Luis Rubio
Like many other things in life, democracy is an acquired art that evolves and transforms over time. England, perhaps the first democratic nation in the modern sense of the term, began to be constructed with the Magna Carta in 1215. After centuries of piecemeal progress, democracy suddenly burgeoned at the end of WWII.
The most common explanation for the transformations that occurred over the past seventy years, especially in southern Europe and Latin America, was that they took place under the rubric of the so-called “modernization theory.” The concept continued evolving and changing throughout the decades. Still, its guiding principle was that economic growth generates political pressures, which can only be contained through the constitution of mechanisms of political participation. Under this conception, the governments -hard and soft, modern or tyrannical, civilian or military- ended up ceding control because they had no other choice. That is, it was the weakness of their structures that led to the building of democratic systems of government.
Dan Slater and Joseph Wong* argue that the process of democratic transition in Asia followed a very different pattern, which may explain the contrast with Latin America in results, especially in the economic sphere. Their approach is particularly interesting for Mexico now that it is undergoing a systematic regression politically and economically.
In contrast with the Latin-American region, which has undergone democratization processes nearly always during economic crises, in Asia, the success of economic development created circumstances propitious for democracy. The central argument of Slater and Wong is that it was developmental governments (almost all military or associated with these) that chose democracy deliberately and voluntarily, not because they would confront risks of radical or revolutionary uprisings but more readily the contrary: because they had the expectation, in fact, the certainty, that the change in the governmental system would secure stability and contribute to accelerating economic development. They acted through strength, not through weakness or lack of alternatives.
The authors assert that not only were there alternatives, but that economically successful nations such as China and Singapore have elected not to reform their political structures: “Paradoxically, an authoritarian regime strong enough to thrive is strong enough to retain its authoritarian power in the near term if it so chooses.” This way of seeing things stands the theory of modernization on its head in that it implies that governments and economies are strong and, therefore, capable of deciding the best way to administer themselves, a situation very distinct, historically, from that in Latin America.
But the key factor that characterizes the contention of these authors is that to attain their successful economic development, nations like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and other less successful such as Indonesia and Thailand, were building indispensable mechanisms for the functioning of the economy, especially in ambits like the bureaucracy, security, and justice. Before liberalizing, they constructed effective and efficient governments to guarantee the functioning of their economies, deriving from which they procured professional bureaucratic structures with substantive autonomy that would allow them to ignore political pressures to fulfill their respective mandates. Having abandoned practices based on patrimonial principles that would favor loyalty and corruption, “the autocrats in the region liberalized because they had very good reason to expect the incumbent regime’s most important political and economic organizations to endure and even flourish under the newly democratic conditions.”
In Mexico, the reforms initiated in the eighties followed the opposite pattern: they responded to the succession of economic crises that put the government against the wall. The reforms were the product of weakness and, far from responding to criteria of economic efficiency, were negotiated to always protect the interests privileged by the reigning political coalition. When the time came to negotiate political reforms, especially in the nineties, the governmental structures were lacking all the elements that the Asians had resolved beforehand, beginning with professional and apolitical bureaucratic structures, an effective judiciary, and functional strategies of security. Under this yardstick, Mexico entered the democratic era because there was no alternative (conflict was growing) but without a consolidated economic foundation that would ensure continuity or, in the words of the authors, the expectation that the country would flourish under the new democratic provisos. Optimism outstripped the objective circumstances.
López Obrador dismantled the few remaining vestiges of governmental capacity, and worse, he has demolished the judiciary. It is difficult to imagine an optimistic future for his successor. However, regression such as that which Mexico is experiencing today has no reason to be definitive. As Indonesia illustrates, pressure from the citizenry can force a government to imitate the successful ones, not the losers. That is the challenge.
*From Development to Democracy: The Transformation of Modern Asia, Princeton
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