Reflections on Liberal Democracy and International Debt Issues in Post-Cold War Africa?
By
Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo
Cornell University
Department of City and Regional Planning
106 West Sibley Hall
Ithaca, New York 14853 U.S.A.
E-mail: tl25@cornell.eduPaper Presented at
the 10th General Assembly of CODESRIA
Held in Kampala on December 8-12, 2002FIRST DRAFT ONLY
PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE
INTROUDUCTION: Objectives, Approaches, and Main Issues
Within the context of the euphoria associated with the promotion of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), an initiative which is claimed to be African and which was officially adopted on October 23, 2001 by the African Heads of State, what are the implications for the international debt in eradicating poverty and promoting democracy as demanded by the African people? Furthermore, within the framework of the newly established African Union (AU), seemingly an imitation of the European Union in its form, will the issues concerning the African debts be central as a way of dealing with the total integration of the African economies, markets, and politics?
This paper is divided into four headings. The first part deals with objectives of the paper, the approaches used to guideline the analysis, and the identification of some relevant general issues related to the topic. The second section analyzes the liberal democratic theory. Given the nature of the relationship between foreign loans and the structural adjustment programs since 1981 in Africa and how these programs have directly or indirectly influenced international and national politics, in the third heading, the discussion will be on how the concept of liberal democracy was projected into structural adjustment programs (SAPs). The fourth part examines the question of the nature of the international debt in Africa. And the conclusion is on what should be proposed as remedies to solve the puzzle of the international debt and democracy effectively and comprehensively?
The main objective of paper is not about finding and/or analyzing rigidly causal relations or corrections between the international debt and liberal democracy. I am interested in analyzing some of the dominant philosophical, social and political assumptions set up in the loan schemes and implications of the debt issue in Africa with a focus on the significance of the rise of liberal democracy. That is to say, I am interested in the question of how will the African social conditions support or be conducive to liberal democracies that are being reduced to electoral procedures? I intend to discuss how the debt has been among the key factors that have directly or indirectly contributed to impede any consistent local and regional efforts toward mobilizing human and material resources needed to formulate and actualize development agenda. I will also discuss how liberal democracy, despite its massive supports and high levels of expectations among various segments of the African societies is likely to produce meager positive social results in light of the current marginalization of Africa and within the framework of global apartheid.
In this paper, philosophical questions are essential to pose. What kind of people and societies can be promoted by liberal political theories and practices? How would the values articulated by liberal democracy be supported or not by those advanced by the advocates of the international debt? I intend to critically assess whether or not the rise of liberal democracy and multipartyism and the newly promoted debt forgiving agenda by the G seven countries (the group of highly industrialized countries) are likely to create the conductive conditions to genuine political debates at the national and continental levels on development. The paper is generally theoretical but it will also have some supportive empirical illustrations.
International debt problems, involving the arcane operations of the world’s financial system, may appear abstract and far removed from peoples’ daily lives, but those problems have had severe, pernicious, and very concrete impacts. In the third world, debt problems have increased hunger, illness, and degradation; debt has become a barrier to progress, dashing hopes and solidifying misery for millions of people (MacEwan, 1990, 14).
Can the national and international technicalities or conditionalities set up to apply for loans, the domestic/internal financial constraints such as deficits, the payment of the arrears, social conditions, and ideological determinism related to the international debt in Africa produce and/or support the claims and the principles of liberal democracies? Are there really international debt problems in relationship to people’s efforts to actualize democracy or any other types of progressive societies? With the internationalization of the principles of the global financial donors, are we witnessing the end of the progressive movements in Africa?
The total African external debt at the end of the 1998 was $324.6 billion. The issues concerning this international debt and its social, economic, and political implications have been intensively debated in international, regional, and national forums and in many social milieux between the 1980s and the 1990s. Furthermore, interesting and provocative books, which have received positive reviews such as "A Fate Worse than Debt: The World Financial Crisis and the Poor by Susan George, Debt and Disorder: International Economic Instability and U.S. Imperial Decline by Arthur MacEwan, and World Debt, Who is to Pay by Jacobo Schatant have also been published. However, philosophical and developmental questions associated with the debt issue have not been fully and systematically questioned, explored, examined, and appreciated in Africa. Yet, the results of the international forums and intellectual discourses in terms of the impact of the debt based on its direct and/or associative claims for improving significantly the majority of the African people’s conditions have been pragmatically either negligible or totally negative. Thus, they are still debatable.
It is not easy to define and discuss with precision the implications or ramifications of the relationship between forms of democracy movements and democratic practices that are taking place in Africa and the magnitude of her international debt in general terms. I am not necessary concerned in this paper about the amount of the debt accumulated in Africa. I am more interested in examining the nature of power relations behind the donors of the loans and the receivers, and the ability or possibilities of payment of the debts by national governments. Thus, the issue of relationship between the availability of the existing national resources and the implications of such efforts, decisions, policy on institutionalization of liberal democracy is essentially a distributive and a political issue. In addition, it should be noted that there are different types of international debt, for example, bilateral, multilateral, concessional, official non-concessional, and those originated from private creditors and commercial banks. The analysis has to be concrete. The focus on this paper is on foreign debt at large.
My approach is a combination of historical-structuralism with a dose of the systems analysis. Social systems do not change by their own will. They must be changed. And genuine or quasi-permanent changes are first of all, structurally internal though they may have external support. The way states and societies function in the world system is the result of the internal and external dynamics of their location. But this location is far from being historically fixed or static. The world is a system and an organic whole, which is conditioned by the actors’ location and how they came to be in the system. Africa is perceived as a system that has its own history and its own internal social dynamics. This history is cumulative, and not necessarily deterministic, in relationship to the ability of the system to change or to engage in the process of change. I am interested in the history of production and reproduction. It will be argued in this paper that how a system produces and reproduces itself in a given environment is likely to inform us much about the nature of the system itself; its weaknesses and strengths. That is to say that I am interested in contradictions, not necessarily as pathological tools of destruction, but as signs or reflections of objective conditions needed for any kind of constructive endeavor to take place.
The conceptual elements associated with the above approach can be summarized in the following three constructive premises:
The first premise is that regardless of the good intention of many African leaders, activists, and people in trying to continuously copying or imitating the European experiences and their unilinear models of development, and regardless of the quality of their imitations, Africa will never organically and ontologically develop out of the European history and the European languages and metaphysics. However, no society can develop out of autarky. People also can learn or borrow from others but whatever can be borrowed from other people’s experiences has to be selectively injected into the African projects, appropriated and owned by Africans before it can positively be part of the African metaphysics, ethos, and the African experiences.
The second premise, which is also similar to the scientific and historical premise, stipulates that no people, a nation or a continent can socially progress without building the foundation of its actions on its own history and culture. European kings, the nobility (commercial classes/petty bourgeoisie), and the churches from the medieval era up to renaissance and even in the 18th century, fought each other to acquire or share power in Europe, but it should be emphasized that the emergence of the modern state structures in Europe since the Westphalia peace accord in 1648, was essentially an internal process and a collective decision. European monarchs and nobility forcibly appropriated the Mediterranean city-states histories and cultures, and technologies and resources from China, India, and Africa. As Martin Bernal (1987) traced Greece’s roots to Africa whose semiotic and spiritual innovations had been channeled to the Aegean Sea by Egyptian boats. This premise promotes a perspective that the African history and culture and their internal contradictions must be critically reexamined to avoid the projection of their romantization as a tool of making social synthesis. Romantization of any culture and history is as dangerous phenomenon as fascism and any kind of biological argument can be in a nation-building project. It should be emphasized that the contradictions should not always be perceived and defined as infinitely pathological. Out of the contradictions, humans have always made synthetic judgments on what directions to follow in defining and redefining them
The third premise is that even with the advancement of genetic engineering or newly developed cloning experiments, people have not consciously chosen by themselves the place of their birth, their gender, and the color of their hairs and eyes. People are who and what they are clearly firstly, as a result of some immanent historical accident and biological structures and evolutionary process. An individual’s infant conscious contribution to this historical determinism at the beginning of life has a probability of zero. However, what is more important in the definition of ourselves is what we can or should do after we have been projected out there in the context of the jungle or divined forces of the historical and natural accidents. That is to say that, human beings’ choices and decisions to shape their destinies and create social meanings and define things including themselves, is transcendentally more important than what gods or divinities did or do on their single objective on our behalf. That is to say that social consciousness is a valuable determining factor in the ways people define and redefine themselves in a given physical and social environment. Without such a social consciousness, humans may not be very much different from other animals.
It should be noted that at the end of the Cold War, judicial activism, the rise of the demands of democratic rights and grassroots movements, the intensification of popularization and internationalization of human rights, globalization of liberal economy, and global state’s reforms have significantly contributed to the struggles for some types of democracy the world over. These factors in one way or the other may also challenge mechanisms related to the payment and/or acquisition of more foreign debts in Africa. Debt as an analytical tool or a unit of analysis in the international political economy and a social and political phenomenon in term of its implications that can help understand the functioning structures and rules of the contemporary dominant economy is not new in social science lexicon. Historically, it has taken different forms depending on its nature and origins, its beneficiaries and social and political implications in a given society and social classes and gender. However, if and when nation-states start to spend between 30 and 40 percent of their Growth National Product (GNP) to either pay for the principal and/or to service the loans, then international debt becomes part of the world crisis. Who is to pay for it and where the money to pay for it has to come from?
In general terms, Cold War politics can be characterized by the influence of two interrelated dominant factors, namely the building of international debt and politics of militarism. Most African countries gained their nominal political independence during the Cold War era (1945-1991). The dominant ideology was then militarism. Peripheral capitalism was fully supported by militarism whether it was a civilian regime or technically military one. The world, especially the Global South was essentially ran by the institutionalization of military in state apparatuses. The debt that African states accumulated took place when liberal democracy was either functionally very weak or it was totally absent. The global financial institutions that organized and provided loan programs such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were themselves undemocratic institutions.
In the 1970s and ‘80s at the time of militarism in most developing countries, especially in Africa the issues concerning social and human rights, development, and individual and collective security were timidly articulated mostly in grassroots movements or in underground levels of civil societies. In this context, militarism is used as an ideology, which values war and/or war like social situations highly and, in so doing, legitimizes the state violence. It implies the subordination of the civil society to military and the subordination of civilian control of the military to military control of civilians. In most cases, it can be associated with political instability, rigid bureaucracy, arbitrary decision-making, totalitarianism and autocracy. Between the 1990s and the year 2000, the popular demands for social and political rights and the gender equality have intensified the world over. These quests have been incorporated into the opposition political parties and discourses. Thus they have become part of platforms of actions and means through which people and their local leaders are requesting social changes.
The debates on what democracy or multipartyism and what development for Africa are not new. These debates and the interactions among the above phenomena should continue to help redefine and refine the old question of what kind of social and political systems that may fit the African socio-historical and cultural imperatives and be relevant and appropriate for Africa and the world. These questions will be directly or indirectly examined within the framework of the debt issues as global issues and the recent movement of ideas toward their forgiveness.
The question of international debt and its implications in relationship to the practices and values of liberal/representative democracy has to be critically examined within the context of the failures of the states in Africa to produce, to promote, and to sustain systematically any agenda or policies that articulated development
II. ELECTORAL DEMOCRACY AS A GLOBAL ISSUE
There are some people and scholars who are still skeptical, based on the nature of the global economy and orbits of powers about the real, vis-à-vis possible or potential successes of electoral democracies around the world (especially among countries in the South) in terms of their contribution to improvement of people’s social conditions. Some have perceived the theater of global democracy and its dominant dogmas as an operational scene or procedure that resembles a Japanese Kabuki drama in which on a karaoke stage, the visible singers come and go, but the songs remain the same, selected from a limited, rarely changed menu (Jain and Inoguchi (1997, p. 2). The Japanese democracy has been called "karaoke democracy." It is my position in this paper that the notion of "plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose" is intellectually inadequate in examining a dynamic social concept such as democracy.
In about 500 years of the existence of the world system, this is the first time in contemporary world that we can talk about the global democratization both in terms of the size of its defined claims and demands, the number of the actors involved, and the nature of its policy and social implications. Obviously, slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism were all structurally anti-democratic.
Let me begin this section by saying that one of the difficulties in studying democracy at the global level is that despite the fact that democracy has become a global desirable end of many social, economic and political pursuits among different peoples the world over, no model of democracy can claim to have universal acceptability. Different regions, sub-regions, and countries have produced their own democratic models. Each democracy among the liberal democratic societies in Western Europe, United States, and Japan, for instance, has its own technical mechanisms and procedures that define its uniqueness and particularities. People’s attitudes, expectations, and responses to democratic institutions, and the nature of the democratic institutions and their values in those countries also all vary from country to country. However, in a broad sense, for Robert Dahl (1971), democracy can be defined by the following characteristics:
- an extensive competition among individuals and organized groups;
- a highly inclusive level of participation in the selection of leaders and policies;
- and a high level of civil and political liberties (with all kinds of freedoms). It is "a political system, separate and apart from the economic and social systems to which it is joined" (Diamond, Linz and Lipset, 1999, p. 6). These authors refer to democracy as a political system that supplies regular constitutional opportunities for changing the governing officials, and that permits the population to influence major decisions by choosing the holders of political offices.
My own perspective of democracy is reflected in the following citation:
Democracy is not a menu prepared from the outside of a given culture. It is a political means through which social contradictions, with respect to collective and individual rights, should be solved at a given time and in a given society. There cannot be real democracy if a concerned society does not have any consciousness of its own contradictions, does not allow political debate, and does not outline a social practice to provide rules for the society to manage its interests and objectives with equity and justice. Democracy should be a struggle against social inequality, injustices, exploitation, and social miseries. That is to say, democracy is more than formal political pluralism or the process of producing an electoral code or an electoral commission. ……Democracy is both a process and a practice that involves equal economic and social opportunities for the citizenry. It is a corrective process in which a given society, especially a formerly colonized society, is born again. Born again is used in this context as a process of reconstruction. It is a ritual processing of new ideas and policies in a given society (Lumumba-Kasongo, 1998, 34).
What factors associated with the electoral democracies have been globalized? Have the demands of democracy and the processes of producing democracies become global?
Through a new wage of democratization, democracy has been claimed by most people. Theoretically, the demands have become global. In 2000, the movements that started in the 1970s from the claims and demands for democracy the world over can be characterized by what Victor Hugo once said: "On peut resister à une armée mais jamais à une idée dont le temps est venu," ("One can resist the army but never an idea of which the time has come.")
It should be noted that after the end of World War II, many countries in different subregions of the South were still under the domination of the colonial powers. As I indicated earlier, the new processes of globalization were set up with the creation of three major agencies of the United Nations, namely the World Bank, the IMF, and the GATT. In fact these new global forces not only produced non-democratic effects and behaviors but they have also been functioning undemocratically. Thus, while there was a high economic growth as indicated in the first part of this paper, between 1945 and 1960 democracy was not a part of the economic equation as a global force. Even in Western Europe, the first priority of the reconstruction movement was based on economic determinism and military and security policies.
Although some countries in the South won their independence by building or borrowing from the dogmas of liberal democracy and fragile institutions such as chambers or assemblies, in general, the struggle for democracy as an issue of political rights was not a unique movement that was different from the overall strategic struggles for independence. The discourse of self-determination at the international level, which was articulated and promoted by the United States, was essentially adopted in many countries as a national liberation objective or nation-state building dogma. The priorities of most movements and/or political parties that led to political independence in the majority of countries were more on building nation-states and promoting the ideas of constitutional rights and political sovereignty than on procedural democracies and the pursuit of individual political rights. The rights of the nation-state were perceived as more important and comprehensive than the rights of the citizens. It was assumed that the immortality of the states would create later the conditions for the institutionalization of democracy. However, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights composed of a preamble and 30 articles adopted by the Third General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948, is one of the most important international elements that contributed to the rise of the struggles for democracy.
The polarization of the world by the ideological, military, and power struggles between the Soviet Union and the United States did not contribute to the development of liberal democracy. On the contrary, these struggles inhibited, in controlling the agencies of social changes including the people, in the name of states’ ideologies and security, possibilities of the rise and expansionism of both centralized democracy and liberal democracy models. Wherever these models were experienced, in most situations, they were used as instruments of control and manipulation. In most cases, during the Cold War era, states’ apparatuses, especially ruling political parties and executive branches of government essentially served as national intelligence agencies for the super-powers to collect information, to recruit, and to intimidate progressive forces. Both categories of rights, namely, social rights and political rights, which are considered to be the foundation of democracy, were limited and constrained by the dictum of the dominant ideologies. In fact, this international conflict created a non-democratic world, heavily armed and policed by the United States and the Soviet Union.
In 1999, there were electoral democracies in about 180 countries. This movement has swept over every region of the globe. In the 1970s, one-party regimes and military dictatorships of various sorts, supported by multinationals, the World Bank and the IMF, the United States and the Soviet Union, held power over Africa, South America, Asia, and Eastern Europe.
These new electoral democracies have produced new presidents and members of parliaments or national assemblies. Not only the claims of democracy have become global but also democracy is being perceived and appreciated itself as a global value. There are high expectations about what these electoral democracies should do. For many people in developing countries, for instance, democracy is the savior. It is perceived either as another dimension of development or a complementary force to development. Its expansion between 1970 and the 1990s has been unprecedented in contemporary world politics. For instance, in just 25 years, since the mid-1970s, the number of electoral democracies has more than doubled. During this period, approximately 74 countries changed from being non-democratic to democratic regimes. According to the survey conducted by James Holston of the University of California in San Diego, in 1972 there were 52 electoral democracies, constituting 33 percent of the world’s 160 sovereign nation-states. By 1996, the number rose to 118 democracies out of 191 nation-states, or 62 percent of the total, for a net gain of 66 democratic states. Among the larger countries, those with a population of one million or more people, the number of democracies nearly tripled during the same period. Significantly, the number of non-democratic states has declined by a third since the early 1970s, after rising steadily from the beginning of the century. As Holston stated:
If it took almost about 200 years of modern world history to produce fifty democratic states by 1970, it has taken only 10 years of political change since the mid-1980s to yield the same number of new democracies. …. In 1975, only a few countries in all Latin America had democratically elected national leaders, namely Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. Of the 36 countries that gained independence in Africa between 1956 and 1970, 33 became authoritarian at the birth or shortly after. The exceptions were Botswana and short-lived electoral democracies in Ghana and Nigeria (2000, p. 4).
In the Asia-Pacific region, only a handful of countries, including Australia, Fiji, Japan, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka had some democratic practices. Others such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South Korea had suffered from democratic reversals in the 1960s and the 1970s. The recent military coup d’état in Fiji and the ongoing process of establishing some forms of the military control since May 19, 2000, and the declaration of a state of emergency on May 29 by the general of the army, have created a process of democratic reversal in the country, as has been the case in Côte d’Ivoire since December 25, 1999.
By the end of the 1990s, among 35 states that compose the Americas, 31 had electoral democracies (89 percent). In South and Central America, of 20 nation-states, only Peru and Mexico could not be clearly considered democratic despite some partial elections. Of 53 countries in contemporary Africa, the number of electoral democracies increased to 18 (34 percent). But there are some democratic reversals in countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Niger, and Sierra Leone. The recent movement of Islamization of the state in the Northern Nigeria for example is seriously threatening its electoral democracy. In the Asia-Pacific region, for instance, 24 of its 38 nation-states are now politically democratic (63 percent). Within the new nation-states of the former Eastern Europe, out of its 27 nation-states, 19 have become formally democratic (70 percent).
Although democratic debates and local democratic projects are not absent in the Middle East, it is the only region of the world that has been comparatively stagnant in terms of engagement in the pursuit of liberal democracy. Only Israel and Turkey, (14 percent) have had solid formal political debates on democratic and systematic elections and functioning democratic institutions.
III. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF REALIST SCHOOL OF THOUGHT AND CLAIMS OF THE STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAMS
Realist school as the dominant paradigm in analyzing state formation and international relations in the North has been influenced by the Hobbesian state of nature perspective, theories of anarchism and libertarianism, and also by the Hegelian divined foundation of the statehood. My objective here is not to expand the discussion on the historiography of liberal democracy within the realist school of thought. Rather, I would like to identify some general characteristics of the liberal democracy and examine how they have been projected and/or incorporated into the SAPs logic in Africa, if any.
One of the main differences between the realists and idealists in political science and their perceptions of the world is that realists tend to perceive and define the world mainly in the state-centric paradigm while idealists maintain that although the state is vital in the management of the affairs of the world, they also envision the establishment of some types of universal world (universal institutions) with common features. Idealists argue that in addition to the state as an important actor, there are other actors that should equally participate in the management of the world politics with legitimacy. As it is also called power politics theory, and as it developed within many dimensions of the European-American scholarship, realist school of thought as reflected in the works of Thucydides, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli, Hegel, E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and Henry Kissinger for instance, is essentially a state centric phenomenon. States are fundamentally self-interested and competitive phenomena (Newman, 1996: 17). As an irreducible element in international politics, the underlying condition for its development is conflict. In international relations, the state’s expansionism is the motive for the interactions among states and nations. It is in the name of the national interests that states interact with one another. It is in the name of those interests that they also take arms against one another. The so-called national interests are defined as natural and organic. Humanity is secondary to the interests and actions of actualization of the state power. In the classical Western scholarship Aristotle fully discussed the conditions that ought to be conducive to the "immortality" of the state in the polis (city-state). In this limited democracy, the citizens’ participation in the agora was perceived to be the most important condition to advance society and promote at the same time "the immortality" of the state even if women, slaves, and traders were not qualified to be citizens. In this tradition, the state is then perceived as a rational political animal most times, despite contradictions that may emerge from its actions and means. As Ann Kelleher and Laura Klein state:
While the state primacy perspective of the world does not define the superiority of types of systems, it does privilege a specific type of political organization: The state is viewed as the most important unit for both national and international interaction. According to those who hold this perspective, the primary political identity for all groups and individuals should be as citizens of the state of their birth or adoption. The state primacy perspective does not argue for universal similarity in cultures or centralized power between states. In fact, it gives states a tremendous amount of autonomy in deciding the nature of their realms (41).
Within the state primacy, realists emphasize the sovereignty of the state. No matter how this state was created and whether it is located in the North or the South, as a reflection of human nature, the state has to be a self-centered entity. As David Held wrote:
Modern liberal and liberal democratic theories have constantly sought to justify the sovereignty power of the state while at the same time justifying limits on that power. The history of this attempt since Thomas Hobbes produced the arguments of balancing might and rights, power and law, duties and rights. On the one hand, states must have a monopoly of coercive power in order to provide a secure basis on which trade, commerce, religion and family life can prosper (1993: 18).
What does that mean in a competitive world economy? To be able to discuss how realists define and characterize some elements of the liberal democracy, it is necessary to briefly describe the classifications of the functions of the government as reflected in the structures of the industrial societies. Without examining the historical configurations of how a given government has been created and what the social forces behind its formation were, realist scholars (known also as functionalists and neo-functionalists) have defined the role of government in a "perfect competitive society" in the following manner:
1 to protect our freedom from the enemies outside our gates,
to preserve law and order,
to enforce private contracts,
to foster competitive markets (Dodd, 1955: 219), and
to undertake those few public projects like road construction, that are clearly of general value to the whole society and cannot be readily undertaken under private auspices (Franklin, 1977: 47).
First of all, it should be noted that the concept of "perfect competitive society" is ahistorical even in the United States after the Great Depression. Second, I should also mention the idea of government that should function as a balance wheel through appropriate monetary and fiscal policies. This idea is important for the functioning of any government in the capitalist world as it also relates to another notion that realists, especially the mainstream economists, have produced namely government as a neutral entity and impartial institution. Government can represent the general interest of society as a whole and hence steer capitalism in the social interest (Franklin, 1977: 48). In short, the best government should be the government that does not govern or that governs the least. In the United States, for instance, the ideas of "small government" or "take the government off people’s back" have been part of political lexicon before many elections. However, despite controversies, the United States qualifies the notion of strong government paradigm. Contrary to the arguments related to laissez-faire principle of realists, the United States government for instance, has significantly intervened in mobilization of resources and sponsoring development projects including banking systems between 1944 and the 1970s.
What are the characteristics of the liberal democracy from a realist’s perspective? How does a citizen interact with the state? How should a citizen pursue his/her interests? How should his/her interests be protected within the framework of sovereignty of the state?
Citizens in this historical context are individuals who are legally born in a given country or naturalized individuals who are part of a given society. They have obligations to the society and the state in terms of respecting laws, paying taxes, and maintaining the equilibrium of the society. They also have rights (or entitlements) in their countries to pursue good life and happiness as part of the sovereignty principle of the state. From a realist perspective, these individuals are also buyers and sellers, and producers and consumers. Within the logic of the self-regulated market or the invisible hand of Adam Smith, buyers and sellers are free to buy and sell whatever they have and wherever they choose to. What is important is the quality of their goods that should allow them to compete effectively with one another. The buyers and sellers (citizens) should be able to participate freely in order to sell and buy their services and labor according to their abilities.
The liberal democracy is the system of governance that, in principle, protects citizens’ rights and the instruments of production (land, machinery, factory buildings, natural resources, and the like) that are privately owned by many individuals. The institutions of state should produce social equilibrium. This democracy is called procedural democracy. As Robert D. Grey in citing Joseph Schumputer states:
The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote (1942). Scholars who adopt this procedural, or elitist, version of democracy tend to be concerned primarily with stability of the system. Once the rules are in place, is the system able to maintain itself without experiencing outbursts of violence or becoming oligarchies? Rule of law and constitutionalism help regulate both government and citizens activity to limit abuses of power and keep the system running (Grey, 1997: 83).
Do the people matter in this type of democracy? The question is complex but will not be expanded in this paper. However, in general terms, I affirm that people as consumers/voters matter. The routine of rituals of elections brings political elite and electors closer for a short period of time. A fresh start can bring new possibilities for the ordinary people. But the mass values are articulated through elitist filters through which important issues are selected and elevated from their individualistic origins to the local or national agenda. As Grey indicates:
Central to procedural definitions of democracy is the free and fair competition among political parties for the power to make public decisions. This regular competition for power keeps conflictual groups from engaging in violence, much like individuals in conflict might "settle it" through a coin toss or an arm-wrestling match rather than in a fist fight. Hence, in a procedural democracy, conflicts are legitimate and adverse to public interest (1997: 87).
With its concern on reason, law, and freedom of choice that could only be upheld properly by recognizing the political equality of all mature individuals, this democracy limits in a large extent the power of the state (Held, 1993:18). As Beetham said:
Democracy I take to be a mode of decision-making about collectively binding rules and policies over which the people exercise control, and the most democratic arrangement to be that where all members of the collectivity enjoy effective equal rights to take part in such decision-making directly-one, that is to say, which realizes to the greatest conceivable degree the principles of popular control and equality in its exercise (1993: 56).
The question of whether or not liberal democracy effectively functions the way liberal theorists tend to project is a complex matter that is not the object of this paper. In short, in liberal democracy, individualism or individuals rights, free choice, freedoms (or civil liberties), and democratic accountability are among the most important characteristics of this type of democracy. How have these elements of liberal democracy and the notion of strong state been projected in the SAPs?
In the 1970s and 1980s, the SAPs were implemented through highly centralized political structure with a high level of technical secrecy. But even before the implementation of these programs in Africa, anti-democratic formula was preferred in the name of efficiency and growth. As it is reported in World Development Report:
Authoritarianism often has been seen as useful, if regrettable, expedient for effective policy-making in the face of political instability. A strong held view from 1970 through the 1970s was that development policies took time to bear fruit, and that this was inconsistent with the politics of short-term electoral cycles. Democracies were seen as having a built-in inclination toward populist policies (199: 132).
In most cases where the SAPs were adopted in their initial stage, there were no serious debates on how to implement them and what in the long-term the consequences of their implementation are likely to be. Even when they were enveloped in the African policy symbolisms, their content had tendencies of being "universal;" or they were Americo-European oriented. It was technical operation of highly selected members of political elite in the ministries of finance, economy, planning and in other cases, the office of Prime Minister. As Ali Mazrui indicates:
When I served on the World Bank's Council of African Advisors, I repeatedly asked the Bank to devise a calculus of democratic indicators by which an African country would be judged democratically before a loan was granted. Vice- President Edward Jaycox of the World Bank repeatedly protested that it could not be done. Partly because market ideologies have been pushed with greater vigour and consistency than has liberal democracy, the market is almost triumphant by the end of the 20th Century. There are more countries that have been forced to privatise and adopt structural adjustment programmes than there are countries that have been penalised for not democratising (1998: 2).
Although the political situation in the world has become different in the 1990s and there is a space for political debates in most countries, the SAPs are still very much elitist programs in Africa. That is to say that the majority of Africans, especially those who live in the countryside, have not been able to directly or indirectly participate in their formulation and implementation.
However, since the early 1990s, as a result of popular movements, intellectual critiques from both liberals and organic intellectuals, and the brutal end the Soviet Union and its socialist bloc, the World Bank was obliged to revise some of its requirements for having access to its financial resources and to those of its affiliate institutions. In the process of producing new reforms guidelines, the technocrats and policymakers at Bank started with what they called "rethinking state." Thus, the World Bank started to insist on the "good" governance as one of the prerequisites in admitting states on the credit lines and loans. As it states in its Report:
The agenda for reform that emerged in the course of this Report calls for government to intervene less in certain areas and more in others--for the state to let markets work where they can, and to step in promptly and effectively where they cannot (World Report Development, 1991: 128).
The notion of strong state that was defined in militaristic and personalistic power structure and that prevailed throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, is not a rigidly defined central dogma of the World Bank anymore. The state that can maintain "law and order" is the one that the Bank can do business with. "Law and order" is a legalistic expression that has been articulated well in the literature of modernization of school of thought as the state’s coercive power. Even Leopold II of Belgium used it to govern the Congo as a personal property.
It should be noted that despite the fact that the World Bank has started to engage the non-governmental institutions, it still believes in the power and organization of the state in the process of implementing its programs. It should also be emphasized that the notion of "law and order" does not necessarily imply liberal democracy or any type of democracy for that matter. Another notion that has been central in the discourses and the lexicon of the bank is "good" governance. Projected in normative terms, it includes building state’s institutions, and accountability.
It has been clear that liberal democracy within the SAPs means periodic elections at most levels of the societal organizations within multiparty politics, and political stability of some kind. Concerning elections and multipartyism, the rules have not been generalized over Africa. Some countries with limited electoral democracy or the non-party politics are still, despite recent debates on their performance and possible restraints to stop pouring money to them, les enfants chéris of the Paris Club and the World Bank. The point is that multipartyism and liberal elections are still used as ad hoc principles within the World Bank.
In a situation where multipartyism has become almost routine practice in some African countries, the World Bank does not seem to care much about whether this multipartyism is an autocratic or a democratic one. I defined multiparty autocracy as a system of governance with more than one political party in which the ruling party has monopoly over political and financial resources; it controls them to advance its causes, and it also determines the direction of discourses of other political parties and those of the national politics at large (Lumumba-Kasongo, 1998: 22-23). In countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Togo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), multiparty autocracy was confused with liberal democracy.
INTERNATIONAL DEBT
As articulated earlier, my analytical perspective in this paper is that the international debt has to be examined as an essential part of the operations and structures of the international capitalism. The African debt crisis is therefore part of a larger world debt crisis. However, given the local and regional particularities associated with the dynamics of the world economy, the implications of the African debts should be analyzed through the geo-political regional paradigms and the role of Africa in world capitalism. International debt issues should inform how capitalism works.
The issue concerning foreign debt forgiveness, known also as the debt relief, has been internationalized since the 1999 conference in Germany of the G 7. In the April 2000’s conference in Cairo, Egypt, President Jacques Chirac of France announced that France will forgive the totality of bilateral debts to the poorest and indebted countries and that other countries should follow suit. And that in the next 15 years, France will make an effort to forgive about $23 billions to countries heavily indebted. The processes of selecting the first group of countries have been completed. Eleven poor countries have already qualified for debt relief from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and other creditors. These countries include, Benin, $ 460, Bolivia, $ 2.1 million, Burkina Faso $ 700 million, Cameroon $2 billion, the Honduras $900 million, Mali $ 870 million, Mauritania $1.1 billion, Mozambique $4.3 billion, Senegal $850 million, Tanzania $3 billion, and Uganda $2 billion. The debt-relief package is pending in Congress, which must approve the US share. It should be noted that it is not clear how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank came up with the above figures. However, many speculate that the debt relief scheme is basically part of bilateral debt.
Other countries that are also on the pipe line and are expected to have the debt relief before the end of the year 2000 include Chad $ 250 million, Gambia $ 130 million, Guinea $1.2 billion, Guinea Bissau $700 million, Guyana $ 1.1 billion, Malawi $ 1.1 billion, Nicaragua $ 5 billion, Rwanda, $ 800 million, and Zambia $ 4 billion. And countries under consideration are Ethiopia $1.5 billion, Madagascar $1.5 billion, Niger $700 million, Sao Tome and Principe $170 million. It should be noted that conditionalities for the debt relief are similar to those of the SAPs as discussed earlier, with an emphasis on electoral democracies, poverty alleviation, and women issues. But these conditions have been used in ad hoc fashion depending on the unwritten geo-political factors that shape the major powers interests and behaviors in the discourse of the global economy and their security paradigms. What do all the above figures represent in the total African debts?
In order to have an idea of what debt relief may represent in the African debt saga, and in the absence of the availability of data concerning the debt by country in the year 2,000, I decided to use the 1998’s data to calculate the relief as of % of debt. It should be noted that the selected nations in my sample have likely continue to increase the loans between 1998 and 2000 making the percentage not representative of the reality. However, the exercise gives some general ideas about what this relief may be statistically (see the table of debt in 1998 and debt relief in 2000). Unless in the past two years countries selected here doubled or tripled their loans, it is clear that the debt relief scheme may have a significant reduction of between 20 % to almost 100 % in some cases of the total debt in some countries. The effort seems to be on positive side. However, the debt relief impact has been assessed within the framework of the performance and structures of the total African political economy.
Why do nation-states, companies, and people take foreign loans? Who is to pay back these loans in Africa? Some simplistic answers are that some nations, companies, and people are at a given time in need of cash in order to run their businesses and correct their budgetary problems. It is also obvious that people are paying back their loans with their labor. But in Africa, it should be that many governments have been paying their financial obligations with people’s "blood and lives." Many people are being social and physically tortured so that government could pay back loans. And many people are dying as a result of policies related to loans.
Since the 1970s, along with the oil crises, international debt has become also an issue not only in international relations, trade arrangements and agreements, and diplomacy, but also about fiscal policy management, resources allocation and distribution. In principle, executive branches of the states, governments, from the views of both realist and idealist schools of thought, have obligations to secure resources for social progress of their citizens. This complex issue has to be examined within a structuralist perspective.
The amount of the African international debt or public debt has been gradually and annually increasing since the 1970s. But as compared to other countries in developing world, especially those in South America, the African total public debt represents only a relatively small percentage of the total public debt of the world. For instance, in 1998, the total public debt of Nigeria represented 3.485 % ($ 23bn 455) of the total public debt of the world while this of Côte d’Ivoire was 1.608% ($ 10bn 822); this of South Africa was 1.579% ($10bn 626), this of Ghana was 0.828 ($ 5bn570), this of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was 1,330 % ($ 8bn 949), this of Kenya was 0.836 ($ 5bn629), this of Senegal was 0.487% ($ 3bn 274), and this of Ethiopia was 1.429% (9bn618). In countries in South America, the percentage of the total public debt was higher than in Africa and Asia. For example, in Brazil it represented 14. 707 % ($98bn959), Mexico 13.076 percent ($87bn 996) and Argentina it was 11.413% ($87bn799). In Asia for instance, South Korea represented 8.612% ($57bn956), and Indonesia was 9.948%($66bn944).2 These trends are not qualitatively very different from those in the 1980s.3 Values in million of debt countries as a % of GDP in 1998 are calculated in the charter annexed at the end of the paper. For instance, in Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, DRC, Kenya, Senegal, and Ethiopia, these values are 71.1, 116.3, 291.1, 57.9, 44.7,174.7, and 133.5 respectively. In Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, DRC, Kenya, Senegal, and Ethiopia And the charter of Debt per Capital in 1998 also is included at the end of the paper as well. But as stated earlier the issue is about the availability of resources to pay back this debt and the origins of loans. On a simple formula, money that one is paying its debt has to come from some other sources. What are those sources and how are those relate directly or indirectly to human conditions?
Why debt forgiveness or debt relief at this time. The question is complex as it reflects both cost-benefit analysis and power relation issues. Generally, it is difficult to relate them in a non-linear process of reasoning. What should Africa benefit from this relief in a short and long run? And what should the "forgivers" gain as a result of their actions. It should be emphasized that in a capitalist pragmatic logic, there is no such thing as a free lunch. But African may take advantages of the principle of mutuality, which should be examined carefully.
I have argued in this paper that there is no such thing as compassionate capitalism. To save capitalism some decisions must be made at the various orbits of powers. So this specific scheme of debt relief is not a humanitarian action from the industrial countries. It is corrective process that should integrate Africa further into the world of international capitalism. Jacques Chirac clearly articulated this situation in the Cairo conference in April 2000 that what Africa needs are European investments, further integration into world economy, and also she needs to compete with other actors in world economy. So in order to accomplish these interrelated goals, there is a need for political and juridical stability. This is where the role of electoral democracies becomes vital.
Conclusion
Cold War liberalism was essentially an ideology of the alliance of between the military alliance and its bureaucracies, and corporation complexes that ruled the world with iron, stick, and the "controlled ‘freemarket’ tools." These institutions were essentially interested in power, control, and surplus making. The space and options for dealing with economic democracy, which has been demanded by popular and grassroots movements and progressive forces, were limited and in most cases non-existent in developing countries, especially in Africa. Is the post-cold war liberalism equal to pre-cold liberalism in terms of the power associated with the international debt?
Many countries in Africa accumulated the larger portions of their external debts at the time where there were no liberal democracies. The state apparatuses were re-organized to support the major objective of payment of the debts. In the post-Cold Era, these countries have been expected to fully commit to pay back their debts or to negotiate about the payment when electoral democracies have become partially the rules of the game or international practices for worse or better in many parts of the continent. It is my view in this presentation that the electoral democracies have been supported by the Western powers and global financial institutions partially to avoid possible occurrences of worse case scenarios such as defaulting, or extreme nationalism, or even the cases of social revolution. Within the existing social and economic conditions, the chance to have an "acceptable" level of people’s political participation in those democracies, with perhaps few exceptions, is minimum because of the related factors such as intrigues of ruling parties or the parties in power to control the electoral processes, internal weaknesses of the oppositions parties, most of which have little ideological guidance, poor technological and social infrastructures, and more importantly the involvement of support of the agencies associated with the corporate globalization in the local electoral processes.
It is argued in this paper that as long as the structures of the world economy have not seriously challenged collectively or regionally in Africa by the African political, social, and economic organizations and alliances, the results of the electoral democracies in terms of qualitatively changing people’s living standards will matter very little. In fact the involvement of corporate globalization in the electoral democracies either in directly supporting the elections or in propaganda making in the international media, has to worry us because corporate globalization is not philosophically and socially interested in any democracy, development, and people. As stated earlier, its main interests are in power, control, and the surplus accumulation. In short, if electoral democracies framed within the technical dogma of the World Bank and the IMF are not transformed, by the actions of coalitions between popular and social movements, into social democracies, they will not be able to satisfy the demands of social changes that are taking place in most societies in Africa. Corporate globalization is interested in the existing electoral democracies because these democracies are, in most cases, façade to real democracies.
We have to search for some forms of working multipartyisms and democracies. In the absence of guided revolutions, a combination of politics of consensualism and consociational democracy (Lijphart, 1984) can contribute to the process of producing a human, productive, and a transformative multipartyism and democracy. This working multipartyism has to be constructed on a genuine premise of "politics of compromise." Within the existing levels of social and economic cleavages, this compromise will not be actualized until the African systems of governance provide and secure basic rights and needs for all. The sine qua nun condition for a better functioning multipartyism and democracy is that the state has to provide social security, improve the standards of living, and provide advancement of all. I have argued that African states should be recaptured and transformed so that they can be able to subsidize liberties and rights. This can be done if social protection is codified. There is a need to create a leadership that is nationalistic that understands the dynamics of the world economy and its contours.
As for proposed solutions to debt issues in Africa, I agree with the logic articulated by McEwan who said:
There is no way to determine in advance when a debt burden will become unsustainable. The debt process is a bit like building a tower with a set of children’s blocks. We cannot tell ahead of time how high we can go, how many blocks we can pile on top of each other, but we do know that there is a limit. If we keep going higher and higher, at some point the whole structure will come tumbling down. There are, of course, ways to extend the limit. We can widen the base of tower, for example, or construct some support structures. There comes a point, however, where we are devoting all our efforts and resources to shoring up the tower (MacEwan, p. 31)
In short, some of the elements of my thinking are reflected in what Henry Hart stated: "Equality among nations and the democratization of international relations, economic, and political. It wants global co-operation for development on the basis of mutual benefit. It is a strategy for the recognition and preservation of the world’s diversity "(1977, p. 360). African needs developmental democracy (Olukoshi (2002) and developmental state (Amuwo, 2002) in order to deal effectively and socially with the implications of international debt in its domestic affairs. It is only when people would be able to determine what they can do about the international debt in their specific countries that this issue will be permanently solved. It is only in a social democracy promoted by an African welfare state, a strong and a visionary interventionist state, on behalf of the majority weak and poor, that people can be in charge of their destiny.
NOTES
My perspective is that global capitalism has created a global apartheid system that consists of the established centres (European Union and NAFTA), the emerging peripheries (East Asia, South Africa), struggling peripheries (much of Latin America and the Middle East), and stagnating peripheries (much of the Sub-Saharan Africa). For instance, about 14 percent of the world population uses more than 80 percent of the world resources. The bulk of global resource flows is confined to the dominant capitalist center. According to Keet (1997: 23):
Fully 84% of all Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) originates within such countries, with a large proportion (of almost 40%) originating in just two countries, the USA and the UK, in 1996. [...](Almost 60% of global FDI in that year was still moving between the most developed industrialized countries of North America and Europe. [...] 98 out of the 100 largest TNCs, globally, originate in the OECD. [...] Fully 87% of all TNCs are headquartered in the EU, the US, and Japan; and in 1996, 88% of their "foreign assets" were actually located in each other’s economies. [sic.]
All the calculations and charts making were carefully made by my teaching assistant, Kristen Kristen Powlick, who used the data from the World Development Report and the World Bank.
From Table A.25 (Pg. 276-278), World Economic and Social Survey, 2000. (United Nations).
Source: "United Nations, based on IMF, OECD and World Bank" (278).
From Table A.25 (Pg. 276-278), World Economic and Social Survey, 2000. (United Nations).
Source: "United Nations, based on IMF, OECD and World Bank" (278).
External Debt of Net-Debtor Developing Countries, 1989-1999
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
Africa
Total External Debt
275.5
288.8
291.1
287.5
290.1
315.6
335.2
330.1
315.4
324.6
---
Long-term Debt
241.5
254.5
257.6
251.6
250.2
275.6
290.3
282.8
269.5
276.5
---
Concessional
77.1
84.9
91.8
95.8
100.8
110.6
119.2
125.2
122.8
130.4
---
Bilateral
51.8
56.6
60.1
62.2
64.2
68.8
72.0
76.1
73.0
76.4
---
Multilateral
25.2
28.3
31.7
33.6
36.6
41.9
47.2
49.1
49.8
54.0
---
Official, non-concessional
79.8
81.4
84.1
82.5
81.1
91.5
97.2
90.1
82.7
84.5
---
Bilateral
51.8
50.6
51.7
50.5
47.8
55.3
60.7
55.4
52.0
53.3
---
Multilateral
21.4
24.6
26.6
27.0
28.2
30.4
31.3
29.2
26.1
26.9
---
IMF
6.6
6.1
5.7
5.0
5.0
5.8
5.2
5.4
4.5
4.3
---
Private creditors
84.7
88.3
81.8
73.2
68.4
73.4
73.9
67.6
64.0
61.7
---
Of which:
Bonds2
2.0
3.6
3.1
5.1
2.9
4.5
5.3
5.9
9.7
9.8
---
Commercial banks2
31.9
31.1
29.4
22.9
21.3
21.9
22.9
25.1
22.3
21.3
---
Short-Term Debt
34.0
34.2
33.5
35.9
39.9
40.0
44.9
47.3
45.9
48.1
---
Sub-Saharan Africa
Total External Debt
123.8
140.0
145.9
149.5
153.7
162.5
172.1
170.6
165.8
171.1
175.7
Long-term Debt
108.4
121.3
125.7
127.1
129.2
140.0
147.4
145.1
141.8
147.4
149.9
Concessional
50.0
58.4
63.1
66.3
69.8
77.9
82.2
84.6
84.6
90.5
94.2
Bilateral
29.0
33.0
34.5
35.8
36.7
38.4
39.8
40.3
39.9
42.3
42.7
Multilateral1
21.0
25.3
28.6
30.5
33.1
39.5
42.4
44.3
44.6
48.3
51.5
Official, non-concessional
33.7
37.4
37.3
36.7
35.3
37.2
39.5
36.6
33.0
33.6
33.0
Bilateral
20.0
22.8
22.9
22.8
21.7
24.7
25.8
24.8
22.6
21.1
22.9
Multilateral
9.3
10.5
10.9
10.8
10.9
11.2
11.1
10.0
8.8
8.7
8.1
IMF
4.4
4.1
3.5
3.0
2.7
1.3
2.5
1.9
1.6
1.8
2.0
Private creditors
24.7
25.6
25.3
24.1
24.1
24.9
25.7
23.8
24.3
23.3
22.8
Of which:
Bonds
.4
.3
.3
.2
.2
.2
.3
.2
2.7
2.6
3.2
Commercial banks2
8.1
8.7
8.5
8.2
8.2
8.5
9.3
12.2
10.1
9.9
10.2
Short-Term Debt
15.4
18.7
20.2
22.4
24.5
22.5
24.8
25.5
23.8
23.7
25.8
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