“It is impossible to name a country that has developed in democracy. Democracy is only the result.”
This statement by Burkinabe military ruler, Captain Ibrahim Traore, should not be controversial.
You can say rightly that, as a coup-plotting military ruler, he is a flawed messenger for the point he’s making.
You can say his statement is convenient and self-serving. You can say he’s merely justifying the kind of governmental system he superintends. You can say that, as a military ruler, he has no choice but to discredit democracy.
You’d be right in making these assumptions.
But those assertions alone do not make him wrong on the points he raised. Even a broken clock, as they say, is right twice a day. You’d have to use evidence, history, and logic to disprove his point.
I haven’t seen anyone do that. Not even Gimba Kakanda, one of my most perceptive interlocutors in the debate, did that.
All I see are attacks on the messenger, Traore, and the repetition of stock, frozen, and hackneyed “democracy” talking points manufactured in the West and propagated to uncritical folks in the non-West.
And yet, Traore’s message is a simple and truthful one: he is debunking or rejecting the widespread, taken-for-granted, but utterly inaccurate assumption that democracy produces or guarantees development.
This is not an innocuous, accidental assumption. This a fat lie that was propagated to popular reception in our part of the world by so-called pro-democracy activists and their Western funders in the moment of “democratization” in the 1990s and 2000s.
Traore is thus correct in asserting that the notion that democracy guarantees development or that it produces more development than its supposed opposites is fraudulent. The claim is simply not borne out by evidence, historical or contemporary.
The truth is, and I challenge anyone to prove this wrong with evidence from any era of human history, including our present time, neither democracy nor various iterations of authoritarian rule guarantees development.
The much-cited case of the West is a lie.
The US became a “developed” country when it was at best a severely restrictive democracy, and at worst an authoritarian imperial plutocracy. It denied the franchise to non-whites and women and practiced segregation, institutionalized discrimination, and sociopolitical exclusion.
The so-called gilded age of America, when the country became an industrialized “developed” economy and military power (1865-1904) was a period in which the US could hardly be described as a liberal democracy. I’ve not even “touched” the period of slavery.
At the time that Britain became a “developed” country and economy, it had not fully become a constitutional monarchy. Moreover, it practiced slavery, authoritarian colonial rule, and many other undemocratic systems of rule and administration in its vast global empire.
What about the other countries of Europe, including the Scandinavian countries? The ones who are today regarded as “developed” achieved that status when they were ruled by absolute monarchies, not when they became “democratic.”
So, clearly, there is no correlation between the development of the West and democracy.
There is a vast economic history literature on the so-called Great Divergence, that is, the West’s developmental separation from the rest of the World. There are several explanations and consensuses in this literature on why the West “developed” first, but democracy is not one of the reasons proffered. It cannot be because the chronology doesn’t work as the Great Divergence occurred in the sixteenth century.
This is of course not to say that non-democratic leadership forms guarantee development. The truth is that there are and have been “democratic” and “non-democratic” developed countries, just as there are and have been underdeveloped “democratic” and “non-democratic” countries.
In the former scenario, development did not follow from the leadership and political system adopted. Several other factors had to be present, several good choices had to be made, and the appropriate institutions built and nurtured. All these can be done in “democratic” and “non-democratic” systems.
The only area where Captain Traore may have exaggerated his point is his rather absolutist point that a country cannot or does not develop in a democracy. It can happen, all other things being equal.
Where he is absolutely right is in the assertion that the overwhelming majority of countries developed when they had the least amount of political liberalization or “democracy.”
Then, as Traore overarching point signaled, after development was achieved, democracy followed. This is because development produces a middle class, and it is the middle class, the bourgeoisie in Marxian terms, that agitates for, builds, and nurtures democracy.
Historically, you didn’t have liberal democracy without development, without the emergence of a vibrant middle class.
This chronology and sequence are historical facts. Prior to the “democratization” imposed on African and other non-Western spaces in the 1990s post-Cold War world, there had been no “democratization” without a country first developing and producing a middle class. It had never happened.
This is why that African moment of “democratization” was truly when, to paraphrase Achebe, this rain began to beat Africa. It was the moment when Africans were deceived into adopting liberal democracy with the lie that democracy fosters development.
In a poor, underdeveloped country, democracy, especially of the Western liberal kind, exacerbates problems and stymies development.
Many economists now recognize this, although they differ on the alternatives and remedies. Dambisa Moyo is one economist who makes this point eloquently.
I was just at a conference organized for Economist and recent Nobel Prize winner, James Robinson, and the issue of the unsuitability of liberal democracy for Africa echoed through the proceedings.
Finally, two points.
First, the retort of “what is the alternative?” is the most pedestrian way to engage with the question of the failure of “democracy” in Africa and with the critique of the fraudulent coupling of “democracy” and development.
That question uncritically accepts the problematic binary of democracy and autocracy, a construct produced in Western discourse to universalize liberal democracy and discredit/demonize other political forms found in the non-Western world.
That Eurocentric binary should itself be challenged and rejected. I believe that’s Traore’s overarching point, whatever motives we may plausibly attribute to him in making that point.
There are different kinds of democracy, different ways of being democratic, and Africa had several kinds of democracy before colonization and before our centuries-long encounter with Euro-America. So did Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
We must stop talking as if the only alternative to liberal democracy is military dictatorship or similar autocratic forms of rule. We can forge our own kind of democracy that does not check all the boxes constructed by Western liberal democratic discourse. We do not have to be democratic in the way that the West sanctions or approves of.
And even in discussing and debating democracy, governance, and leadership systems, we should not be bound by or have our discussion constrained or structured by the discursive hegemony of the West and their restrictive, simplistic, and self-interested definitions of what is democratic and what it not. Nor should we use the inaccurate and simplistic binary of democracy versus dictatorship.
This is one of the areas in which I fully support decolonial theory, especially the call for the decolonization of the colonial language we use uncritically to discuss matters concerning our countries.
There are gradations of democracy, generically speaking. And there are gradations of autocracy, generically speaking. Political systems constitute a continuum. Each part of the world should be free to find a location for itself along that spectrum, or to invent something entirely new to suit its political history, institutional peculiarity, cultural singularity, and unique aspirations.
The second final point is that it is the proponents of the idea of “democracy” as a vehicle of development, those who argue that democracy produces development, who have to demonstrate their claim. As the saying goes, he who asserts must demonstrate.
Asking those who critique that claim to advance an alternative is changing the subject, a non-sequitur.
Let those who argue that democracy—however defined—produces development demonstrate it with concrete examples from history and our contemporary world. I have already debunked the often-cited examples of the West.
Gimba Kakanda and co, over to you.
