Of these states, we argue that the lower levels of democracy witnessed in Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda are no accident, but relate to their experience of civil conflict. Tilly himself has questioned whether his analysis applies to developing countries, noting that the principal mechanisms he identifies such as the relationship between war and the expansion of state revenues do not apply in contexts where, for instance, the military is externally funded and, consequently, no domestic bargaining over taxes and military restraint occurs.
There are even more reasons to doubt that such a relationship may exist in cases of civil war because, as Tilly well understood, its logic is profoundly different to inter-state conflict. Most obviously, the internal nature of civil strife means that states do not develop stronger borders, and the fact that there may be no central government for long periods of time means that the need to prosecute a war does not always lead to higher levels of central taxation.
Instead, in the absence of an effective government administration, rival armies often survive through predation and forced recruitment. At the same time, high levels of inter-communal violence strengthen political identities LeBas and heighten inter-ethnic tensions Reyntjens , undermining the emergence of a coherent national identity Horowitz The combined impact of these trends can generate weak states and divided societies.
Despite this, the positive features of domestic conflict continue to be emphasised in the comparative literature, which focuses on alternative mechanisms that are said to promote democratization. Although some African cases are cited in this work, the broader Africanist literature casts doubt on how far these claims can be generalised.
Both of the accounts cited above place considerable weight on the opinions and agency of ordinary citizens. As a result, incentives to build strong, plural and impartial political institutions have been limited.
This point is well demonstrated by the work of William Reno , who argues that warlords and other local power brokers are unlikely to see a value in strengthening and investing in the formal state apparatus, which offers greater risks than benefits, and in creating genuinely independent institutions, which would constrain their ability to benefit from the spoils economy.
In line with this, scholars of African countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia have demonstrated that prolonged episodes of unrest have done little to promote democratic norms and values, or the state capacity needed to enforce them Prunier The Africanist literature thus casts doubt on the virtue of war for democracy in all but a small number of cases.
But despite this, there have been relatively few attempts to theorise precisely how and why conflict reduces the prospects for plural politics. This article represents a first attempt to do this with respect to the countries of East Africa.
In the discussion that follows, we proceed by assessing these cases in terms of the quality of political institutions, the degree of elite cohesion, and the nature of civil-military relations. We start by explaining how conflict negatively affects each of these factors, and how via these intermediary variables, it erodes prospects for democratization. Making this argument effectively requires us to be wary of the risk of endogeneity.
It could be the case, for example, that the onset of conflict and the failure of democratic consolidation are both explained by a prior third factor, such that the relationship between conflict and consolidation is illusory. This is a particularly relevant concern in this study given our case selection, as the process of nation building and democratization in Burundi and Rwanda are often said to have been doomed from independence as a result of the divisive legacy of Belgian colonialism Uvin , a very different scenario than in nearby Tanzania.
We tackle this challenge in two main ways. First, we explicitly recognize that in some cases common factors — such as weak institutions — both render civil war more likely and undermine the prospects for democratic consolidation, but are able to demonstrate through careful process tracing that conflict exacerbates these issues and renders them more potent. Second we draw on the comparison of Kenya and Uganda to isolate the impact of civil conflict in countries whose starting conditions at independence were more comparable.
Indeed, while both states suffered the destabilising effect of British divide-and-rule policies, it was in many ways Kenya, which had experienced the violent Mau Mau rebellion and the prohibition of colony wide parties during the state of emergency Branch and Cheeseman , that had the greatest challenges to overcome.
Tracing the mechanisms through which conflict in Uganda occurred and subsequently undermined the prospects for democratic consolidation, such that it was Kenya that established the more open and competitive political system, allows us to bring the deleterious impact of civil war into sharper relief.
Of course, even with careful process tracing and targeted comparisons, it is difficult to isolate and quantify the specific impact of prior conditions as opposed to the onset of war.
Given this, it is important to emphasise that we are not claiming to show that conflict is the most significant factor preventing democratic reform in our cases. Thus, our analysis should not be taken to imply that countries that have avoided war will inevitably become democratic, or that those that have been mired in conflict cannot. In other words, our purpose here is not to argue for the pre-eminence of war,4 but rather to flesh out the mechanisms through which conflict contributes to authoritarianism so that these processes can be better understood.
Measuring democracy is complicated and controversial. To avoid any suspicion of cherry picking, we use the democracy scores for all five countries in four commonly used democracy indices, from which we have derived a composite index, in table 1. While all five countries feature political elites with authoritarian tendencies, and there is some inconsistently in the rankings, it is clear that a democratic divide exists within East Africa: on average, Kenya and Tanzania are significantly more democratic states, although there is continued variation across the five states.
As a result, the overall pattern is likely to remain the same. Note that this involves inverting the Freedom House score. We have already noted that the literature has identified a number of different factors that promote democratic consolidation. Our decision to focus on institutions, elites and civil- military relations is based on three criteria. First, as we argue in the sections that follow, these are some of the issues that have attracted most compelling arguments within the Africanist literature on democratization.
Second, they also represent some of the processes that are most likely to be impacted by civil conflict. For obvious reasons, it does not make sense to argue that conflict shapes some of the factors commonly mentioned by comparativists, such as the identity of the former colonial power or the presence of oil.
Third, although these themes are prominent within the Africanist literature, they are not unique to the continent; rather, they are central to discussions of democratization in Latin America and elsewhere Whitehead Thus, if we can show that they are significantly impacted by instances of conflict, our argument will resonate well beyond East Africa. Indeed, a number of scholars including Bratton and van de Walle and Cheeseman have posited that strong institutions are central to the process of political reform, in large part because they make possible negotiated and stable transitions — as in the case of South Africa.
Following this literature, we understand the capacity and independence of political institutions to refer to their ability to perform the basic tasks set out for them in the constitutional and legal system. This is shaped not just by formal rules such as meritocratic appointment processes and security of tenure, but also by norms such as whether members of the judiciary and legislature challenge and constrain the powers of the executive in practice Helmke and Levitsky We argue that in the one-party states that emerged in Kenya and Tanzania, formal political institutions were weakened but were never fully destroyed and in some cases were fortified by the reintroduction of multipartyism.
The high conflict cases Belgian colonial rule was authoritarian and paternalistic, ignored the separation of powers, and endorsed divide-and-rule strategies that sowed division between rival elites.
It also did little to prepare colonies for majority rule. The first general elections in Burundi were organised less than a year before independence, and political institutions immediately exhibited considerable fragility, setting the scene for post- colonial instability.
The reign of General Micombero, who seized power in , was marked by personal rule and deinstitutionalisation, which is highlighted by the constitution that did not provide for a parliament, and gave both executive and legislative power to the president. After another coup that brought Colonel Bagaza to power in , the constitution introduced a strong presidency that allowed Bagaza to dominate the political system. He was in turn overthrown by Major Buyoya in , a further demonstration of the falling capacity of formal institutions.
These polls were won by the Hutu- dominated opposition party Frodebu, thus putting an end to decades of rule by Tutsi elites. Just months later, the Tutsi-dominated army staged a coup with the aim of preserving the privileges of the former incumbents.
President Ndadaye was assassinated, which plunged the country into a decade-long civil war during which political institutions were paralyzed.
Following heavy international and regional pressure, the protagonists signed a power- sharing accord in Arusha in August Thanks to shrewd constitutional engineering, the ethnic divide was largely managed, but the attempt to create new political institutions ultimately failed because there were insufficient foundations to build upon. It set out to consolidate its power, and soon marginalised the political opposition and civil society. Although in principle the formal rules placed considerable constraints on the president, in reality they proved to have little effect.
Moreover, those leaving the country included the most prominent representatives of the opposition and even the moderate leaders of the ruling party , civil society, and independent media, further weakening the potential for strong political institutions to emerge. The late introduction of democratic institutions, and the refusal to establish a more inclusive form of politics, meant that Rwanda entered independence with a political system that had particularly shallow roots and no time to develop a supportive set of informal norms.
Episodes of conflict further weakened the institutional landscape and undermined the prospects of democratic consolidation. The immediate post- independence period saw ten years of de facto single party rule that were marked by moments of ethnic violence. Only the president of the Movement was allowed to be a candidate for the presidency, and there was no distinction between the organs of the Movement and those of the state. This allowed for personal rule; separation of powers existed on paper only.
In , a fresh episode of conflict led to a process of further institutional upheaval, as the Rwandan Patriotic Front RPF invaded the country from Uganda, thus starting the civil war that was to end with genocide against the Tutsi, resulting in the loss of over , lives. The recent period of mass conflict, and the resulting destruction of the previous institutional landscape, made this task considerably easier.
Parliamentary elections in , and and presidential elections in , and were held without meaningful opposition and were characterized by intimidation, terror and fraud, resulting in the establishment of de facto single-party rule. Policy on the most important issues has been decided by a small inner circle of the RPF, without involvement of the cabinet or parliament, and free from judicial oversight Reyntjens The constitution was amended in , so as to allow Kagame to stand for a third seven-year term and two additional five-year terms after that, thus potentially leaving him in office until In August , Kagame was re-elected with over 98 percent of the vote.
Uganda is a somewhat different case. At independence, it was not obvious that the country was headed for a downward spiral. Although the British colonial strategy of indirect rule conferred considerable political privileges on the Buganda Kingdom while also feeding into a North-South socio-economic divide Apter , its institutional legacy was more positive.
A legislative council was set up as early as , and the first African member was admitted in Two competitive multi-party elections were held in advance of independence, and although the polls were problematic, the two main parties split the seats roughly equally. When the Buganda establishment pushed back, Obote sent troops to attack the royal palace, forcing the Kabaka King into exile. In , the Tanzanian army aided by a loose coalition of exiled Ugandan forces invaded and overthrew Amin.
A brief, turbulent transition period followed, which culminated in a rigged election in that brought Obote back to power.
A variety of rebel groups soon emerged to fight the Obote II regime. The implementation of this democratisation agenda nevertheless proved slow as a new constitution was only adopted in Even the transition to multi-party politics ultimately served to consolidate NRM control as opposition parties struggled to register and to organize freely Kiiza et al, The highly controversial general elections, with a partisan Electoral Commission overseeing widespread fraud and a post-election crackdown on opposition activity, were a further illustration of this authoritarian trend.
And now, less than two years into a new term, the NRM is angling to remove presidential age limits from the constitution, thereby clearing the way for President Museveni—who will have exceeded the year limit—to run for re-election in Thus, in all three of these cases, episodes of conflict further undermined the weak institutions inherited from the colonial era, leading to the emergence of vulnerable and pliant political systems.
Where political upheaval has been a regular occurrence, contemporary institutions have especially shallow roots and so are poorly placed to resist the will of the executive. One clear indicator of this is that in all three countries the current president flouted or removed presidential term limits in order to stay in office. The low conflict cases In stark contrast to the three conflict cases, Tanzania stands out as one of the most stable states in the continent.
Although German colonial rule led to the violent suppression of the Maji Maji revolt in , after World War I the country was mandated to Britain and in this relationship was converted into a trusteeship by the United Nations. As a result, colonial rule was not nearly as invasive or exclusionary as in many other parts of the continent, and featured national political associations from the late s onwards.
Less obviously, despite its status as a de jure one- party state, Tanzania held competitive parliamentary elections every five years from to , at which point opposition parties were again allowed to contest.
Although the one-party legislature remained a weak institution, subordinate to the ruling party, some scholars have argued that it provided an important forum for protest, amplified through high levels of media interest in parliamentary proceedings Van Donge and Liviga The extended reign of the ruling party has, needless to say, created its own set of challenges, notably regarding the independence of key political institutions.
There are numerous examples of overlap between partisan and official functions. Constitutional reforms have remained a top-down affair both under one-party rule and after while limits on press freedom and efforts to co-opt civil society actors have also constrained the space for political dissent Nyirabu, Unlike Tanzania, Kenya experienced a particularly turbulent colonial era.
The violent conquest of the country in the early s was followed fifty years later by the Mau Mau rebellion, which was not only a conflict between Kenyans and colonial forces but also pitted different elements of the Kikuyu ethnic group against each other.
The rebellion and the resulting state of emergence from onwards led to the prohibition of colony wide parties, retarding the development of national politics. Yet in stark contrast to Uganda, Kenya did not experience high levels of post-colonial conflict.
Participation came through one-party elections for Members of Parliament that were held based on the Westminster model,6 and which remained relatively free and fair until the s. The reintroduction of multi-party elections in the s created fresh challenges for the regime, and led to significant election related conflict in , and However, although this violence was tragic and cost over 3, lives, it did not lead to the collapse of political institutions that occurred in Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.
In part, this was because the level of violence was comparatively low and localised. Along with the strong coercive institutions at the disposal of the president, this empowered the government to retain overall control, and as a result the state limped through its various crises.
Of course, it is also true that the same coercive institutions were often used to intimidate opposition supporters, and so compromised the potential for democratic transformation. However, over time the stability of the political framework, and the willingness of Kenyan leaders to seek power through the ballot box, facilitated a process of institutional strengthening. Most notably, at times the government has responded to political crises by implementing piecemeal reforms to the structure of the state.
Although the Jubilee Alliance government elected in has attempted to roll back some of these gains, key elements such as the system of devolution are becoming entrenched. In both of our non-conflict cases, then, institutional stability, combined with pressure from opposition groups, civil society organisations and international donors, has given rise to gradual processes of institutional strengthening.
The latter factor is particularly significant here, because there is considerable evidence that pro-democracy foreign powers are more likely to accept poor quality elections in post-conflict countries, in part because they fear that adopting a tougher stance might result in the resurgence of war Cheeseman et al Thus, this is not just an issue of capacity but also relates to the independence of institutions.
In stark contrast to our conflict cases, presidential term limits have become entrenched, and have so far been respected by a number of leaders: Daniel arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki in Kenya, and Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Benjamin Mkapa and Jakaya Kikwete in Tanzania.
This cannot be fully explained with reference to the absence of conflict, but it is clear that these iterative processes of democratic consolidation have benefitted from taking place against a backdrop of relative political stability.
Elite consensus is high when rival leaders share common beliefs and goals, and are willing to work across party, ethnic or other lines to achieve these.
Researchers such as Anja Osei and Robert Dahl have argued that this kind of cohesion contributes to democratic consolidation by enabling the political class to manage crises and disagreements in a way that prevents the breakdown of the wider political system. Trust and cohesion is also significant because it improves the prospects for a negotiated transition to take place, and makes it more likely that agreement can be reached on the new rules of the game.
While the degree of elite consensus is shaped by a variety of different factors — such as divide-and-rule colonial government — a number of scholars have emphasised the significance of episodes of conflict Horowitz ; Rothchild In line with this analysis, we show that repeated bouts of violence have negatively impacted on elite relations in Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, even after periods of rapprochement.
By contrast, Tanzania has never experienced notable or sustained conflict, at least on the mainland. While political ethnicity existed in pre-colonial times, particularly in Rwanda, a number of measures by the colonial administration rigidified and exacerbated the divide, undermining the potential for a stable political system to evolve.
These were typically palace revolutions that aimed at replacing a military ruler who had come to be seen as a liability for the group in power. Indeed Micombero, Bagaza and Buyoya all hailed from the same area in Bururi province. Subsequent episodes of ethnic conflict, and the coups themselves, led to a further deterioration in relations between rival political leaders. When the incumbent elites were defeated at the elections, there was no common ground between them and the unexpected winners.
In turn, this lack of trust led to the coup of October Reyntjens Moreover, the experience of prolonged conflict engendered a form of political paranoia within the new political elite. Although the CNDD-FDD handsomely won the elections, it failed to transform from a rebel movement into a political party, retaining its bush mentality.
This was expressed in two ways. On the other, it continued to be haunted by internal distrust and competition, and the settling of scores was common. Rudolph J. Jack S. Greg Cashman, What Causes War?
Clifton T. Bruce M. Scott Gates, Torbjorn L. Knutsen and Jonathon W. Karl W. Deutsch et al. Melvin Small and J. Edward D. Clifton Morgan and Sally H. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. See William J. Charles S. See James D. Rational-choice explanations of the democratic peace rooted in reduced uncertainty must assume perfectly divisible issue disputes. See, for example, James D. David E. William R. See David A. Michael R. Lucian W.
Well-known theories linking domestic conflict and interstate war include: the deathwatch theory, contagion effect theories, and diversionary theory of war or scapegoat hypothesis.
For the diversionary theory of war, see Jack S. Midlarsky ed. Harvey Starr and Benjamin A. It is, after all, the World Cup generation, now in its twenties and thirties, that is most antagonistic to a continued U. A waning U.
Enhanced North Korean nuclear and missile capabilities could in tum potentially have important security implications for the broader Northeast Asian region, especially for Japan, its missile-defense preparations, its peace constitution, and its broader role in North Pacific security affairs.
Democratization and Human Security Human security questions, including unemployment and hunger, have arguably been most salient in modem East Asia during three periods the Depression of the s and s,38 the early aftermath of World War II, and the Asian financial crisis of The first period coincided with Japan's fledgling democratization, but that experiment with democracy sadly had little positive social impact, as the political system was strongly elite-dominated, and popular interest-articulation mechanisms were not well-institutionalized.
Democratization after World War II had more pervasive social-policy implications, including the beginnings of an enhanced social role for women, agricultural groups, and small business. Yet social-welfare policies were, following an initial surge of transplanted New Deal liberalism on the part of the Allied Occupation, slow in coming, and driven to a large degree by political-survival impulses on the part of the ruling conservatives,39 The positive contributions of democratization to human security would seem natural in the abstract.
Free-hold agriculture has benefited in several countries, including Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, to be sure. Yet the human implications, along other dimensions, have often been more mixed, even outside the human-rights area. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Security and Democratization in East Asia 0 Kent E Calder Contemporary Indonesia is a disappointing case in point evocative of the difficulties a poorly institutionalized Taisho democracy in Japan eighty years ago had in dealing with problems of human security.
To be sure, the autocratic Suharto regime, encouraged in its rigidity by the International Monetary Fund, was quite slow in responding to the initial social dislocations of the crisis, and the more democratic Habibi and Wahid appear to have been initially more responsive, in terms of public pronouncements.
Yet implementation of social policy appears to have been poor, and momentum has been lost. Democratization and Internal Security The Rousseauean proposition that democracy brings solidarity does not seem to be borne out in at last one Asian nation: Indonesia.
Whatever the enhanced responsiveness to human-security needs, democratization clearly seems to have intensified communalism, even as it undermined govern-ability. In the Aceh region of northern Sumatra, this gave rise to regionalist separatism. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, , pp. See Singapore Straits Times, January 19, How the Indonesian central government can sustain both national cohesion and internal security against pirates and terrorists, on the one hand, and maintain fidelity to democratic values on the other remains to be seen.
Security as a Structural Constraint on Democracy This paper has focused on democratization as an independent variable. It has stressed the multiple ways in which democratic transition has transformed the East Asian security calculus, and how it shows promise of doing so further in future, especially in Greater China. Yet security also has profound effects on the course of democratization itself that deserve serious analysis. Broadly speaking, during the Cold War security considerations arguably often made the United States, in particular, cautious about actively promoting democratic pluralism when it conflicted with perceived short-run security imperatives.
The United States has, for example, stationed more than 37, troops for more than fifty years in South Korea, to forestall a repeat of the North Korean invasion. From the mids until the mids it was generally reluctant to oppose steps by the South Korean military to suppress student and worker dissent, including most notably the Kwangju rebellion, in which over people reportedly died. Yet the overall picture is controversial and mixed. The pattern has been similar in the Philippines, where the U.
It provided refuge for dissident leader Benigno Aquino until he returned to be murdered on the Manila Airport tarmac, and supported his widow, President Cory Aquino, in the face of coup attempts in the early s. Since the advent of the war on terrorism, however, the U. Security considerations especially those of internal security have also constrained the 46 Bruce Cumings. Korea's Place in the Sun, pp. This proclivity has, for example, been pronounced in Indonesia.
Its military clearly used security for many years as a rationale for brutal suppression of the democratic movement in East Timor during the s. More recently, in the wake of the Bali bombings, many observers, especially in the NGO community, have feared that the new Anti-Terrorism Law will create a rationale for further suppression of democratic impulses.
Conclusion In assessing the broader implications of security and democratization in East Asia, it is of course always important to remember how distinctive the East Asian region is in comparative perspective.
As Fareed Zakaria points out, East Asian has achieved two essential attributes of good government, perhaps accidentally, that James Madison specified in The Federalist Papers: governmental ability to control the governed, and also government ability to control itself. Order, in short, plus liberty. The relatively homogeneous character of many East Asian populations has also helped to ease what is an intrinsically perilous process.
And the social coalitions on which East Asian democratic transition has typically been basedoften business, free-hold agriculture, real-estate, and military interests49 , excluding labor-- have been profoundly conservative, with a clear Confucian bias against the concept of pluralism for its own sake that Madison himself valued so deeply. Although East Asia's democratization has been rather orderly in comparative perspective, it has nevertheless often had its turbulent aspects.
The de-stabilizing implications for both internal and international security of that democratic transition have 47 See Fareed Zakaria. Norton, , p. I, March, , pp. The Eastasia Edge. New York: Basic Books, , pp. Generational conflict has often, as in Korea today, been quite pronounced. Nationalism has periodically been strident, and has grown more so over the past largely democratic decade.
Base relations, between U. Democratization has marginally enhanced human security in Southeast Asia, although local responsiveness to the profound social issues raised by the Asian financial crisis has been uneven. The fledgling democratic process as a whole seems to be gradually intensifying pressures for responsiveness across the region, as evidenced in Indonesia by the substantial gains for Golkar, party of discredited former strongman Suharto, now in the Opposition, during the national legislative elections.
The pressing problem has been weak implementation of promises made. There are signs, however, that the Indonesian Presidential administration inaugurated in will be more effective at implementing nominal policy reforms, and at curbing corruption, than the ineffectual Megawati government has been. Technological changes, such as the mass diffusion of cell phones and the coming of the Internet, are amplifying grassroots pressures for change in security policy, by broadening the community of politically active citizens.
Such changes are thereby diminishing the power of elite cartels that have traditionally dominated the politics of nations like the Philippines, and insulated leaders from populist pressures there.
Whatever its social implications, democratization appears to have eroded govern-ability and internal security throughout Southeast Asia, in particular. This erosion of govern ability opens unsettling opportunities for terrorism, and for the use of isolated island and jungle sanctuaries as redoubts for terrorists with destructive ambitions, both within the region and elsewhere. Seoul: KAIS, , pp. Security and Democratiwtion in East Asia 0 Kent E Calder portions of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Mindinao, and has unsettling implications for the ability of these areas to sustain authentic pluralist democracy.
Looking forward, the crucial looming issue is how Greater China's democratization, including that of Taiwan and Hong Kong, will proceed, and what implications that evolution will have for regional and global security. The historical experience of other nations in East Asia, as indicated above, is moderately unsettling.
In the short to medium term, their experience would lead one to expect intensified nationalism from the PRC, although the recent moderation and support for multi-lateralism of the Hu Jintao administration in its early days initially belies that assessment. Over the longer term, beyond the turmoil of transition, the security implications of China's democratic future appear brighter. At that stage, one must hope for the powerful logic of the democratic peace, which has re-asserted itself so often, and so positively, in the Western political context.
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