalities, private property, a free market, etc.,
are
required for the maintanence of a "democratic" political system.
Despite his claim to do so, he does not, therefore, limit democracy to
the government structure, or to process centered around competitive
elections! Neither does Przeworski. And Diamond, Linz, and Lipset,
despite their stated definition of democracy as "a political system
separate and apart from the economic and social system," similarly
assert that "democracy" requires capitalist free markets.72
All theory, to acquire social scientific status, must demonstrate
logical consistency and empirical verification. Democratization theory
fails on both accounts. It argues against any linkage between the
political and the socioeconomic system, but then validates itself by
making just such a linkage. This is its logical inconsistency. The very
theoretical construct precludes from the empirical terrain on which the
theory is based the relation between wealth and power, and therefore
precludes either empirical verification or falsification of the
pluralist
assumption on power by examining this relation. Empirical evidence
demonstrates that those who hold wealth in society exercise political
power directly, through their inordinate influence over (or direct
participation in) the state apparatus, and indirectly, through their
dominant position in economic institutions and the organs of civil
society. This is its failure of empirical verification.
Having exposed the antinomious essence of democratization theory,
what concerns us now is its connection to hegemony, which resides in
the relation of intellectual thought to the transnational elite project.
Promoting polyarchy and promoting neo-liberal restructuring has
become a singular process in US foreign policy. The AID explains that
promoting polyarchy in the latter part of the twentieth century "is
complementary to and supportive of the transition to market-oriented
economies."73(Since the promotion of capitalism and of polyarchy are
seen as symbiotic in USpolicy, it is therefore more precise to qualify
the
policy as promoting capitalist polyarchy.) If democracy is only "a
system
of government, separate and apart from the economic and social
system," as democratization theory maintains, yet policymakers assert
that promoting polyarchy and promoting free markets are inseparable,
there is an evident disjuncture between this theory and actual US
policy. The discrepancy is an extension of the contradictions already
identified in democratization theory and reflects its legitimating
function.
It is not dispersed inequalities, free markets, the exclusion (from
democracy) of economic well-being, social justice, socioeconomic
equity, and so on, which enhance democracy, as the theory suggests.
Rather, the polyarchic concept of democracy which the United States
promotes is an effective political arrangement for legitimizing and
sustaining inequalities within and between nations, which, we have
seen, are deepening under global capitalism, and therefore of utility to
dominant groups in an asymmetric international order.
If the political sphere is separated from the socioeconomic and
democracy limited to the former then these inequalities and
international
asymmetries are of little concern to democratization in the Third
World (or only of concern insofar as they threaten the stability of the
social order). If democracy is limited to "a system of government,"
then enormous concentrations of wealth and power in "private"
institutions such as transnational corporations are not relevant to
"democracy." Discussions of democratization are extraneous to those
of transnational power relations, elite domination, hegemony,
international
asymmetries, and US interventionism. Beyond its legitimating
function, mainstream democratization theory, as we shall see below
and in the following chapter, also provides technical solutions to
practical problems of domination in global society by contributing
intellectual precepts to the policy of promoting polyarchy. Its
legitimating
function is made easier owing to the hegemonic status of the
polyarchic definition of democracy. But polyarchy competes with
alternative definitions.
Polyarchy versus popular democracy
As an essentially contested concept, polyarchy competes with concepts
of popular democracy. Although, in distinction to polyarchy, there is no
fully elaborated theory of popular democracy (a situation which
strengthens the hegemonic status of the polyarchic definition), an
abundance of literature is available on the subject and on the debate
over democracy.74 The various concepts and views on popular democracy
are traceable to the literal, classical Greek definition of democracy
as the rule, or power (cratos), of the people (demos), and rooted in
Rousseauian-Marxist traditions. They posit a dispersal throughout
society of political power through the participation of broad majorities
in decision-making. The model conjoins representative government to
forms of participatory democracy that hold states accountable beyond
the indirect mechanism of periodic elections. Popular democracy is
seen as an emancipatory project of both form and content that links the
distinct spheres of the social totality, in which the construction of a
democratic political order enjoys a theoretically internal relation to
the
construction of a democratic socioeconomic order. Democratic
participation,
in order to be truly effective, requires that democracy be a tool
for changing unjust social and economic structures, national as well as
international.
In sharp contrast to polyarchy, popular democracy is concerned with
both process and outcome (although a fully elaborated theory of popular
democracy would have to address such issues as the institutional
structures of popular democracy and the relation between process and
outcome). Popular democracy is thus distinghished from the polyarchic
focus on process only, and from the focus of the statist models of
the former Soviet bloc on outcome only (and the concept of popular
democracy should not be confused with the types of political system
that developed under the former Soviet bloc). Elitism theories claim
that democracy rests exclusively on process, so that there is no
contradiction
between a "democratic" process and an anti-democratic social
order punctuated by sharp social inequalities and minority
monopolization
of society's material and cultural resources. Under the polyarchie
definition, a system can acquire a democratic form without a
democratic content. Popular democracy, in contrast, posits democracy
as both a process and a means to an end - a tool for change, for the
resolution of such material problems as housing, health, education,
access to land, cultural development, and so forth. This entails a
dispersal of political power formerly concentrated in the hands of elite
minorities, the redistribution of wealth, the breaking down of the
structures of highly concentrated property ownership, and the
democratizing
of access to social and cultural opportunities by severing the
link between accessand the possession of wealth. It includes
acknowledging
the public (social) character of "private" institutions in civil
society such as universities, cultural establishments, and transnational
corporations, holding them accountable, and thoroughly democratizing
their operation. Democracy begins with respect for human
rights, civil liberties, the rule of law, and elections, and includes
the
outlawing of racial, ethnic, gender, and other forms of discrimination.
These should be seen in the model of popular democracy, not as
democracyin itself, but as "pre-conditions" for processes of
democratization,
which unfold to the extent that structures are developed
which allow for participatory democracy, for the direct participation of
majoritiesin their own vital affairs, "upwards" from the local,
grassroots
level. It is what Carl Cohen refers to as the "breadth, depth,
range" of democracy.75
The locus of power in both models is civil society: formal political
structures regulate the instruments of the state, and democracy
(however so defined) limits the powers of the state vis-a-vis civil
society, in distinction to authoritarian coercive domination, and to
statist models of the former Soviet bloc. Relations between the state
and civil society theoretically take on the same form under both
polyarchy and popular democracy - power flows "upwards" to the
state. This is why state managers and organic intellectuals who have
developed "democracy promotion" argue that the powers of the state
should be limited vis-a-vis civil society in intervened countries, and
why they emphasize developing the organs of civil society in these
countries. The contradiction between polyarchy and popular democracy
is not expressed in the degree to which the organs of civil society
are able to influence local and national affairs, but in whether elite
or
popular sectors have achieved hegemony in civil society, and in the
degree to which these organs are themselves democratic institutions
that popular majorities are able to utilize in their own interests. In
polyarchy, the state is the domain of the dominant classes, while the
popular classes are incorporated into civil society under the hegemony
of the elite - which is the formula for the exercise of consensual
domination. Popular democracy involves participatory mechanisms
for popular sectors to subordinate and utilize the state in pursuit of
their interests, with mobilization in civil society as the principal
form in
which political power is exercised.
Elections are meaningful components of popular democratization to
the extent that mechanisms of participatory democracy linked to
formal representative structures allow for accountability and control
by the population over those elected. Under polyarchy, "political
inclusiveness" (polyarchy's "first dimension") is limited to the right
to
vote, and mass constituencies have no institutional mechanisms for
holding elected officials accountable to them and to the platforms upon
which they are elected. Polyarchy theory claims that democracy
requires that those elected be insulated, once they take office, from
popular pressures, so that they may "effectively govern." If rulers
deviate from the "course of action preferred by the citizenry,"
according
to this reasoning, they are to be held accountable by being
voted out of office in subsequent elections, since accountability is
defined as nothing more than the holding of elections76 Polyarchy not
only limits democratic participation to voting in elections, but focuses
exclusively on form in elections. The polyarchic definition of "free and
fair" elections are those which are procedurally correct and not
fraudulent. Equality of conditions for electoral participation is not
relevant to whether elections are "free and fair." These conditions are
decidedly unequal under capitalism owing to the unequal distribution
of material and cultural resources among classes and groups, and to
the use of economic power to determine political outcomes. But
economic considerations are excluded by definition from the polyarchic
conception, in which "political contestation" (polyarchy's
"second dimension") means the juridical right, not the material ability,
to become a candidate and vie for power in elections. Equality of
influence, as Miliband has noted, "is in fact an illusion. The act of
voting is part of a much larger political process, characterized ... by
marked inequality of influence. Concentration on the act of voting
itself,
in which formal equality does prevail, helps to obscure the inequality,
and serves a crucially important legitimating function" (emphasis in
original).77This legitimating function accounts for polyarchy's
electoral
fixation.
Behind essentially contested concepts are contested social orders.
Popular democracy and polyarchy rest on antagonistic notions of what
a democratic society resembles. In popular democracy, ultimately, a
society is democratic to the extent that popular majorities are able to
impose their sovereignty - popular sovereignty properly conceived
does not refer to a "general interest" but to the interests of popular
classes - that society is governed by the "logic of the majority." Under
polyarchy it is the inverse: sovereignty is exercised by dominant
minorities, but under conditions of hegemony (consensual domina-
tion).Terms vary: in mainstream social science consensual domination
is "liberal democracy," while critics have coined such phrases as
"limited democracy," "restricted democracy," "controlled democracy,"
or "low-intensity democracy." Class (or popular versus elite)
sovereignties are at the heart of worldwide social struggles unfolding
under globalization. As is illustrated in the case studies, broad
popular
movements tended to put forward the model of popular democracy in
their demands and in their alternative visions for organizing
postauthoritarian
societies. In contrast, elites sought capitalist polyarchy as
the goal of anti-dictatorial struggles.
An exploration of the contradiction between polyarchy and popular
democracy raises two questions. First, to what extent do processes of
popular democratization run up against constraints inherent in the
capitalist mode of production? Private appropriation of the social
product is in the last instance the social relation which underpins the
separation of real from formal power, and democratic form from
democratic content. Without doubt, implementation of the full model
of popular democracy requires the supersession of capitalism, and I
return briefly to this issue in the conclusion. But the question may be
a
relative one: just how much popular democratization is possible within
the limits imposed by capitalism is not clear. However, it is not
theoretical reflection that motivates masses of people to demand the
democratization of their life conditions. Perceptions of individual and
collective interests and the dynamics of mass consciousness are as
important in this regard as structural analysis of political economy.
Democratization struggles are played out at the level of
intersubjectivities
not as contradictions between modes of production or social
orders, but as concrete struggles for practical change in daily life.
Democratization struggles take on a dynamic which is autonomous of
historic contradictions between modes of production. The global
economy generates pressures under which subordinate groups mobilize
and dominant groups tend to shift from coercive to consensual
forms of domination. But the outcome to societal struggles against
authoritarianism in peripheral and semi-peripheral regions of the
world system is not predetermined.
The second question raised is to what extent does a polyarchic
political system itself constrain popular democratization? Polyarchic
political systems tend to set boundaries in which social struggles
unfold whose parameters do not transgress the social order. Polyarchy
plays a legitimating function for an increasingly cohesive transnational
elite that seeks to legitimate its rule by establishing formal
democratic
institutions. And ideology as a material force establishes patterns of
conduct which fix limits on social action. But the problem is not just
ideological. Polyarchy also place enormous institutional constraints on
popular democratization. Polyarchy as the political institutionalization
of social relations of power limits state accountability to periodic
elections. Between elections groups who control the state are free to
pursue their agenda without any accountability and insulated from
popular pressure. The polyarchic state may legitimately employ
repression
against popular sectors that transgress legality when the demands
they place on the state are not met (they usually are not). Thus while
authoritarianism insulates but does not legitimate elite rule, polyarchy
performs both functions. Attempts to challenge elites within the
bounds of polyarchic legality run up against the vastly superior
resources of the elite. The structural power of transnational capital in
the global economy gives political and ideological power to elites tied
directly and indirectly to transnational capital, and also gives the
transnational elite "veto power" over local states which by chance of
circumstances are captured by popular sectors. This structural power
combines with the institutions of polyarchy and provides an immanent
class advantage to those who command superior resources. These
ideological, institutional and structural constraints to the
democratization
of social life under global capitalism are mutually reinforcing.
They lend themselves to non-coercive mechanisms of social control
and, therefore, to elite hegemony. The case studies tend to support
these propositions.
The notion of national sovereignty requires theoretical rethinking in
light of globalization. In an interdependent world economy, in which
autarky, besides being undesirable in terms of restricting development
possibilities, is not possible, the issue is not "economic
independence."
Rather, it is how popular majorities whose locus of political life is
still
the nation-state may take advantage of economic interdependence to
develop autonomous economic spaces. Popular democratization ultimately
depends on international conditions which are beyond the
control of individual nations. However, the conjoining of formal
political (state) sovereignty and popular sovereignty in society,
springing from internal popular democratization, constitutes the terms
under which majoritarian social groups organized in nations and
groups of nations may struggle for greater equity in the international
order. The utilization of political sovereignty to secure greater equity
between nations and greater control over national resources involves
struggles over redirecting surpluses and stemming the outward drainage
of wealth towards the centers of an asymmetric world economy.
Shifts in the correlation of forces towards the popular classes within
nations and regions, conjointly at the level of state and civil society,
have deep repercussions for international relations and changes in
world order. This is what Gramsci meant when he wrote: "00 international
relations precede or follow (logically) fundamental social relations?
Any organic innovation in the social structure... modifies
organically absolute and relative relations in the international field
toO.,,78Modifications in the international political economy, including
the creation of more symmetric relations among peoples and regions,
begin with basic changes in social relations of the type envisioned by
popular democracy.
Despite the open-endedness of these issues, the implications of
substituting this literal or classic definition of democracy with the
institutional definition embodied in polyarchy are vast. By limiting the
focus to political contestation among elites through procedurally free
elections, the question of who controls the material and cultural
resources of society, as well as asymmetries and inequalities, among
groups within a single nation and among nations within the international
order, becomes extraneous to the discussion of democracy. It
should be clear that promoting popular democracy constitutes a
profound threat to the interests of dominant classes in the United
States and the centers of the world system and their junior counterparts
in the South. When US policymakers and organic intellectuals speak of
"promoting democracy," they do not, as a matter of course, mean
promoting popular democracy. But more than this, they mean the
suppression of popular democracy, in theory and in practice.
Controlling (and limiting) democratization during
"transitions": "trade-offs" and elections
Successful politics is always "the art of the possible". It is no less
true,
however, that the possible is often achieved only by reaching out
towards the impossible which lies beyond it.
--
Max Weber [79]
What happens in other forms of government - namely, that an
organized minority imposes its will on the disorganized majority -
happens also and to perfection, whatever the appearance to the
contrary, under the representative system. When we say that the
voters "choose" their representative,we are using a language that is
very inexact.The truth is that the representativehas himself elected by
the voters. [Emphasis in originaL]
--
Gaetano Mosca [80]
Struggles for democracy go beyond class lines. Democratization movements
may ultimately be pro- or anti-systemic, and usually incorporate
aspects of both.81 However, these movements are not separable from
class struggle. Under dictatorship, struggles for democracy often
become multi-class and majoritarian. But the further majorities push in
these movements for outcomes of popular democratization, the more
dominant classes either withdraw from these movements (or revert to
supporting authoritarianism), or alternatively try to gain control over
and contain society-wide mobilization. Where enough social forces
accumulate to create a polar situation between authoritarianism/
dictatorship and social majorities - such as in Chile, the Philippines,
Nicaragua, and Haiti - the underlying struggle shifts from democracy
versus dictatorship to the terms and reach of the democratization
process. Under the policy of promoting polyarchy, the United States
converges with broad majorities in the dictatorship-versus-democracy
divide. But in the underlying struggle, the convergence is between the
United States and local elites around a program whose objective is to
suppress popular democracy. Controlling and limiting popular
democratization
during transitions becomes the goal of US intervention.
As mass popular pressures grow for an end to dictatorship, a quick
return to elite civilian rule becomes a means for defusing a popular or
revolutionary outcome to the demise of authoritarianism. In such
situations, notes Gramsci, "various strata of the population are not all
capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing
with the same rhythm. The traditional ruling class, which has numerous
trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with
greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs
the control that was slipping from its grasp."82 These are controlled
transitions. Dominant social classes that were direct governing classes
prior to dictatorship, and had lost direct political power, turn - in
competition with popular sectors - to recovering that power. Their
high-risk gamble is to assure the transfer of power to their hands from
authoritarian regimes and simultaneously to keep under careful control
the mobilization of the masses and limit their agenda of social
emancipation. This is why, in instances such as Marcos's Philippines,
Pinochet's Chile, and Duvalier's Haiti, the United States stepped in
just
as mass, society-wide mobilization in favor of democratization was
reaching a peak, and began to "promote democracy" where it had
formerly supported dictatorship, as we shall see.
This is rationalized in democratization theory with the argument
that the only way to assure "democracy" is to accept the boundaries of
the possible, and "the possible" is a functional capitalist polyarchy.83
Popular forces have to be restrained in order to assure a stable
transition, and are held responsible for jeopardizing "democracy" by
inducing with their social demands a resurgence of authoritarianism.
Democratization theorists such as O'Donnell and Schmitter argue
prescriptively that demands which go beyond the acceptable boundaries
of capitalist polyarchy should be defen:ed as "trade-offs" necessary
to assure the end of authoritarianism. One is the "equity trade
off," or the deferral of social justice and economic equality under the
supposition that deprived majorities will at some future point win
justice and equality through the "freedoms" afforded by "liberal
democracy." But the consolidation of polyarchy and its legitimizing
rules and institutions systematically constrain social change in the
post-transition period, as we shall see in the case studies. Another
"trade-off" is concessions to the military, including preservation of
existing military structures and promises not to prosecute militaries
for
human rights violations committed during dictatorships. Hegemony is
"consensus armored by coercion." What takes place in transitions to
polyarchy is a shift from coercive to consensual mechanisms in the
practice of domination, but not the elimination of a coercive apparatus
which, in the last instance, girds the social order. In the practice,
preservation of the military (and even a legal impunity often built into
post-transition juridical structures) in transitions to polyarchy in the
1980s and early 1990skept in place formal apparatuses of coercion that
acted to thwart - by the threat of repression or by actually repressing,
legally or extra-legally - any challenges to the social order, or even
those popular demands which do not transgress the social order itself
but are deemed unacceptable. Latent coercive force thus circumscribes
the decisions of groups and the actions they take in the exercise of
formal legal rights. The preservation of the coercive apparatus during
transitions guards against demands for popular democracy in the
posttransition
period.
"Trade-offs," therefore, are not merely "transitional" concessions of
a tactical character; they become a structural feature of the
postauthoritarian
political landscape, as the case studies illustrate. What is
at stake with the end of authoritarianism is the political and
socioeconomic
project that will replace it. So-ealled "trade-offs" facilitate the
hegemony over transitions by polyarchic elites, often called the
"moderates"
or the "center" in democratization literature. These promoters
of polyarchy strive to assure that in recovering power from
authoritarian
regimes, the relations of class domination themselves are not
jeopardized. The process of regime transition should not get out of
hand, such that a greater quota of political power passes from the
authoritarian regime directly to the popular classes.
Electoral processes, when properly controlled, can contribute to this
elite effort. Elections serve a legitimacy function, provide an immanent
advantage to those who command superior resources, and, when
isolated from other aspects of popular democratization, provide a key
mechanism for intra-elite compromise and accommodation, and therefore
stability. For these and other reasons, electoral processes are often
pivotal in transitions to capitalist polyarchy and figure prominently in
both democratization theory and in the actual US policy of promoting
polyarchy. "For a transition to political democracy to be viable in the
long-run, founding elections must be freely conducted, honestly
tabulated,
and openly contested, yet their results cannot be too accurate or
representative of the actual distribution of voter preference [emphasis
mine]," argue O'Donnell and Schmitter. "Put in a nutshell, parties of
the Right-Center and Right must be 'helped' to do well, and parties to
the Left-Center and Left should not win by an overwhelming majority."
84 Elections playa key role in channeling mass protest and
social demands into controllable processes and non-threatening outcomes.
When electoral processes controlled from above substitute
society-wide mobilization for democratization, it is easy to steer
"transitions," or the breakup up of authoritarianism, into clearly
delineated parameters with attendant constraints on current outcomes
and on future possibilities. And we shall see that the United States
does,
in fact, "help" right-center and right parties to do well.
Controlling transitions also involves controlled demilitarization. The
effort to demilitarize Latin America and other regions on the part of
local civilian elites and US policymakers in the wake of "transitions to
democracy" should not be confused with an intent to eliminate the
coercive capacity of the new neo-liberal states. The new elites of the
global economy did not perceive the old-style militaries as capable of
providing conditions propitious to transnational models of capital
accumulation and long-term political stability. Corrupt militaries
seeking their own corporate privileges were a fetter to capitalist
modernization, an unproductive drain on resources, necessary only
insofar as social control requires a coercive component, and dangerous
to the consolidation of polyarchy. For economic, social and political
reasons, controlled demilitarization is a requirement for the success of
the transnational elite agenda. Controlled demilitarization as a
component
of controlled "democratization" sought to make military authority
subordinate to civilian elites, but not to do away with a repressive
military apparatus, and its ideal type, for US policymakers and local
elites, is the "Panama model," imposed on that country following the
1989 US invasion. In this model, armed forces are "professionalized,"
purged of both nationalist tendencies and the most unruly and
ambitious authoritarian elements, and reduced to constabularies able
to suppress popular demands and protests against neo-liberalism,
while the United States retains the role of international policeman,
responsible for regional and global "security," fighting
drugtrafficking,
terrorism, and other "threats."85
Reconstituting "democracy": the shift in social
control from political to civil society
In the distinction belween means (policies) and ends (interests) in US
foreign policy, the imperative for polyarchy lies in the view that
"democracy" is the most effective means of assuring stability, the
former seen as but a mechanism for the latter. This is in contrast to
prior periods in US foreign-policy history - and correlatedly, to the
historic norm in center-periphery relations predicated on coercive
modes of social control, such as in the colonial era - when military
dictatorships or authoritarian client regimes (and before them, colonial
states) were seen as the best guarantors of social control and
stability.
The intent behind promoting polyarchy is to relieve domestic pressure
on the state from subordinate classes for more fundamental change in
emergent global society. Military regimes and highly unpopular
dictatorships,
such as Somoza in Nicaragua, the Shah in Iran, Marcos in the
Philippines, the Duvaliers in Haiti, and Pinochet in Chile, defended US
and local elite interests. But they also engendered mass-based
opposition
movements that sought outcomes, beyond the mere removal of
dictatorships, of popular democratization. These movements became
transnational in their significance as globalization proceeded and
threatened core and local elite interests. The old authoritarian
arrangements
were no longer guarantors of social control and stability. On the
one hand, says Gershman, "traditional autocrats ... simply cannot
adapt to the pace of change and conflicting political pressures of the
modem world." On the other is "the declining utility of conventional
military force in the contemporary world." In this context, "competition
is likely to continue to shift from the military to the political realm,
and it will become increasingly important for the West to develop a
sophisticated and long-term strategy for democratic political
assistance."
86 Several events in the late 1970s brought home this lesson to
US policymakers. One was the successful transitions in Southern
Europe, particularly Portugal, from authoritarianism to polyarchy as a
result of decisive Western European support for polyarchic elites as a
strategy of containing socialist movements. Another, more compelling
for US policymakers, was the Iranian revolution, followed shortly
afterwards by the Nicaraguan in July 1979. "The Nicaraguan experience
shattered both sides of the argument over US attitudes towards
friendly Third World autocrats," explained Gershman:
On one hand, the conservative view that such regimes are a bulwark
against communism seemed a good deal less compelling after the
Sandinistas took over from Somoza. The Nicaraguan events seemed
to bear out a different analysis, namely, that right-wing
authoritarianism
is fertile soil for the growth of Marxist-Leninist organizations...
On the other hand, the liberal side of the argument - that
policy sufficed in simply seeking the removal of authoritarian
dictatorships,
as communist movements could be defeated by denying
them this easy target - fared no better. As long as the Communists
were the most determined alternative to Somoza, the downfall of the
dictatorship would enable them to take power. Thus in the wake of
Nicaragua both conservatives and liberals needed a fresh approach to
the question of defending democracy in the Third World ... Shirley
Christian said in the epilogue of her study of the Nicaraguan
revolution:
"Only by promoting democratic political development on a
long-term basis can the United States hope to avoid the hard choices
between sending troops and accepting a regime that overtly opposes
its interests." Promoting democracy, in other words, is... a matter of
national security.87
In the past, the US state promoted authoritarianism as the political
system judged most appropriate for the free operation of international
capital, and in this way functioned as what sociologists James Petras
and Morris Morley refer to as the "imperial state," promoting and
protecting the expansion of capital across state boundaries by the
multinational
corporate community.88 Under globalization the "imperial
state" still plays the same role of promoting and protecting the
activity
of transnational capital, but globalizing pressures have inverted the
positive correlation between the investment climate and
authoritarianism.
Now, a country's investment climate is positively related to the
maintenance of a "democratic" order, and the "imperial state" promotes
polyarchy in place of authoritarianism. But this shift required a
corresponding reconceptualization of the principal target in intervened
countries, from political to civil society, as the site of social
control.
There is a critical link in this regard between the "breakdown of
democracy" referred to in the 1975 Trilateral Commission report, The
Crisis of Democracy, and the subsequent development of "democracy
promotion" in foreign policy. The "breakdown of democracy" was
seen as generated by the uncontrolled demands of popular sectors and
oppressed groups in societies where formal political democracy
allowed these groups to mobilize and press their demands. This was
described in the report as "intrinsic challenges to the viability of
democratic government which grow directly out of the functioning of
democracy," and an example of "the dysfunctions of democracy."89
This seminal report was not, in fact, really about the "breakdown" of
democracy; it was about the breakdown of social control. It argued that
an
"excess of democracy" was a "threat" to the social order and established
authority. Huntington, one of the authors of the report, stated
that the danger
comes not primarily from external threats, though such threats are
real, nor from internal subversion from the left or the right, although
both possibilities could exist,but rather from the internal dynamics of
democracy itself in a highly educated, mobilized and participant
society... there are also potentially desirable limits to the indefinite
extension of political democracy.90
This concern with how too much "uncontrolled" democracy can
threaten the existing social order materialized in Chile. There, a
selfdeclared
socialist came to power and proposed to implement a project
of sweeping, popular socioeconomic transformation for which he was
elected, utilizing the constitutional instruments of formal democracy.
Henry Kissinger called this a "fluke of the Chilean political system."91
Allende's government challenged the existing social order from within
its own legitimizing institutions (see chapter 4). With the Chilean
experience in mind, among others, the Trilateral Commission report
stressed the need to "reconstitute democracy" in order to assure that
"democracy" does not generate its own instability, both within states
and in the international system.92 Another of the report's authors,
Michel Crozier, emphasized the need to "carry through a basic mutation
in [the] mode of social control," to "experiment with more flexible
models that could produce more social control with less coercive
pressure." 93
US "democracy promotion," as it actually functions, sets about not
just to secure and stabilize elite-based polyarchic systems but to have
the United States and local elites thoroughly penetrate civil society,
and from therein assure control over popular mobilization and mass
movements (that is, correct the "flukes," or "dysfunctions," of
democracy).
This is in distinction to earlier strategies to contain social and
political mobilization through a focus on control of the state and
governmental apparatus. Stephen Gill, in analyzing the Trilateral
Commission report and the thinking at the highest echelons of the US
foreign-policy establishment, notes that the emergent model of
"reconstituted
democracy" corresponds "to the concept of civil society, and
indicate[s] its centrality in the making of state policy."94 Philip
Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl note: "At its best, civil society provides
an intermediate layer of governance [read: control] between the
individual and the state that is capable of resolving conflicts and
controlling the behavior of members without public coercion."95 US
strategists have shifted attention from the state and governmental
apparatus of other countries to forces in civil society as a key locus
of
power and control. The composition and balance of power in civil
society in a given Third World country is now just as important to US
and transnational interests as who controls the governments of those
countries. This is a shift from social control "from above" to social
control "from below" (and within), for the purpose of managing
change and reform so as to preempt any elemental challenge to the
social order. This explains why the new political intervention does not
target governments per se, but groups in civil society itself - trade
unions, political parties, the mass media, peasant associations,
women's, youth, and other mass organizations.
This shift concurs with critiques made from within the policymaking
establishment and its organic intellectuals of earlier theories of
moder-
nization in the Third World. These theories argued that Third World
countries would be helped along the felicitous path of capitalist
economic development with US (and other Western) aid and investment,
and that stable polyarchic democracy would naturally flow from
economic modernization. However, modernization theories came
under criticism as political unrest in the Third World increased during
the 1960s despite US aid and investment programs and registered
growth in GNPs. As a result, a new body of literature emerged: political
development. Most notable is Huntington's 1968 classic, Political Order
in
Changing Societies, which argued that the political and civil
institutions
in the Third World (i.e., political parties, trade unions, civic groups,
governmental structures) were not sufficiently developed to absorb the
tensions and dislocations associated with modernization. US policy,
therefore, had to look beyond merely assuring a friendly government
and promoting economic growth; it had to focus on the development of
political and civic institutions as it became involved in the Third
World.
After arguing in the Trilateral Commission report that "excessive
democracy" was a "threat," Huntington updated the thinking developed
there in an oft-cited 1984 article, "Will More Countries Become
Democratic?" linking it more explicitly to the emergent transnational
agenda by positing a close relation between unfettered free-market
capitalism (neo-liberalism) and democracy (polyarchy). Reiterating that
"democracy" could best absorb the social and political tensions
associated
with global restructuring, he argued that the prospects for
"democracy" in the 1980s and beyond would require, in addition to
implementing neo-liberalism, building autonomous institutions in civil
society, and particularly a bourgeoisie autonomous of the state and of
state economic intervention. Huntington added that "democracy"
could be further enhanced "as a result of direct efforts by the American
government to affect political processes in other societies."96 Through
"democracy promotion," the United States seeks to build up in other
countries the political and civic infrastructure that Huntington
stressed
was insufficient to absorb tensions and thereby to assure stability.
Promoting polyarchy to suppress popular
democracy and construct transnational hegemony
Formal democratic structures are seen as more disposed to diffusing
the sharpest social tensions and to incorporating sufficient social
bases
with which to sustain stable environments under the conflict-ridden
and fluid conditions of emergent global society. Under a hegemonic
social order, that is, under consensual domination, the state is still
the
site of the "processing" of demands and the reproduction of the
relations of domination, yet the "input" side of the Eastonian equation
is altered, since many an "input" is "resolved" within civil society,
before it ever reaches the state. Hegemonic ideologies contain key
political and socioeconomic concepts which establish the legitimacy or
illegitimacy of the demands placed on the social order. The "political
system" remains the institutionalized arena for processing these
demands, yet a hegemonic social order implies a more expansive
political system incorporating, or fusing, the state and civil society.
All
demands are not processed in the same way. Those that serve to
reproduce the social order (and thereby benefit the long-term interests
of the dominant groups) are legitimized in civil society and filtered
upwards to the state. Those that challenge the social order itself are
delegitimized and filtered out of the very legitimizing parameters of
that order.97 Polyarchy, as a form of elite rule distinct from
authoritarianism
and dictatorship, is better equipped under the conditions of
social dislocation and political reorganization that accompany each
nation's entrance into the global economy to confront, or at least
control, popular sectors and their demands. Polyarchic political
systems lend themselves to more durable forms of social control, and
therefore to stability.
But trappings of democratic procedure in a polyarchic political
system do not mean that the lives of those in nations where the United
States is "promoting democracy" become filled with authentic or
meaningful democratic content, much less that social justice or greater
economic equality is achieved. Seen in the light of popular democracy,
US "democracy" and "democratization," have nothing to do with
meeting the authentic aspirations of repressed and marginalized
majorities for political participation and for greater socioeconomic
justice. Nevertheless, the new political intervention is complex and
cannot be reduced to simplistic scenarios or conspiratorial plots in
which elite, polyarchic players A, B, and C in the intervened countries
are supported by Washington, and popular democratic leaders 0, E,
and F are suppressed (even though, ironically, this is what sometimes
takes place). Even as alternative concepts of democracy compete, the
aspirations for democratization strike deep chords among broad
sectors of the population, and calls for democracy in historically anti-
democratic systems find resonance throughout civil and political
society. Democratization movements are therefore almost always
majoritarian social struggles. This study requires assimilating a level
of
analytical abstraction in which the focus is on the intersection of US
policy with the aims and objectives of multiple and competing groups
who are involved in majoritarian struggles for democracy.
In synopsis, the extended policymaking community has developed a
theoretical awareness and a practical attunement to what is required
for the maintenance of social control in twenty-first-century global
society. The community analyzed the dramatic changes in the
international
correlation of forces between the 1960s and the 1990s which
occurred simultaneously with new challenges raised by subordinate
groups in the world system for a redistribution of resources and the
democratization of social life. This community also perceived the
increasing structural power of transnational capital and the emergence
of transnational forces in the wake of globalization, including
reconfigured
transnational blocs, and explored the prospects for new forms of
transnational political organization. Its awareness and attunement (the
behavioral level) developed on the basis of the theoretical and
intellectual
reflection (the structural-conjuncturallevel) that took place among
organic intellectuals linked directly and indirectly to the state, and
on
the heels of the general crisis of elite rule in the South.
Authoritarianism
increasingly proved to be an untenable mode of domination
and an unpredictable means of preserving asymmetries within and
among nations as globalizing processes began to assert themselves (the
structural level). As argued by its promoters, polyarchy should prove
to be more resilient in constructing and maintaining global order. But
the shift is in the means, not the ends, of US policy. It involves a
change in methods, in formal political-institutional arrangements, and
in cultural and ideological discourse. The ends are defense of the
privileges of Northern elites and their Southern counterparts in a
highly stratified world system. Promoting polyarchy is an attempt to
develop a transnational Gramscian hegemony in emergent global
society. These are the theoretical underpinnings of the new political
intervention.
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