Last week, the Weekly Standard had a cover article entitled "Poor
Democracies: Instead of condescension, they deserve our support," which you
may find interesting:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/magazine/mag_6_41_01/aron_feat_6_41_01.asp
The article is a compare and contrast of the development of democracies that
have recently emerged and the development of democracies that emerged in
earlier times. Here is a taste:
"Another defining attribute of poor democracies is their historically
unprecedented combination of elections by universal suffrage with early,
crude, and brutal capitalism, what Marx called the capitalism of "primary
accumulation."
In the West, capitalism preceded universal suffrage by at least a century.
In most poor democracies, certainly those of the post-Communist variety,
democracy was the paramount societal goal, with capitalism a distant second
item on the agenda. (In some countries, we have been treated to the sight,
never before beheld, of modern democracy essentially without capitalism�for
example, in Ukraine between 1991 and 1995.) This has produced a novel
socioeconomic organism: capitalism whose key elements require approval by
the voters, elements as basic as private ownership of large industrial
enterprises, the right to buy and sell land, to hire and fire workers, and
market prices for rent and utilities.
Where the foundations of modern capitalism are being laid for the first time
in countries governed by majority rule, the consequences for both capitalism
and democracy are profound. The experience of the poor democracies is a
reminder of the fundamental heterogeneity of capitalism and democracy: The
former institutionalizes inequality, while the latter institutionalizes
equality. Amalgamated in the West by the weight of time and custom,
capitalism and democracy have an especially tense, often tenuous,
co-existence in poor democracies. One result is a remarkable opportunity in
the early 21st century to revisit the rough and ready days of early
capitalism, whose "bloodstained story of economic individualism and
unrestrained capitalist competition," in the words of Isaiah Berlin, has
faded from the memory of the West.
That story involves, among other things, the brutality with which the rich
democracies rid themselves of surplus classes, most conspicuously the
subsistence farmer and the independent artisan made obsolete by the
Industrial Revolution. The pioneer of large-scale industrial capitalism,
merry England, where 8 out of 10 subsistence farmers were forced off the
land in the 30 years between about 1780 and 1810, traveled the road to
industrialization over the bodies of farmers and urban poor�pauperized,
arrested as vagabonds, branded, hanged, or shipped to the colonies. The
author of the classic account of the various paths to modern democracy,
Barrington Moore, wrote that "as part of the industrial revolution,
[England] eliminated the peasant question from English politics. The
admitted brutality of the enclosures confronts us with the limitations on
the possibility of peaceful transition to democracy and reminds us of open
and violent conflicts that have preceded its establishment." "
David Shemano
