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The Democracy-Building Formula: What India and Pakistan Can Tell Us

A Review Article

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

U.S. policy makers would love (I almost said “kill”) to find the magic formula for creating, co nsolidating and sustaining democracies.  Political scientists, for their part, have been struggling to uncover the secret. 

Academic speculations about democracy cover a lot of ground. Maybe what’s most determinative  is a country’s socio-economic mix—its ethnic make up, education, class structure, income distribution, degree of industrialization and so on.  But maybe, others assert, successful  democratization depends more on historical and/or developmental sequences involving  “tasks” like cons titution writing, party formation, trustworthy elections, the emergence of an organized civil society, and other elements of institutionalization that diminish the attractions of charismatic (or merely brutal) authoritarianism.  Then there’s this:  maybe, for an emerging democracy not to backslide, it’s better if the process has been gradual rather than abrupt. 

Now try putting all these factors (and more) into a predictive formula.  It’s apparent why democracy-building for real is such a dicey (and perhaps best avoided) ambition for outsiders, idealistic or otherwise.  Human affairs are messy at best, which is why seers have opted, traditionally, for gnomic statements about future events, thereby proving how wise (or prudent) they were.

A new book illustrates the contingencies and complications of democracy-building by looking at two cases that couldn’t have been more salient if they had been imagined: India and Pakistan.  That excellent book is Phillip Oldenburg’s India, Pakistan and Democracy: Solving the Puzzle of Divergent Paths.  

Modern India and a brand new, largely Muslim Pakistan were born when England terminated its shape-shifting, three century old mercantile/colonial/imperial enterprise in South Asia.  Among the still-remaining loose ends: the ultimate fate of Kashmir, now very much in the news again, and Pakistan’s political exploitation of a once rational but no longer credible fear of invasion by a “twin” that’s four times larger population-wise. 

The Airport Scene - Time to Change Those American Welcome Mats

In Tyler Brûlé’s September 18, 2010 Financial Times column entitled “Let’s play ‘Guess where I am?” the columnist wrote: “I’ve just come off an airliner (after an eight hour, 45 minute flight from Frankfurt) and it’s absolute pandemonium. There are gate agents screaming for transfer passengers, there are sniffer dogs, there are loads of immigration officers and there’s a general sense of disorganization.” His experience descended quickly downhill from there.

The answer to his “guess where I am” question - which he reveals later in his column - is Washington, DC’s Dulles Airport on a Sunday afternoon.

Akin to a “dumpy” airport in a “shambolic banana republic” or “police state”

Brûlé’s description of the immigration hall at Dulles was that of a “corral for citizens of the country” he’d “just arrived in and a much larger maze for everyone else.” “The citizen’s line (had) about 200 people waiting to be processed, while the other pen (had) more than 1,000 passengers waiting to be interrogated. . . He said that he studied “the scene . . .and reckoned” that he “was in for an hour’s wait. When passengers from a Jeddah flight” were “ushered to the front of the line,” he quickly revised his “timetable to 90 minutes.”

As he finally approached the inspector’s booth, a bevy of immigration officers closed up shop and waddled off duty in response to an all-points bulletin announced over the public address system that advised all officials who had not signed up for overtime to “leave their post.”

Dallas-Ft. Worth: Immigration the Weak Link

My experience at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport on a Wednesday afternoon coming from an equally long, or longer flight that originated in London was nowhere as horrific as Brûlé’s. I didn’t have to deal with antiquated airline-to-terminal shuttles that were state of the art decades ago but have long past their prime; the American Airlines flight I was on landed on time and the airline’s baggage transfer system functioned far better than a near Brûlé-type disaster I remember in Denver four years ago when the pandemonium there – at every step of the way from airline ground crew incompetence to long backlog at immigration - resulted in my missing my, albeit short, connecting flight to Albuquerque.

Nevertheless, the immigration hall at Dallas-Ft Worth was the weak link in the chain on September 8. The line was far longer for non-Americans – at least double. Even those of us with the appropriate passports had to wait in a queue for twenty or more minutes before approaching the official’s booth although handicapped were exempted and wheeled to the front of the line. An INS employee was assigned to direct the able-bodied to booths to keep us, I guess, from rushing the special booth reserved for airline crew, diplomats and APEC where, guess what, no one was waiting.

A Brief Cultural Diplomacy Survey from American University's School of International Service

Posted by Patricia H. Kushlis

Professor Robert Albro from American University's School of International Service would like to invite past, present, and future professionals in the field of cultural diplomacy, both active and retired, to participate in a brief survey on cultural diplomacy. The survey is found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9XLK7TK. It is open-ended and should not take more than a few minutes to complete.

This is an exploratory survey, with the purpose of obtaining brief reflections from professionals in the field of cultural diplomacy, or those who are now retired but worked in the field, on some key dimensions of diplomatic practice, as they understand it, with particular concern for the role of "culture" in this work.

The survey is a follow-up to the rich discussion of a conference held in Washington, D.C. last November, called “Culture’s Purpose and the Work of Cultural Diplomacy.” Organized for the International Communication Program of American University's School of International Service by professor Robert Albro and colleagues Craig Hayden and Ambassador Anthony Quainton, and with the support of the Public Diplomacy Council and the MountainRunner Institute, this conference examined the role of the culture concept in the work of cultural diplomacy.

Further details, as well as a complete conference podcast and full texts of presentations, are available for download here: http://www.american.edu/sis/ic/International-Communications.cfm.

The survey is also part of the preparations for a second conference, on cultural diplomacy as a listening project, to be held at American University, November 8, 2010.

According to Professor Albro, "Your answers to this brief survey will be integral to planning for this year’s event, and will help to inform the broader discussion we seek to maintain with respect to this important form of engagement. We hope you might take a few moments to add your wisdom and insights to this critical conversation. If you have any questions about the survey, please do not hesitate to contact him at: [email protected]."

 

 

Notice to Dems: The “End” of the Recession for Whom?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

People who are unemployed or underemployed or suddenly homeless or hopelessly under water home-wise are furious right now.  How very not surprising!  The unwanted hear a chorus of voices declaring that the “recession” is over.  The country is  “in recovery,” they hear, although (what a pity!) the pace of recovery has been a tad slower than optimum.  

Slower!!!  To be involuntarily unemployed a mere month or two is to suffer an excruciating severance from normal life.  A year of such is eternity.  Now consider that some hard-working, responsible people have been unemployed for two years now.  That’s death with little hope of resurrection. Job re-training ain’t what it used to be.  Too many jobs are overseas now.  Some recovery.

TheFeel of Recession

Let’s begin with basics.  Recession, however it may feel to us working slobs, has, our betters tell us,  more to do with econometrics than the quality of human life. In ordinary English, of course, recession means hard times, economically and/or financially.  It means pain, pain, pain, the which to be diagnosed and treated by (heaven help us!) that wizard class of economists. 

Totally turned on by super nerd math games in recent years, economists haven’t been very sensitive to living standards, although a new field called behavioral economics shows some promise of turning the discipline into a tool for creating habitable human societies. Meanwhile, the norm has been for economists to label anyone refusing to maximize monetary gains whatever the cost to other values “irrational.”  This is not a term of endearment or respect.

As to the present unpleasantness,  economists and their cousins the bankers and financiers have looked into their basket of indices (in which unemployment, it seems, plays a rather insignificant role as a mere “trailing” indicator, like an afterthought) and declared the country out of recession.  Actually, according to them, the recession ended over a year ago.  Did you notice? 

You're OK, I'm Not

I thought not.  The end of the recession is a kind of in joke.  Wall Street is singing a happy song.  Although the stock market is skittish, profits are not so bad and bonuses are fat again.  Banks are back to pressing for system-threatening privileges.  Productivity is up, a good indicator, supposedly.  However, it doesn’t mean that wages or U.S. employment are looking good.  American workers are expensive luxuries in a world of cheap labor and machines that don't need doctors or  vacations or raises.  Some of their jobs are gone forever, and new ones aren’t being created fast enough.  As for the President, he’s sorry more jobs haven’t been created.  I’m sure we all feel his pain.

Fair and Foul

When economies are in truly dismal shape and everyone suffers, morale tends to be amazingly good.  The we’re-all-in-this-together principle comes to the fore, promoting an inclination to pull together to make things better for everyone.

But when some sectors are doing very very well on the backs of the poorly paid and the dis-employed, the result is alienation, and feelings of unfairness multiply.  When, on top of that, re-employment seems to rank last on the to-do list of those in charge of the economy, people taking the brunt of the recession tend to get impatient.  And angry.

About that Election

It may well be that the economy is improving as rapidly as possible.  It may well be that employment is always the last indicator to climb back to healthy levels when recession strikes.  In that case, may I suggest that the psychology of announcing the end of recession  while millions of Americans are still hurting will not be the morale booster (or vote getter) it’s probably intended to be. Instead, it tells workers that they don’t count.  No jobs.  No respect.  Suicidal for Democrats on the eve of an election.

America The Invisible

By Patricia H. Kushlis

  The British Embassy recently announced the three month American tour of the Tricycle Theatre Company’s production of “The Great Game: Afghanistan” that began September 15 in Washington, DC. “The Great Game” has been playing in London since 2009. As a part of the UK’s public diplomacy efforts in the US, the British Council plans “to host a slate of energetic public events exploring ideas from the Great Game” with high profile speakers from the media, public diplomacy, cultural communities and others who engage interactively with audiences.  (Photo of Buckingham Palace Guard: August 2010 by PHKushlis)

“The Great Game” will also play in New York, Minneapolis and Berkeley, California. This ambitious three part study consists of 12 plays by British and American writers about Western involvement in Afghanistan since 1842 and it has been well received in London.

Meanwhile, a second element of the UK’s three - or four part (if exchanges and scholarships are counted) public diplomacy efforts, BBC America’s half hour news of the world program is broadcast daily in prime time over our own PBS station right here in New Mexico.

The Foreign Ministry-funded Wilton Park Conferences form the third prong of the UK's public diplomacy triad. These professional gatherings bring scholars, practitioners and others together in Sussex to discuss current foreign affairs issues. One of this year’s conferences was on public diplomacy and I note that several Americans participated.

London from this American tourist's perspective

I just spent most of the past month in London visiting family, friends, the theatre and just playing tourist in a city I had last seen over twenty years ago. I attended several plays, became reacquainted with the London mass transport system, visited the Parthenon Marbles (photo left by PHKushlis August 2010) and the Assyrian Friezes at the British Museum, stopped by Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, attended the Carnegie Cup rugby match at Wembley Park between Warrington and Leeds, toured the late Winston Churchill’s Chartwell House and paid homage to Canterbury Cathedral as well as the below ground Roman Canterbury Museum nearby, walked through a part of Hyde Park where the speaker’s corner was empty, along Portobello Road (photo left by PHKushlis August 2010)  and Notting Hill where I did not see William Thacker’s Travel Bookshop with the blue door, photographed a red-coated guard through the gates at Buckingham Palace on a Sunday and took pictures of several rare and not so rare oboes, English horns and an over-sized tuba in the Horniman Museum’s Musical Instruments Collection, (photo right by PHKushlis September 2010)  crossed the Millennium Bridge to the New Tate and back, (Photo left below by PHKushlis August 2010) but chose not to pay 20 pounds to see the interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral amidst the hordes who had decided otherwise.

A 1978 Fodor’s Guide to the UK stated that Cathedral entry was free but donations would be appreciated. How times have changed.

Europe's largest metropolis

London, of course, is huge – it’s Europe’s largest metropolitan area. This collection of distinct villages – each with its high, or main, street and special character - has run together over the centuries. Because the city is so enormous, I could not have begun to explore every nook and cranny – that would have taken a lifetime - but I did see a vibrant multi-ethnic metropolitan area home to the country’s media, theatre, and artistic communities, some of its colleges, universities, think-tanks and the seat of its government and commerce as well as the world’s financial heart. In a sense, London’s multi-ethnic population and its consequent flavors – from kebab shops, Italian coffee houses, Indian and Chinese restaurants to its bus drivers, performers, sales persons and financial consultants – looks a lot like a sprawling New York.

Indeed, a twenties-something waiter we chatted with at an Indian restaurant in Bromley, now a London suburb to the south told us how excited he was to be attending a family wedding in New York this fall. He also told us that his grandfather served in the British Navy before immigrating to the UK from India. It will be this young man’s first trip to the Big Apple and I hope – and pray - American officialdom treats him well.

What was missing? An American presence.

Two Very Different Muslim Voices

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I was about to take a close look at the continued unrest in Kashmir, the Muslim majority area that is the biggest bone of contention between India and Pakistan, when Koran-abuse allegations and visuals broadcast from Iran turned a crowd of Kashmiri nationalists, briefly, into an anti-U.S.  mob. In the course of the ensuing ideologically-confused violence more than a dozen people were killed by Indian authorities attempting to restore order.  As I write, 19 are dead and Kashmir is under 24-hour curfew.

Religion, it seems, is no longer a matter of conscience, but of performance, on a stage whose extent is global, thanks to viral 24/7 media coverage.  Well in advance, with plenty of time to build suspense, an obscure Florida zealot announced that he would, on 9/11, burn a copy or copies of the Muslim holy book.  At the very last minute, with the whole world on edge, he canceled the performance, either because his ego had already been sufficiently gratified or as a consequence of a deluge of pleas and threats from his intercontinental audience. 

Non-Muslim Americans high and low, including the President of the United States, insisted that respect must be shown to the icons and holy books of all religions, not only one’s own.  Another argument had more to do with U.S. security.  Burn the Koran, cautioned Secretary of Defense Gates and others, and you’ll put American troops (to say nothing of other Americans within attacking distance of angry Muslims) in danger.  Muslim rabble-rousers of the same bigoted ilk as the Florida trouble-maker were already promoting virtually uncontrollable demonstrations in many countries. 

Yet, even as PressTV, an Iranian government enterprise, was doing its best to generate mayhem, a voice in Kashmir was sounding a rather different note.  For present purposes, it doesn’t matter which faction Hurriyat (G) Chairman, Syed Ali Geelani represents, when it comes to positioning  Kashmir between India and Pakistan.  Here are some of the things he is reported to have said in recent days: 

These acts will not harm the Quran as it is safe in our hearts and guarded by Almighty Allah as well....Our protests should be peaceful and we have to present ourselves as oppressed . Arson and violence only gives the Indian troopers a chance to kill us....It also weakens our struggle as vested interests and the Indian government always look for such incidents to sabotage the ongoing Movement in Kashmir. We have to remain cautious and it is our duty to safeguard the minorities in Kashmir and maintain peace and Harmony which is very important at this crucial phase of our struggle....   

I can understand that emotions of Kashmiris Muslims have been hurt by the desecration of Quran. But at the same time, we have to control our emotions and not create such a situation which could given chance to vested interests to defame Islam and our movement.

Like American leaders’ appeals against Koran-burning, Geelani’s statements entwine principle with pragmatism.  Above all, he wants protesters not to be distracted by stupid provocations, when they should be concentrating on the important thing: Indian misgovernment.  He is, in short, prioritizing politics, not religion. That he tried and succeeded says much about Kashmir, which is not, by and large, a natural home for Islamic fundamentalism.  Most  intolerance is infused by Pakistan, to make Indian rule difficult, if not impossible. 

Now I want to turn to some words penned by another Muslim leader, who found himself dealing with a shocked world’s reaction to the prematurely leaked news that the Taliban-controlled government in Kabul planned to destroy the ancient Buddhist images in Bamiyan.  The passages are from Abdul Samam Zaeef’s autobiography My Life with the Taliban.   Zaeef was “a former senior member of Afghanistan’s Taliban and a principal actor in its domestic and foreign affairs.”  As such, he had to deal with a Japanese delegation trying desperately to rescue the statues.   If the statues were unwelcome in situ, Japan and Sri Lanka were willing to pay the full cost of removing the statues, stone by stone, and transporting them out of Afghanistan. 

Zaeef, by his own account, ridiculed Japanese concern.  Since the Afghans had forsaken Buddhism for the true religion, he said, the Japanese should do the same.  “Furthermore,” he sneers, in retrospect, “the Buddha statues are made out of stone, by the hands of men.  They hold no real value for religion, so why were they [the Japanese] so anxious to preserve them?”

Actually, the Japanese had produced a good reply. “The Ka’aba too was also made of stone and by the hands of men.”  Yet millions of Muslims, they observed, circumambulate it.  That logic was too much for Zaeef.  “After that,” he reports, “I didn’t reason with them for much longer.”

Poor Zaeef.  For him, “reasoning” clearly implied, not listening, not trying to understand the Buddhists’ point of view,  just bowling those pagans over with irrefutable arguments for destruction, which obviously the Japanese and others didn’t buy.  “There was nothing I could do to satisfy the delegations,” Zaeef complains.  Of course not!  The Taliban can’t co-exist with Shi’a or even with non-Talib Sunni. No wonder the whole business was “tiresome.”

And so the Bamiyan statues were destroyed, despite world opinion.  But the Koran wasn’t burned in Florida, because most Americans, though non-Muslim, opposed the desecration. I’d to see a little more appreciation for that.

   



 

 

Interpreters who can’t interpret – a security threat to the troops in Afghanistan

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Juan Cole complained in a September 9 article on the Huffington Post that the American media is a security risk to the US. In this case he was referring to the paucity of US television time devoted to covering the devastating floods in Pakistan and their aftermath. It was as if Pakistan and those millions of Pakistanis killed or left homeless as a result of the surging Monsoon waters that covered one-fifth of their country did not exist.

Cole pointed out that with the exception of PBS and occasional broadcasts on CNN aired when most of the country was asleep, the Pakistani floods this past summer represented a non-event for most Americans. Yet, Pakistan has been designated a nation at risk and crucial to this country’s battle with Al Qaeda. Maybe as a result of the almost invisible television coverage, Cole suggests, American private donations to aid the Pakistani flood victims have lagged substantially in comparison with the massive television coverage and perhaps consequent outpouring of support for Haitian earthquake victims earlier this year.

Cole’s dreary assessment may well be right. If so, it shows the crucial role television still plays in this country’s information chain – for good and ill.

Ignorance is not bliss

The US is facing a number of serious security risks to which too few are privy, that is, until it’s too late. The lack of American media coverage of problems that affect this nation’s future, therefore, plays a significant part.

Why, for instance, did it take years and a whistle-blower lawsuit for the following military contractor story to break into the big time? If ABC’s Nightline had not investigated and broadcast “Exclusive: Whistleblower claims many US Interpreters Can’t Speak Afghan Languages” on September 8, 2010 which resulted from an individual’s law suit against a private company, would this contractor shortcoming have – for all intents and purposes - continued to be unheard - just another tree falling in a silent forest? But ABC did – and kudos to Nightline and Diane Sawyer for the story’s airing because of its important to US national security.

America: Join the Cultural Fiesta

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Having referenced “American culture, whatever that is,” in my post about anchor babies, I got harsh words in return.  Usually I’d just comment on the comment, but the question demanded a more generous format. What follows is my own experience with the intriguing plurality of American cultures within the larger, multivocal political culture that does embrace us all.

When I was a kid, my father’s company kept transferring him from one office to another as he climbed the corporate ladder.  I never lived in one place, meaning one city, one town, one neighborhood, one state, long enough to belong or make friends. I took refuge in history, as laid out in a genealogy of my mother’s family, which went back to the early 1600s, in Connecticut. Nomad I might be, but I had roots. I took comfort in that.  Since my father also had a WASP background, the family culture was consistent, a recognizable (and often lampooned) evolution from the mores of those God-ridden early settlers from England.

Meanwhile, other traditions, no less directly descending from English antecedents, had been established in the American South, where a strongly Anglican, highly stratified, plantation economy depended on slavery until involuntary servitude was abolished.  Since one of my mother’s ancestors had fought in a Connecticut regiment during the Civil War,  there was no way I was going to leap to my feet in order to sing “Dixie,” when I attended a school in Maryland during the fifth grade.  Mere singing?  Well, ok.  Standing?  No way!  The culture clash was too extreme. 

That’s two cultures so far—and what deeply divided them was another: the culture of those whose ancestors had been shipped like cattle from Africa.  We now know that the future African-Americans managed to preserve significant elements of their culture despite their owners’ commitment to deracination.  Family history informed me of my descent from some of America’s earliest abolitionists.  That soothed me through those uncomfortable “Dixie” moments.