On Democratization

At his blog, Matthew Yglesias makes a point in a post, “Geopolitics and Democracy,” that, while not explicitly about Africa, has quite clear ramifications for the way that we think about and describe the political context in African nation states. I am going to quote him in full because 1) the post is pretty salient and 2) I am going to assume that he would not object, though do go to his work, which generally focuses on American politics:

True, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was democratically elected. But you can discern his authoritarian tendencies in the fact that he had the constitution changed to allow him to run for a second term, and currently he’s working on changing the constitution again to allow for a third term.

Oh, no, wait . . . that’s not Chavez, that’s staunch American ally and brilliant democratic leader Alvaro Uribe in Colombia. The horror.

Which just goes to illustrate a longstanding and bothersome point. In the world you’ve got your countries that are clearly democracies—South Korea, Canada, Portugal. And you’ve also got your countries that are clearly despotic—Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Burma. But you’ve also got an extremely broad class of countries, typically “middle income” countries, where they have elections and competition between political parties but also have a lot of corruption, weak state institutions, and not much in the way of an entrenched tradition of liberalism.

But lacking a good umbrella term for states that fall into this middle ground, the tendency is for the American media and political establishment to arbitrarily assign such states to either the “promising new democracy” box or “threatening incipient authoritarianism” box based primarily on geopolitical considerations. So-called “pro-American” leaders are also “democrats” whereas those alleged to be “anti-American” are “authoritarian.”

Again, I think the ramifications for how we think about Africa are quite clear, or at least descriptively, his assessment captures the rather facile way too many conceive of politics in those African countries that even draw any attention in the American/”Western” media.