I believe economic and legal (constitutional) reforms play a greater role in opposing communism than mere democracy (suffrage).
Ok, we’re in the “defining democracy” stage… when I say “democratic reforms” I mean reforms aimed at enhancing the three things that I believe define democracy: political accountability, protection of basic rights, and guarantees of basic liberties (including economic liberties).
All of us have seen that elections alone don’t make a democracy, or assure good government. This is because elections do not assure political accountability, especially where the political system is undeveloped and the rule of law is weak. Elections are critical, though: they provide an avenue for change, and they create a link of confidence, or at least the potential for such a link, between government and governed. That is a critical factor in fighting insurgencies. I’ve seen how fast popular support for a leftist insurgency can crumble in the face of an accepted elected government, even if the performance of that government is weak.
I don't believe it's necessarily the form of political system that will protect people from totalitarianism or authoritarianism. It's a system where people have an expectation that they receive fair and due process by the government and the system which that government represents.
These things can only come about when a government is accountable to its people, and when it guarantees basic protections and liberties.
only under democratic, and authoritarian systems do we find economic property rights generally respected.
I don’t think you’d say that if you had any direct experience of authoritarian regimes. The only property rights such regimes respected were the rights of those who ran the regime, and they concentrated property under their control as fast as most of the left-leaning regimes did, often faster. They were able to do this because they were able to wield the power of the state for personal ends.
We called certain regimes “authoritarian”, and accepted them as an evil necessary to the defeat of communism, a greater evil. “Feudal” would have been a better description. Many of us have yet to accept the degree of damage these regimes did, or that these regimes were actually, in retrospect, more of a liability than an asset in the fight against communism.
Not being particularly familiar with the Phillipine economy (other than likely being agricultural), what exactly were they "import dependent" upon? Technology?
Energy. All kinds of machinery. Most complex manufactured goods. Telecommunications equipment (in mid-‘80s Manila, applicants for phone lines faced a ten year waiting period). All but the simplest tools. Heavy equipment of all kinds. Ships (7000 islands, remember). Aircraft. Fertilizer and pesticides. Vehicles: there was a time when the only new vehicles available were being cobbled together in small lots, using castoff diesels imported from Japan and Korea. You can imagine what that did for urban air quality.
You’d be surprised at just how import-dependent an agricultural economy can be when it’s deliberately designed to be that way, as colonial economies were.
I've heard it stated by various international analysts that currency devaluations and stock market collapses are usually preceded by capital flight by private investors. These are the people who recognize that the "party is over" and it's time to find safer havens for their capital.
This is entirely true of devaluation in the current climate. 20-30 years ago things were different: most countries fixed their currency rates in those days, and devaluations were scheduled events debated in Parliament.
The round of devaluations (it wasn’t just in the Philippines) that I’m discussing came about because a large number of badly managed countries came simultaneously under the control of the IMF and the World Bank, at a time when those institutions were coming under the control of highly technical economists. In those days it was widely believed, with great relief, that economic science really had come up with the answer, and that the computer models at U. of Chicago were going to make the 3rd world prosper.
The economic prescription in most cases was an inherently valid one: make use of the cheap labor base by going into labor-intensive light industry aimed at the export market, and move from subsistence food-crop agriculture to plantation-based cash crops. The remaining food farmers could exploit agricultural technology to feed the people on half the land previously necessary, and the income from the exports would trickle down and jump-start domestic demand.
It wasn’t a bad idea, really, but it didn’t work. Part of the problem was that the same prescription was made simultaneously in many parts of the world, which left poor countries competing against one another to offer the lowest wages and the cheapest exchange rates. Boosting exports meant devaluation, and former colonies are almost always import-dependent. That meant higher prices, at a time when the government was trying to keep wages down, in places where people were already desperately poor. That meant unrest, easily exploited by rebels.
The agricultural program had problems too. In the Philippines, the geniuses at IRRI (not sarcasm, they really are) came up with rice strains that tripled yields per crop and allowed an extra crop per growing season. Farmers loved it. The calculations on return, though, were based on anticipated prices for imported fertilizers and pesticides, which the new strains needed in prodigious quantities. Devaluation and the rising price of oil threw these calculations out, and the new strains got very expensive to produce. New problem: if you let the price of rice float up, your wage-repressed urban population takes to the streets. If you don’t let the price of rice go up, your farmers go bust, and the friendly neighborhood commie will be right there to point out that the words “Monsanto” and “Dow” are written in big letters on the sides of those expensive bags.
The farmers tried to go back to the native rice, which was at least cheap to grow, but nobody had thought to keep the seeds.
The result was a mess, and Governments had to choose between breaking the program and repressing their own people.
They paid for it with something, didn't they? Did they use capital borrowed from the IMF and World Bank, or was it foreign capital that eventually expected a return on their investment
There we get to the next step in the program. Way back in the ‘70s it became clear that private banks needed loan customers in the developing world, and that companies in the developing world needed the capital that banks could provide. The system that developed allowed private companies in developing countries to borrow from international banks, as long as they obtained a government guarantee that if the company defaulted, the government would pay back the money. People back then thought that Governments don’t default, but the IMF was charged with seeing that Governments did not guarantee more loans than they could pay. This came to mean that any government with an IMF program in place could guarantee loans.
In theory, it was a good system. In practice, it became clear that the IMF was not going to crack the whip on governments that were seen as vital allies against communism. The dictators figured this out, of course. They set up their own companies, guaranteed their own loans, and opened the tap. Some went to private accounts, a lot ended up as pork barrel funds aimed at keeping the population sufficiently placated to keep the powers in power.
When the debt got big enough, and the IMF was finally forced to step in, the impact of the sudden and drastic policy changes on the legitimate economy was enormous, and created huge dislocations. The ruling classes generally managed to keep their own sources of income out of the firing line, of course. Workers and farmers couldn’t do that, and when the tension placed on them became unbearable, they got disorderly. That left the dictators with a choice between breaking the IMF program or breaking heads; since breaking the IMF program would turn off the tap, the choice was not in doubt. The broken heads, of course, were proudly displayed as a bargaining chip, evidence of fidelity to the anti-communist cause.
The communists loved it. Communism is a reactive philosophy; it flourishes on bad government, and repression feeds it. I can’t think offhand of one case in which an indigenous communist revolution has flourished in a well-governed country.
This is why I no longer see communism as a threat. The communist philosophy rose as a reaction to brutal and exploitive industrial conditions and feudal agricultural paradigms found in much of the world in the late 19th century. Western society grew out of that stage, partially in response to the communist challenge, and those conditions are no longer common enough to support a communist movement, which can exist only where governments and economies fail. Communism’s performance has been a complete failure, and the conditions on which it grew now exist only in scattered pockets. It’s dead.
can foreign influences truly be blamed for all of these problems? Or might we spend more time blaming those local power elites who used and abused their powers, transferring it off-shore for their "retirement accounts… If there's anything that holds back the developing world, it's the pervasive nature of Kleptocratic regimes which abuse their power and face no accountability. "
Unfortunately, many of these individuals and entrenched systems were sustained by foreign influences, largely American ones. We were forced into this corner because we let the communists seize the moral high ground of opposition to feudalism and colonialism. That was our natural territory, and if it wasn’t for our Eurocentrism, we could have grabbed it first at the close of the second world war.
I should repeat, again, that I’m not blaming anybody. Just trying to learn and understand.
We aren’t perfect. We make mistakes, like anybody else. Unfortunately, when you have great power, your mistakes reverberate. None of this means that “everything bad is America’s fault”. None of this means that America and Americans have not done many great things. It does mean that we should refrain from portraying ourselves as the saviours of the world to people who have suffered the consequences of our mistakes (often to a larger extent than we have). America has a lot to offer, but it needs to offer it with a little more humility and a little better understanding of why people see us with suspicion. It’s not all illegitimate, or the consequence of propaganda. There are real concerns that need to be addressed.
Unfortunately, these concerns are hard to see when so many are up on the high horse with their noses in the air. |
