The Retreat of Democracy and Other Itinerant Essays on Globalization, Economics, and India

by Kaushik Basu

Overview

‘The Retreat of Democracy’ presents an expanded and reworked selection of Basu's best journalistic and academic writings on political and economic themes since the late 1990s. As well as essays on globalization and democracy, the book provides analyses of ideas in economics, as well as anthroplogical observations on social norms, the role of culture, and travel in India and abroad. It also includes an intellectual biography of Amartya Sen, with a discussion of his scientific contributions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843318651
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	01/01/2010
Series:	Anthem South Asian Studies
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Kaushik Basu is the Carl Marks Professor of Economics and Chairman of the Department of Economics at Cornell University. He has to his credit a large number of monographs, edited volumes, and essay collections on development economics and democracy.

Read an Excerpt

The Retreat of Democracy

and Other Itinerant Essays on Globalization, Economics, and India

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By Kaushik Basu

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2010 Kaushik Basu
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84331-865-1

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CHAPTER 1

Elé Belé: The Subversion of Democracy

In Calcutta, when as children we played games and some younger kid came along and insisted on joining in, one way of handling the situation was to let the new kid play but only after whispering into one another's ears the words elé belé. An elé belé is a player who thinks he is participating but who is in truth merely being allowed to go through the motions of participation. Apart from him, everybody playing knows that he is not to be taken seriously. A goal scored by him is not a real goal.

When I was a child growing up in Calcutta, mastering the (admittedly cruel) art of elé belé was very important. When that nagging kid arrived, accompanied by a doting mother, we could by a mere glance convey to one another that the new kid would be an elé belé. What we do not always realize is how much of the adult world, especially nowadays when 'participatory democracy' is the rage, continues to use this technique of elé belé. If we think hard enough, we can all recall collective decision-making situations — a selection committee, a committee for drafting rules — where some committee members were elé belés. And though we may not have been aware, there have for sure been situations where we ourselves were the elé belés.

International organizations, officially committed to involving all nations in their decision-making, are often run by a small group of powerful nations, while others merely go through the motions of participation. It has been pointed out that the WTO, which runs on the principle of 'one country one vote', actually has its agenda fixed behind the stage by a small group of nations, a phenomenon reminiscent of something staged that has come to be known as the 'green room effect'. It is nowadays the done thing for international organizations publishing a report or a manuscript to involve all the 'stakeholders' and to reflect their opinions. The evolving report is usually put on a website and suggestions are invited from one and all — NGOs, trade unions, and civil society. This develops a sense of participation and has the advantage of placing no additional burden on the international organization involved. As a friend of mine, seasoned in such matters, tells me, the key to a good report is to finally ignore all the comments received and to write up the report just as you want with no websites and no participation.

Political analysts in India have puzzled over the fact that civil society, almost across the board, has been critical of the Narendra Modiled Gujarat government's handling of communal violence, and yet this has had no effect on the government. Likewise the press, especially the English language one, has been vocal about the shameful failure of government to punish the perpetrators of communal carnage. In many other countries, governments resist popular opinion from placing restraints on them by suppressing the airing of such opinion. In India, fortunately, the freedom of expression is admirably free. The paradox is that such free expression of opinion does not restrain or influence how Indian governments behave.

One witnesses something similar in the United States. People express their opinion freely in newspapers, on television. Take for instance George Bush's war on Iraq. Never before in the US has there been so much opposition to a war before it occurred. There have been large student protests in a number of university campuses. The AFL-CIO has taken a position against the war. Ordinary citizens, troubled by the dubious morality of a pre-emptive attack that will kill thousands of civilians, have spoken out everywhere. The respected TV commentator Bill Moyers, after conducting a regular interview on PBS, faced the camera to forcefully state his opposition to his government's war. We must not do to Baghdad what al Qaeda did to us, he declared.

This aspect of the United States, as also of India, is admirable: there is little effort to muzzle the freedom to criticize government, as in Iraq, China, and scores of dictatorial countries around the world. However, what is not so nice is that these democracies — the US, India, the UK, and others — are becoming increasingly adept at not allowing freely expressed opinion to control and restrain what the governments do. Jimmy Carter has recently written: 'Despite the overwhelming opposition of most people ... the United States seems determined to carry out military and diplomatic action that is almost unprecedented in the history of civilized nations.' This observation applies equally to Tony Blair's British government.

Keeping aside the immorality of this war — and immoral it is — and the shameful failure (or, more accurately, wilfull neglect) of the Indian government to control the Gujarat killings — and shameful it is — I want to draw attention to this newly-increasing talent of democracies to 'deal' with opinion. This is a manifestation of the same elé belé phenomenon — of letting people believe that their opinion counts, that they are participating in their nation's decision-making. This is the same strategy as that of posting an emerging 'report' on the web, inviting opinion, and then writing the report while ignoring the opinions received.

As democracies mature, it is only natural that they will learn how to manage opinion, and in many cases, even shape opinion. Every time the UN weapons inspector Hans Blix commented on the UN inspection of Iraq, it was fascinating to listen to members of the Bush administration paraphrase him. The paraphrasing consisted of subtly changing Blix's comments to suit the US government's case for war. The hope was that by repeating the altered comments sufficiently often, mass opinion would favour the war.

It is often pointed out that nascent democracies do not function well because citizens need to learn how to participate in democratic decision-making. It may be hard to overthrow a totalitarian regime and organize an election. But the harder task is to go from there to creating a true democracy. For people who are habituated into living in a totalitarian state, it is not easy to learn what participation entails. Hence, the popular belief that democracies, like wine, improve with maturity. While there may be truth in this, it is vital to remember that there is also a downside to maturity. Just as citizens in a democracy continuously learn to participate, democratic governments also continuously learn how to get their own way despite the participation.

Instead of going into denial, if we recognize this problem we can prevent established democracies from atrophying and help new democracies become more effective. There is so much talk nowadays of the need to 'lean' on nations to establish democracy. This is as it should be. There is much less talk, however, of an even more pressing need, namely, that of minimal global democracy. The quickening pace of globalization has brought people and nations rapidly and unexpectedly close to one another, while institutions of global governance and democracy remain primitive. This is a dangerous brew that could make for political turmoil, instability, and even war.

It is not only morally wrong to leave nations and communities feeling marginalized and without voice: it is a recipe for terrorism and trouble. The way out of this is not unilateral pre-emptive action but the strengthening of global democracy. In doing this, we need to be continuously aware that such a process will have to contend with subversion in the form of powerful nations trying to get away by creating the illusion of democracy and participation. It is in our own long-run interest to avoid being made elé belés.

CHAPTER 2

The Retreat of Global Democracy

One strange and negative fallout of globalization, which seems to have gone unnoticed, not just by the laity but also by professional economists and political scientists, is this. Even if every country becomes more democratic, the world as a whole is firmly on course to becoming less democratic. This paradoxical process is a consequence of globalization, entailing the increasing ease with which countries can exert influence on the society, economy, and polity of one another. This has never been more transparent than in the wake of the East Asian economic crisis, South Asian nuclear tests, and political and military skirmishes and battles around the world, especially the Middle East. What is noteworthy is that the increase in the power of nations to influence one another has not been symmetric. The well being of Cubans, for instance, depends a lot on what the US president does. The US, because of its enormous international power, can cut off much of Cuba's trade lines, prevent it from exporting goods, and pursue policies which result in inflationary pressures in Cuba — all without having US personnel step beyond the shores of their country. There is, however, very little that Cubans can do to influence the quality of life in the US. Similar asymmetries can be found all around the world: India and Sri Lanka, Japan and Korea.

If 'democracy' means people having the power to elect those who have influence over their lives, then, even if one by one each country adopts democratic procedures for choosing its leader, as long as this process happens to be accompanied by increasing globalization, it is entirely possible that the world as a whole will become less democratic. This is because we do not have a system of transnational voting. Thus, a more democratic Iraq may be able to vote in favour of or against Saddam Hussain, but Iraq has no say in the choice of the US president, even though he exerts an enormous influence on their lives. Hence, the current policy in the US and elsewhere to push for greater democracy in every country may not be good enough for establishing more democracy in the world.

Strictly speaking, for greater global democracy we need to give people in weaker nations a say in the choice of leaders in stronger nations! Now, this is not about to happen. So the trend in global de-democratization is probably going to be with us for some time, along with its concomitant tensions and global instability.

These tensions are most evident in the management of the global economy and finances. Thanks to globalization, the fates of different economies have become intertwined as never before. A bank in Japan can influence the trajectory of the Korean economy. A crisis in Asia can spark trouble in Brazil.

The current system of intervening in these international problems is highly oligarchic, with not even a pretence of democracy. It is not just a linguistic lapse that the standard solution advocated the world over by the IMF used to be called the Washington Consensus. The package put together in the late 1990s by the IMF, with backing from the US and Japan, to rescue the South Korean economy was, as was widely recognized, a package meant primarily to help the rescuers. A donor of credit naturally wants to impose conditions to ensure that the borrowing country is able to repay the loan. But when those conditions include virtually unconnected conditions — such as Koreans being required to lift the ban on imports of certain Japanese products or to open up to foreign banks (an item that had long been on America's bilateral agenda) — there is an unavoidable loss of credibility.

Some of the effects of policy choices among the more powerful nations on the weaker ones may be good for the latter; but that is not the issue here. From the point of view of assessing global democracy what is relevant is that the people of the weaker nations have no say in who becomes the leader in powerful nations that influence their destinies.

What does one do about this? Since the citizens of Iraq being allowed to vote in the next US presidential election, or the Koreans in the next Japanese hustings, is not quite on the cards right now, one must think of realistic ways to compensate for the retreat in global democracy. This essentially means that the need for democratically constituted international organizations is greater today than ever before. This will need a vast reorganization of agencies such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the United Nations, making their leadership structure much more transparently democratic, and more distanced from the wealth of the interested parties — just as we do not allow Mr Ambani or Mr Gates to cast several votes in their respective national elections on the grounds that they have more money and pay more taxes than most other people. Money enables its owner to buy many advantages; that is as it should be. But it is also a precept of democracy that a person's greater financial power should not translate into a louder political voice. It is the failure of this precept in the context of nation states and global decision-making that has seriously handicapped global democracy.

The increasing globalization of capital markets has made it possible for poor countries to grow at rates that were once beyond anyone's expectation, but it has also brought new hazards. The Asian (and, increasingly, global) economic crisis is simply a reminder that we need better international monitors and new rules of the game to take account of the changed conditions of the world economy. But for the global monitoring agency to have credibility it must be recognized as a democratic institution and not an instrument of global oligarchy.

II

Rules and customs, once formed, tend to outlive people and even nations. India's caste norms may once have had a rationale, but these norms have long outlived the rationale and the individuals that played a role in their formation in the mists of distant history. We are today living in an age in which the idea of global governance is beginning to take shape. International conventions on climate change, labour standards, the treatment of POWs, and the formation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in July 2002, are all incipient attempts to bring the world under some common norms and laws. The USA has been in the forefront of many of these efforts. During Bill Clinton's presidency it took the initiative for the ICC and signed the 'Rome Statute' that made it possible.

It is unfortunate that the US administration of George Bush, Jr., while on the one hand deeply involved globally, has at the same time become the most vigorous opponent of global governance and democracy. Bewilderingly, it has sought to resist virtually all these conventions. As for the POW convention, the Bush administration does not reject it but insists that it alone has the right to decide who is a prisoner of war, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. Not surprisingly, this unilateralism has met with intense criticism in the media. What has not been pointed out is that, no matter what the advantages are to the US being able to flex its muscles undeterred by global courts and norms (and no doubt there are some), what the US does at this formative stage of globalization will leave its imprint on the future. If, for instance, the rule gets set that the militarily most powerful nation will be above the global laws, then it is likely that this rule will survive changes in the pecking order of powerful nations.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Retreat of Democracy by Kaushik Basu. Copyright © 2010 Kaushik Basu. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Introduction; Part 1: Democracy and Globalisation; Part 2: India and the World; Part 3: Social Norms and Political Economy; Part 4: Persons; Part 5: On the Road, Around the World; Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

'Kaushik Basu is that triply rare being - an Indian intellectual who is open-minded, an economic theorist who is interested in human beings, and an American academic who has a sense of style.' —Ramachandra Guha, author of 'India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy'

'This is a rare book that combines the wisdom of market economy with social upliftment. Basu shows he is a clear and deep thinker with his heart in the right place.' —N. R. Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys Technologies

'This creative, lucid and forthright collection of essays is a joy to read, even where one disagrees. It will be of great value in sensitizing economists to political realities, and others to economic realities.' —Jean Drèze, former Lecturer in Development Economics at the London School of Economics