- So, in the last several lectures, we've been looking at the combined effects of the disappearance of communism as a viable alternative, both in practice and in the imagination of mainstream political thinking as a serious economic alternative to capitalism on the one hand, and then on the other, the effects of the declining
power of organized labor, vis a vis capital, in many of, if not all, of
the Western democracies. And the effects of that
have been to enhance, in one way or another, the prestige of what was called neo-liberalism at home and the Washington consensus abroad. And we've seen how this played out, particularly in the
agendas of privatization, the increasing independence
of private money in politics that we talked about last time, and the erosion of what had been the social democratic
consensus in Western Europe and the great society
in the United States. The next four lectures, we're gonna refocus attention
back to the global order and particularly the
idea that gained currency in the first decades after the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, that there really was
gonna be a new global order marked by the spread of democracy at home and the, it was the spread
of democracy within countries and the reshaping of global
international institutions. And that's basically
what's gonna preoccupy us. The first two lectures
are gonna be focused on the spread of democracy or the expectation that it was going to
spread around the world, and then the next two are going to deal with international institutions. If there was going to be a new, global, geopolitical order, what form would people expect it to take? I've called the lecture today Democracy's Fourth Wave, question mark, and I'm gonna focus
principally on South Africa as a remarkable transition
with some comparisons to the Middle East and Northern Ireland. But I should say something
about this language of waves. So, the idea of waves of democracy came into currency, at least
in the academic literature, in a book by Samuel Huntington published in 1991 called "The Third Wave", and it had, and I'll
talk a little bit more about the waves in detail shortly, but Huntington had argued that a third wave of democratization
following the first two, the first wave having
been the older democracies that democratized very slowly over the course of the 19th
and early 20th centuries, the second wave being mostly the democracies that emerged in
the era of decolonization, of Africa and Asia after World War II, and Huntington posited
that despite expectations he, among others, had
written an article in I think it was in the late
'70s, maybe in the early '80s predicting that we wouldn't
see much more democracy. By 1991, in "The Third Wave" he said, well, we can really date this
new wave of democratization to the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, which led to democratizations in the former Portuguese
colonies and elsewhere. He had... By the time he wrote that book, he had also seen the democratizations
across Eastern Europe which had largely occurred in 1989, but the changes in the Soviet
Union lay in the future and so he didn't have
anything to say about that. And, indeed, he had very little to say about the South African transition that we're gonna focus on today, which was also mostly in the future. And the other books that
came out around that time, such as Adam Przeworski's
"Democracy and the Market", also were basically looking at this period in the last part of the 20th century from 1974 through the redemocratization of Eastern Europe, and they thought, "Is
this the third wave?" Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and some of the developments
we're gonna be talking about over the next several lectures, there's been a lot of
speculation about a fourth wave that would incorporate some of the cases like the South African transition, the Arab Spring that was much heralded in 2011 and 2012. And we'll hold off assessing
whether or not we think there's a fourth wave
is under way or likely until we've gone through looking at the conditions for the creation
and survival of democracy and how we should think
about the various efforts, some successful, some not, at democratization in recent times. So, the South African
transition to democracy which occurs in the late
1980s and really starts and goes through the
first election of 1994, one thing to say about it was
a highly improbable outcome. Nobody really expected it. Indeed, if you go back to the 1970s, which is when I started
out in political science, it was a very common observation to say that some of the political conflicts in the
world were just so difficult they were never gonna be solved. They were, basically, sort of the political basket cases of the world. The conflicts were just
too entrenched, the possibility of a successful
outcome too elusive, and that we just have to sort
of come to grips with the fact that there's some political
conflicts that can't be solved. And the three exhibits that
were always wheeled out to make this point were the conflict between Protestants and
Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Israel/Palestine conflict
which had been going on in one form or another
since 1948 at least, and South Africa, the struggle between the apartheid regime which had come to power in 1948 but had replaced a previous government that had also
been heavily racist. And many times, people said, "Well, the South African conflict "is the most intractable of intractables." Partly because it was based on race and racial exclusion is very difficult to split the difference when you're... One of the terms we use in
talking about identity politics is that identity politics tends to involve indivisible goods, not divisible goods. If you think back to
our earlier discussion of the divide a dollar game, that presumes that you're dealing with a divisible good, right? So, you can divide it up in
different ways and you can get, therefore, you can form different
coalitions and so forth. When you're dealing
with indivisible goods, those options are unavailable. So, we had an indivisible
good, namely race, and then we had a small, white minority, less than 20% of the
population, considerably less, and they were in power and had no, they were in control of the most powerful military
in South Africa, in Africa until the prospect of a
transition became real, they were widely known
to have nuclear weapons, which they eventually gave up, and it didn't seem like they
would give up with a fight, without a fight and go anywhere. And so most people, even people who thought
the system was unstable, which many people did, thought that it would be
much more likely to end in a civil war or a bloodbath. And, of course, it was also
wired into the Cold War because it was seen as
staunchly anti-communist and so supported by many Western
governments in the 1980s. And, indeed, in the US
there was a huge fight over sanctions against South Africa during the Reagan administration when the Democrats controlled
Congress, as you now know, and eventually the sanctions were passed over Ronald Reagan's veto in the mid-1980s, which is
a difficult thing to do. You need two-thirds in both houses. So, you can see, by the 1980s, the support for the South African regime was certainly hemorrhaging
in the advanced democracies, but, nonetheless, they were
wired into the Cold War until the end of it and so didn't come under great pressure from Western governments, certainly not the US government. So, when I left South Africa in 1972, I didn't believe I would ever go back. I thought that the possibilities for a white, young, white person
of my, I was 15 years old, the possibilities for making a life there were virtually non-existent. By that time, once you had turned 16, they would not give you a passport if you hadn't been to the military, and by that time, military service increasingly was not sitting around in the desert being ordered about by a lance corporal but doing crowd control
in places like Soweto, and I decided it was not for me. And I really did... And my beliefs were not unusual. The vast majority of people
in the 1970s would have said this conflict is gonna get
worse before it gets even worse, (students laugh)
and the outcome is not, certainly a good outcome was not in view. And so, the world was shocked on the second of February in 1990, when Americans turned on the evening news and this is what they heard. - [Announcer] Sitting in
tonight, Diane Sawyer. - Good evening. They were bold words, words that millions of people
had waited years to hear. Today, in a 45-minute
State of the Nation speech, President F.W. de Klerk
transformed 30 years of South African politics. He declared the African National Congress, the major black opposition
group in South Africa, to be legal. He promised that its most famous leader, Nelson Mandela, would soon be free. Our first report is from ABC's
Richard Sergay in Cape Town. (crowd singing joyfully) - [Richard] Nearly 5000 people
who gathered near Parliament to protest against Apartheid
today wound up celebrating. - It's like a dream
come true, that's true. - It's a big step forward,
a big step forward. (brass band playing) - [Richard] Opening his first parliamentary session as president, de Klerk made one thing clear right away. The government is ready
to begin negotiating South Africa's future
with the black majority. - The season of violence is over. The time for reconstruction
and reconciliation has arrived. - [Richard] de Klerk told his colleagues he was implementing a
series of immediate reforms, partially lifting the state of emergency, suspending executions, and easing restrictions on
internal opposition groups. Then came the biggest change in policy. - The prohibition of the
African National Congress is being rescinded.
(crowd cheers) - [Richard] For the
first time in 30 years, the white government's
sworn enemy, the ANC, will be allowed to operate
openly in South Africa. It wasn't until the end of his speech that de Klerk finally mentioned the name everyone was waiting to
hear, Nelson Mandela. - That the government
has taken a firm decision to release Mr. Mandela unconditionally. I am serious about bringing this matter to finality without delay. - [Richard] But de Klerk says
Mandela won't be released until what the president called
his personal circumstances and safety are worked out. de Klerk has met nearly all the conditions that Mandela had set for leaving prison. - I believe that we have
to give Mr. de Klerk very, very considerable credit, and we may be seeing history in the making. - [Richard] But leaders of
the African National Congress in exile were more cautious. - Quite clearly, an important
step forward has been made. But perhaps it's half of a step. - [Richard] Still,
President de Klerk's speech confirmed the worst fears
of white conservatives. - We were fighting with
everything we have to retain the right of self-determination
of the white people and to secure that there
will be no domination of black people over whites. - [Richard] Growing
pressure here and abroad for real change left de Klerk
with very little choice. Today, he challenged
critics on both sides. "Walk through the open door," he said. "Take your place at
the negotiating table." Richard Sergay, ABC News, Cape Town. - So, that was an
astonishingly dramatic moment. It's hard to overstate, as I said, how much it surprised many
people across the world. And not only that. Everything that de Klerk
said, he followed through on. In early... Early in that year, they unbanned all illegal
political organizations, they released all political prisoners, including Mandela from his prison, and legalized all political organizations, many of which had been banned. They then, over the course
of the next three years, negotiated a settlement and
voluntarily gave up power, and since that time, we've had
elections in '94, '99, 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019 which have been judged by
independent organizations to be genuine elections,
free and fair elections, not rigged elections. It is true that the South Africa has not passed
what political scientists sometimes refer to as
the two turnover test. The political scientists don't like to call a country a democracy until it's happened twice that a government has lost an election and actually given up power. 'Cause you don't know what they'll do if they lose an election, and we don't know what the ANC would do if it lost an election. So, in that sense, it's not a consolidated or an established democracy, but there are some pretty reasonable signs in a sense that, first of all, we have had turnover in the leadership. We haven't had a sort of situation as with Mugabe in Zimbabwe where
he staggered on for decades until he was finally dragged out of there. Instead, we've had hard-fought but nonetheless
successful transitions after Mandela stepped down after one term. Some people say his most important, the most important decision
of his premiership because it was a norm-setting that people don't stay indefinitely. Followed by our provost yesterday. Then we had transition to Mbeki, to Zuma, and then a very hard-fought transition to Cyril Ramaphosa more recently, but we have seen people giving up power in the leadership of the ANC. And then it's also the case that the ANC has become accustomed to losing elections and giving up some power because in addition to Cape Town, which is controlled by the opposition Democratic Alliance for a long time, they have in more recent elections, they have lost control of
the other major cities, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria, and Johannesburg to opposition parties. And so... And local politics is not
unimportant in South Africa, and so the notion that
when you lose an election you actually give up power, while it's not been embedded at the level of the national government has some traction in the
South African experience. There are many problems with corruption in South African politics, much of which will concern us, or the causes of it will concern us on next Tuesday, but by the standards of the
evaluation of most democracies, South Africa looks pretty good. They have the other indicators
you might be concerned about. They have a relatively free
press, freedom of association, an operating legal system, and so on. And so certainly by the standards
of many new democracies, it's been quite a remarkable story. So, today's agenda is
we're gonna talk first a little bit about getting
and keeping democracy, what's required to get democracy, what's required to keep it. This will involve revisiting some of the themes of modernization theory that I talked about earlier when we were talking about China. Then I'm gonna talk about
transitions to democracy, and I'm gonna separate out
four types of transition and say something about them. Then we're gonna zero in
on one of those four types, which are negotiated settlements of the sort that we
witnessed in South Africa during the 1990s, and that will lead us to some evaluation of success,
failure, and inconclusiveness by looking at that transition in contrast with the continuous
failure after failure in the Israel/Palestine conflict and the more inconclusive
results in Northern Ireland. Okay, so getting and keeping democracy. There's some historical context to this, some of which I have alluded to. Huntington coined the phrase three waves, and the first wave begins in
the late 18th century, really, with the American Revolution
and the French Revolution and it extends to the early 20th century with the enfranchisement
of women in most countries, except Switzerland when it didn't come for another half century and the enfranchisement, the reducing the voting age often from 21 to 18, which came in many
countries during the 1960s. So, it was a very gradual
and long transition. And that's not really surprising,
if you think about it, because elites were afraid of democracy for reasons we've already talked about. They had some intuitive grasp of the logic behind
the median voter theorem, although they didn't use that terminology, but they were worried. They were worried that if they suddenly
enfranchised the whole population, it would threaten their
position and their property. And so, for instance, in Britain, we got significant expansion
of the franchised in 1832, more in 1867, more in 1885, women in the 1920s, and young people, 18 year olds, in the 1960s. So, it's a sort of some baby steps before big steps. In the European countries it
happened a little more rapidly. A lot of enfranchisement in
countries like Germany in 1870, but still, we see a gradual
process of evolution, if you like, toward democracy rather than universal franchise. And that is one thing that
differentiates the first wave from the second wave because the second wave is really bound up with anti-colonial
struggles against Britain, particularly, in Africa and Asia but also against the
other colonial powers, and those were countries that went from very restricted or no franchise to universal franchise
more or less overnight. So, it is was a very different
kind of set of transitions, and they had, they happened much faster for that reason. And then the third wave,
as I said to you already, is retrospectively dated by Huntington, somewhat arbitrarily one might say, to the Portuguese Revolution in 1974 and what subsequently followed in Eastern Europe, in
particular, in the late 1980s. Now, this creates this talk
about waves of democracy and getting more and more democracies. And indeed by the turn of the 21st century we had more democracies in the world than more non-democracies for the first time in human history, even if it was the case that more people lived in non-democracies
than in democracies because some of the non-democracies
have huge populations, but, nonetheless, it creates
a kind of air of teleology that informed the idea of
the end of history that we've already talked about, this idea that the world is steadily becoming more democratic and it just would be a matter of time before these waves would come along, and eventually the whole
world would be democratic. That was never... That was never a very good bet. So, if you think about the three waves, each one of those waves has
had significant undertow. So, if we think about the first wave, yes, we had the revolution
in France in 1789. By 1791, it had turned into the terror and something which nobody would think was recognizably a democracy. In Europe, in 1830, across the continent we
had democratic revolutions in just about every country except the UK, which had led Marx and Engels to think this was the beginning
and the end of capitalism. And even in the UK we had
the Chartist movement, which people were terrified might turn into a revolutionary movement or hopeful that it might turn
into a revolutionary movement depending on your point of view. By 1832, those revolutions had collapsed and the monarchies had all been restored across the continent. The same thing happened in 1848. Again, democratic
revolutions swept Europe and by 1849, 1850, they
pretty much all collapsed, and the non-democracies were back. If we think about the 20th century up through the end of the first wave, of course we had the advent
of fascism, of Nazism in Italy and in Germany, and in the US, massive
retrenchment after the Civil War of democratic rights
through the Jim Crow period, huge disenfranchisement. I talked about the Supreme Court's reading of the Civil War amendments last time to restrict their application and particularly to
restrict the application of the 15th amendment, where you couldn't exclude
people on the basis of race but you could find surrogates
like literacy tests and poll taxes and so forth. So, there was lots of undertow to the first wave of democratization. It's not like you get these things and then you can't ratchet back. If you think about the second wave, again, many, many democracies
that were established, when the British left, the first election turned
out to be the last election. Lots of theorizing and literature and speculation about why that is the case or why that was the case. Perhaps one of the most
plausible accounts is that where the British governed
by direct rule, as in India, democracy got better traction because you had whole
generations of Indian elites who went to Oxford and Cambridge and came back and
embedded democratic norms and values in their institutions
before the British left, whereas in South Africa, and much of the rest of Africa, the British governed indirectly, which essentially was much cheaper because you didn't have
to set up your own whole, your whole bureaucracy and civil service and institutional capacity and instead found local chiefs or sometimes more or
less created local chiefs and said, "Provided you
deliver what we want, "you can govern as you please." And so there was much more
indirect rule in Africa, unlike the direct rule in India, so some people put it down to that. Wonderful book on this subject by a man called Mahmood Mamdani, who's a professor of political science and anthropology at Columbia, called "Citizen and Subject", about the legacy of direct
versus indirect rule. There are other theories, and it's not an unproblematic
theory itself because, after all, Pakistan had the
same direct rule as India and didn't have such a happy, democratic future as India did. So, it's a complex story, but, nonetheless, there
was plenty of undertow. Many, many democracies
that had been created, as the imperial powers left, turned out not to survive. And then, if we think
about the third wave, again, there's also been
significant undertow there. We've seen, I probably should've put
Pakistan on the second wave, but much of Latin America. We've seen, we saw
collapses of democracy in various countries or at least
serious compromising of it in Burma, in Fiji, where
coups seem to come and go, Algeria in 1991 we had a coup, and of course the ongoing
questions about Russian democracy that have become more acute with time. So, the idea that
there's some inevitablism that democracy's just once you
get it, you keep it forever, clearly not true. Democracies can fall apart
and sometimes they do. And so that puts on the table the question so what are the conditions
for democracy to arrive and what are the conditions
for democracy to survive? And that provokes some
theoretical questions, and there's a huge theoretical literature in political science. I underlined the science because political science aspires
to make predictions. It aspires to tell us
what the conditions are under which we are likely to get a particular outcome. And so, what can we predict? And on democratization, one distinction that
political scientists have made that was not present in the
early modernization literature that I was talking about when we discussed China is a distinction between
transitions to democracy and the survival of democracy. And, in particular, Adam Przeworski and his
co-authors in this book, published at the turn of the century, said we should really think differently about these two things, and the reason is that what produces
transitions to democracy is probably inherently unpredictable. It depends on so many
contingencies that have to line up that you really can't, you can't predict when it's going to happen. On the other hand, you
can say something about, however you get a democracy,
how likely is it to survive. And so Przeworski and others said we should really separate out these two things and stop talking about transitions. And so he, his work and the
work of many other colleagues represent pretty much a
conventional wisdom about survival. So, if I, just to do a little polling here before I tell you what they say, if I said to you, have
we got the microphone? What do you think is
most important to have for a democracy to survive? Anyone. (mumbles) - [Student] An educated population. - An educated population
is one possibility, others. - A strong judicial system.
- Strong judicial system. - A healthy economy.
- Healthy economy. Couple more here. - [Student] I would say that
all actors in the economy or in the political system believe they can win more from the system than from trying to overthrow it. - Okay, yep. - A middle class.
- A middle class. Barrington Moore supporter
over there, yeah. So, okay, so, it is the economy, stupid, as Clinton is famous for saying. People used to think political
culture mattered a lot or that certain kinds of religions were more or less
compatible with democracy, but if you look at the data, none of those things
is much of a predictor. And so, here are the main things that people say are important
for a democracy to survive. One is per capita income of about 14,000 2019 dollars, that if you... This is Przeworski and his... I've converted it into more
2019 dollars, but basically, their data set, which is through the last century
not the current one, shows that if a country has, if a
country is already a democracy and has per capita income
of that amount or higher, its democracy survives indefinitely, and if it falls below that,
it becomes more fragile and the further below that it falls, the more fragile it becomes. Notice that doesn't say
anything about inequality. Because you can have a
very high per capita income in a very unequal country. So, there's per capita income, then a second is the
diversification of the economy. This is the whole oil curse literature. We talked about this somewhat
in relation to Hirschman, "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty", that if the whole economy
is dominated by one sector that's controlled by the government, which is usually the case if
it's an oil curse economy, people will very, be very
reluctant to give up power if it's the only access to
advancement and success, and they'll be very prone
to grab power if they can if it's the only access to, provides the only access
to advancement and success. And so when Al Gore didn't
become president in 2000 in a knife-edge election which he, many people thought he'd actually won, he wasn't happy. Nonetheless, he could
go on corporate boards, go around the world making
movies about climate change, and I saw his net worth
is 250 million dollars. It's not so bad for him. (students laughing)
Not so bad for Al. It wouldn't be the case if he
lived in an oil curse country. Now, some people would
say and some people say oil curse is, generally
speaking, bad for democracy. And notice that the countries
that have discovered oil after they've been diversified,
like Norway or Scotland, don't have this problem. So, it's the diversification which creates multiple opportunities for people to advance in the world other than grabbing the
commanding heights of the state. It was important, by the way,
in the early American republic that when the capitol was, whether it was in New York,
Philadelphia, or Washington, these were not places
the elites wanted to be. They wanted to be out
making money in Virginia, on their farms, and so the desire to hold onto power was not particularly strong. It wasn't that valuable to them. And Washington had to be
persuaded to run again. So did Jefferson have to be persuaded to
run for a second term. That's the kind of thing that highlights the fact that political power wasn't that valuable. Alternation in power. I talked about the two
turnover test already. So, this is the notion
that if you give up power, you're more likely to give
up power in the future. Alternation predicts alternation, coups predict coups, right? So... India maybe got lucky, whereas Pakistan didn't
and so then you get... There's a big, big... This is, again, a paper by Adam Przeworski saying if you get one or two turnovers, and certainly if you get three turnovers, they go on forever. Now, what's the causal
story here is another matter because it may be the conditions that lead to people being given up, being willing to give
up power once remain. And so it's not the alternation that's predicting the giving
up power but the conditions, like a diversified economy, that's actually making them
to keep giving up power into the future. Nonetheless, countries that
have histories of alternation tend to alternate, and countries where there's a history of the military jumping into politics
when they're not happy, they tend to do it. Another consideration I
will just put out there 'cause it's been a theme
in the course so far and it will be more of
a theme in the future is my intuition, I haven't done
systematic research on this, but that, that downward mobility and loss aversion are more important than
people give credit for. So, if you look at some of the countries in which democracy has become fragile, often it's not the poor and it's not people
complaining about inequality, but it's downwardly mobile people, middle class people in Cairo who find their prices
going up, for example, and one could give many other examples. It can be middle class disaffection when people start to experience or expect that they're going to
experience downward mobility. But the takeaway is this is
largely an interest-based story. It's not so much norms
or culture, it seems, but more, more interest-based. Though, as I said, disentangling
some of the causation between the interests and the norms, like the norms of giving up power, can be very tricky to do empirically. Let's, though, talk about transitions. Przeworski said it's a mug's game trying to predict transitions. Too much contingency in there. And, indeed, after 1989
he wrote a piece saying now we're gonna see
hundreds of trees get wasted by people coming up with
theories of transitions, and at the end of the day, they're not gonna be worth a hill of beans because there's too much contingency. Actually, it didn't stop Przeworski from coming up with his
own theory of transitions, but be that as it may,
I wanna say not so fast. And that while it's true we
can't predict transitions, we can learn some interesting things about the conditions that are necessary for them to be successful, and that's what I'm gonna
be talking about next. So, what I wanna do first
of all is single out some different kinds of
transitions from one another. They're basically four ways to get from non-democracy to a democracy. One is intervention from outside. A country goes in and installs
democracy somewhere else. And the two famous success
stories here, of course, are West Germany and
Japan after World War II, and so the notion that you
can't install democracy by force is obviously false, at least
as a categorical statement. Now, there are many, many reasons that people give about why those installations
of democracy were successful, ranging from the fact that
they both had histories of democracy in the inter-war period to the fact that the Allies
stayed there for decades, that they invested in the
Marshall Plan in Germany and economic resuscitation
of the Japanese economy to the Cold War and the creation of NATO. But for whatever reason, there have been external
installations of democracy. We've seen attempts at that in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq that we'll have more to say about later, where the answer's not so much. Perhaps 'cause all of those
conditions were missing or perhaps for other reasons. We'll be digging into that later. The second way in which you get democracy is by a revolution from
below, democratic revolution. People are opposed to autocracy. They get together, have a revolution, and create a democracy. Some success stories there, of course, the American Revolution. People tend not to talk about the US when they do comparative policy, but the US is one case in the world and the American
Revolution was a successful revolution from below. It was of an elite below in that was an anti-colonial
revolution run by an elite. Nonetheless, it was a
revolution from below. The Portuguese Revolution,
to a large extent, was a revolution from below. Of all the 1989 transitions, the one that comes closest
to a revolution from below was the Romanian transition where the Ceausescus were just pretty
much wheeled out of a court and shot behind a, behind a barn. One might say that had the Mensheviks been more stronger than the Bolsheviks, Russia might have had a
democratic revolution in 1917. The Mensheviks were democrats and might have had a
very different history, and it turned out, of
course, they were not. The Libyan civil war, ongoing civil war started out with an expectation on the part of NATO and the Western powers that it was gonna be, lead
to a democratic transition. Again, not so much. Another subject we're gonna revisit. Now, a third path to democracy is when the elites in
power decide to give it up. The military decides to leave power for reasons that, again, people debate. Or even in a non-military
regime, an authoritarian regime, the leadership decides to give up power. This happens when Juan Carlos decided to give up power in Spain. It happened in Brazil. Of course, there was pressure from below. It's not, these... Another of way of putting it,
these are sort of ideal types. Many transitions are hybrids,
to some extent, of them, so I wouldn't wanna say they
all fit in one of these boxes but the center of gravity is elite willingness to give up power. Would you look at what happened in Egypt in the beginning of the Arab Spring? The military got strongly
behind the transition, for reasons that are very well described, I think, by, in the book "Thieves of State" by, who wrote "Thieves of State", somebody? Sarah Chayes. They got, very much got
behind the initial revolution, but of course, they came
roaring back into power a year and a half later. So, again, not so successful there. And then, this is... As I said, political
scientists are not famous for elegant terminology. This is Huntington's term, transplacement, and the only reason I use that is Przeworski's term is even less elegant. He calls it extrication. It's like going to the dentist. So, what is, how do you get democracy by going to the dentist? This is a negotiated settlement,
a negotiated transition from authoritarianism to democracy. And this is, South
Africa's a classic case. Of the East European ones, the closest to that was
the Polish transition, which really starts long before 1989. It starts in the early 1980s where the Solidarity
movement emerges in Gdansk and the regime finds it's necessary to make various concessions to them. And it's almost a decade-long
negotiation in Poland which culminates in 1989, but it's basically a
negotiated settlement. Israel/Palestine and Northern
Ireland, again, not so much. So, again, you can see that they're outside, and from inside
above, below, and negotiated. That sort of exhausts the
universe of possibilities. Now, most of the interest has been in this last
category, among academics, and I think that the reason for that is probably the reason, partly
the reason Przeworski gives, that if you think about the other three, the extent to which they really depend on contingencies is very high. When will... Predicting when it'll be the
case that an invading country will be willing to make
the kind of investments that the US made in Germany and Japan after World War II seems, it seems like a very
difficult proposition. Or predicting, if you
do have a revolution, whether there'll be divisions
among the opposition groups. Predicting, if... As I said, if the Mensheviks
had been stronger, maybe they would have won. There were democratic, there
were more democratic forces in the French Revolution that lost out. They were less... There were people that wanted to restore some sort of monarchy after
the American Revolution. They lost out. But, again, this seems
like contingencies that you're very unlikely to be able to come up with any generalizations about. Similarly, with elites deciding to transform things from above, it's probably gonna depend on unpredictable conflicts among
military or political elites, the alternatives that they
have available to them, and other things that are gonna be, from the point of view of coming up with any kind of
serviceable generalizations, accidents of history. So, there is literature, but by far the most attention has been focused on these transplacements. And I think one is that
people have thought, actually, they do lend themselves to the tools of social science, even if not predictive tools in the sense of point predictions, that you can use, among other things, the term, the insights from game theory and you can predict at least what makes them
more likely to succeed or less likely to succeed. And then I... This was just my observation. It could be wrong, but I think the other reason
there's so much attention to negotiated settlements is
that it seems normatively good. Democratic paths to democracy
seem like a great thing, that we don't have to
kill thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. We can find a way to do it peacefully. And so I think the fact that, that this seems to have
desirable, normative properties makes people want to understand
what are the conditions under which you're likely to get a negotiated settlement to democracy. So, what are the conditions? And I'm gonna give you a
sort of stylized picture of these kinds of conflicts and how they tend to get
resolved when they do. And we can think about it as the governing elite,
government on the one side and then the opposition movement, not a political opposition party because probably the opposition is banned, but there's a government and an opposition but they're not monolithic. They're not monolithic. They're divided into at least two groups. And so, you could think
of the standpatters or reactionaries who are gonna
fight all change at all times and then reformers who are
at least open to change, on the government side. And then on the opposition side, you could think about a division, a mirror image division
into moderates and radicals. This is not moderates and
reformers about policy, but moderates being people
who would, in principle, be open to a negotiated settlement, whereas the radicals think, "No, we've gotta have a revolution. "We've gotta take over
and we've gotta impose "a new dispensation on the country." And what creates the possibility
of a negotiated settlement is a circumstance in which
reformers and moderates, individually, are not powerful
enough to force change but if they could get
together, they would be. Right, if they could get
together and form an alliance, they would be. And so, then, the 64 million
dollar question becomes well, what are the conditions that make that possible or likely? And it's not easy. The first thing to say is it's not easy. At least three things have to happen. One is the reformers and
moderates have to agree, and if you think of a condition of a decades-long civil war where many people have friends and families who have been killed in this war, very high stakes politics, lots of hatred, lots of resentment and anger, it's not obvious that the reformers and moderates are going
to be able to agree, even if there are groups
that might be open to change. A second requirement is that the standpatters and radicals have to be convinced,
co-opted, or marginalized. If none of the above, they will throw a wrench
into the whole process and stop it, right? Inevitably. Or they certainly will try. So, unless they can be convinced,
co-opted, or marginalized, they're probably gonna blow
it up before it's done. And then the third is that
you have to build support for the new dispensation because these groups have grassroots supporters, these groups have grassroots supporters, but they're not grassroots
supporters for this. They might potentially be, but they're not gonna drop out of the sky. If you're gonna have a
negotiated settlement, people are gonna have
to build support for it. So, those three things have to happen, and they have to happen at the right time. And we'll see what happens
when they don't happen at the right time shortly. Okay, so that's a lot, right? It's a big menu. And this means there's a,
for a negotiated settlement, there's a kind of threading
the needle quality to the whole thing. And so when we think about the conditions for successful negotiations, one of them is obviously luck, right? You need luck. And this is what we're gonna, what
Przeworski was pointing at when he said you can't
generalize about this. And I'm gonna use three
word, three things you need. You need luck, you need leadership,
and you need legitimacy. The reason you need luck is
there's so many more ways for them to fail than to succeed. So many things have to line up in the right way at the right time in order to get a successful
negotiated settlement. People often talk about the
importance of leadership without defining it. I'm gonna mean three things by leadership. One is people with an
unusual appetite for risk. Most politicians are pretty risk-averse. They mostly wanna keep what they've got, get re-elected, and stay out of trouble. Politicians who have
the leadership qualities that are gonna be required have to have an appetite for risk, but it's not just any old risk. They... Gambling is risk-taking but it's reckless. You don't want reckless risk-taking. You want people that have
good strategic judgment about what are the
risks that must be taken and how must they be taken? And to what end? And in particular,
you're gonna need people who are willing to take big personal risks for a cause that's larger than
their own personal interest and then to have the
good strategic judgment to know what is a good calculated risk and what is a reckless move
that is not likely to succeed. And the third essential element of good leadership is empathy. Now, empathy is not sympathy, right? Sympathy is feeling sorry for people. Empathy is understanding what people need. It's seeing the world
from the point of view of the person you're dealing with. Because if you don't
understand what they need, you will not have a successful
negotiation with them. So, those are the three
important elements of effective leadership. Now, when I say legitimacy, I'm alluding here to the debate about democratization from above and from below. And so the story here is that some people say, "Oh, it's not legitimate "if it doesn't come from below. "The people have to validate it." Others say, "No, it's
all about elite pacts," elites making deals with one another. The short answer is that it is both, and the reason is that democracy is a public
good in the economist sense. It's a technical public good. Supplying it to some means
supplying it to all, right? It's not excluded and it's non-rivalrous in that some people having democracy doesn't exclude others
from having democracy. So, it's a public good, and it's notoriously difficult to supply public goods democratically. And so that means there will be moments when elites have to take decisive action, but if they can't build support for the actions that they are taking, then they're not going to be successful. Yes, sir. - [Student] Following the
dividing the dollar game and what you mentioned of marginalizing, couldn't you just marginalize elites or marginalize the lower classes and just build a good
enough coalition to go over? - The problem there is who is you? Okay, there's no you to do it. So, they have to see it
as in their interest. So, what I wanna do now is work through the South African
and Middle East cases here from the perspective of
these three considerations. So, the luck in South Africa, what was one thing that was very important was a decaying status quo. Whatever the future was gonna be, South African elites understood that it wasn't gonna be
the same as the past. Partly because the new
generation of black youth was much more militant than
its, than their parents. They were burning down their schools, they were refusing to study
in the Afrikaans textbooks, and so on and so the costs
of repression were going up. That meant the children
of the white elites didn't want to join the army, as I indicated the first
minute of this lecture, and so the elites felt the
sand shifting under their feet. That didn't mean you would get democracy, but it meant that the
status quo was gonna change. The bankruptcy that ensued in the 1980s when Citibank refused to
roll over South Africa's debt contributed as well. Another factor, a contingent
factor that helped a lot was the disappearance of
communism as a viable alternative, which made whites much less
frightened of a transition for reasons I'll talk about on Tuesday, and for the ANC, the Soviet Union stopped
funding them in 1983 because the Soviet Union was
going bankrupt in Afghanistan and while it was fighting
Star Wars spending with the Reagan administration. And so the ANC was in this situation of facing the most
powerful army in Africa and didn't have the resources. They went to the Chinese,
the Chinese said no, and that produced a group within the ANC that was willing to think about talking about a negotiated settlement. Leadership. I wanna spend a little
bit of time on this. So, I became very consumed with the counterfactual. Here we had the successful
negotiated transition in South Africa between Mandela and de
Klerk on the one hand, and if you look at Israel/Palestine, it had many structural
similarities but it had failed. So, but for example, in the early 1990s, there had been something
called the Oslo Accords. People had... There'd been a lot of
negotiating between the PLO and the Israeli government, and many people started to believe that there was gonna be a
transition to a settlement. And if you went there in 2004 or 2005, people, most people thought this is coming to a successful conclusion. And, indeed, Arafat moved somewhat to the middle. He recognized Israel's right to exist. He took some other of the
preconditions off the table that had been so important, and Yitzhak Rabin, they seemed to be
converging on a settlement. There was a lot of work had been done to build support for
it in both communities. People expected it. Yet when Rabin was assassinated
by a right-wing Israeli, it all fell apart. Peres came into power. He temporized, he moved to the right. Arafat was phoning him three times a week saying, "We've gotta get this done," because as he had moved to the middle, that's when Hamas emerged on his flank and seized all the symbols
of Palestinian nationalism. And so he realized he had to get a deal. Peres tacked to the right,
basically cut off the talks. Netanyahu won an election
six months later anyway, and the sort of window
of opportunity closed. So, I got interested in what would have happened if
Rabin hadn't been assassinated and maybe if de Klerk had
been assassinated in 1992. How would things have looked
differently today subsequently? And so, I went and interviewed
de Klerk about this, and I asked him. And I said, "What would've happened if you "or Mandela had been assassinated
during this process?" And the backstory here is that as the negotiations had
been getting into trouble and breaking down, violence
had been increasing in 1991 and early 1992, and this showed up with
increasing white anxiety which expressed itself in the government losing by-elections. They lost three big by-elections in a row. And de Klerk came, responded to this by going on
television one night one night and saying, "I'm calling a referendum "on whether I should
negotiate a settlement "with the African National Congress." So, that's the backstory here. So, what he said was the following. He said, "Well, "if Mandela had been
assassinated in the late 1980s, "it might have scuttled things because "at that time he was having
secret talks with the government "and it is not clear there was anyone "willing to do that in the ANC." And he, Mandela, had kept them secret because he thought if they failed, people could denounce him
as a doddering old man and it wouldn't damage the ANC's cause. That's what I mean. A willingness to take risks for a cause that's larger than yourself. de Klerk said, "In my case, "if I had been assassinated
after the referendum," which he won by a two-thirds majority, he said, "it wouldn't really have mattered "because whoever replaced
me would have gone on. "But the reason I went on television "and announced the referendum was "that everyone in my cabinet
would have opposed it "and everyone in the national
party would have opposed it. "And so I just went in and
announced it as a fait accompli. "And if you think of, "if you think of a circumstance in which "I had been shot before I
had called the referendum, "there wouldn't have been
anyone in a position to do it. "And even if they had wanted to do it, "it's not something a new
president can do as their first, "they have to build support
in the cabinet and so on." So, then it might well have played out, it might well have played out differently. That was very important because the fact that he won that referendum and essentially took on the
far right in his own party meant that the ANC could convince the skeptics there that he was serious, that he was essentially burning bridges with the far right of the
national party establishment and making his future depend upon getting a successful
negotiation with the ANC. And so that was a level of risk-taking that sometimes what solved what
political scientists called the commitment problem. He could... Skeptics in the ANC could be persuaded by Ramaphosa and Mandela,
who were for negotiations, that this was a person
with whom they could work. I've already, so that was one of the ways in which he took on the opposition. The other thing to say is that it's very important to
build support from below. If you look at, fast-forward to 2000 when Bill Clinton is
about to leave office, he decides, like many American
presidents before him, that the last thing he's gonna do is solve the Middle East conflict on the way out in the summer of 2000, and he brings Arafat and the Israeli leader
who by that point was Barak. He drags them to Washington and says, "You need to make this deal
that wasn't made five years ago "when Rabin was killed." And they both say no. And he tries to, he thinks... Bill Clinton thought if he
just can get people in a room and twist their arms
and look them in the eye and tell them that they're the
most important in the world, people in the world, he could get it done. And the reason he couldn't get it done was that there was no support in either community in the summer of 2000. The Palestinian support was below 10% and the Israeli support was below 8%. So, even though it was substantially the same deal as five years
before, it didn't matter. There was no support for it. There were no constituencies for it, and this is why below
matters as well as above. And so all, The Economist was
writing about these articles. What's wrong with the Palestinians? They never miss an opportunity
to miss an opportunity, and so on and so forth. They didn't understand that the dynamics on the
ground were different. And so you have to have
the support from below. Right, so, we can't predict transitions, but we can say something
about what makes them more and less likely. For one thing, we can predict failure. In 1983, Gerry Adams became head
of Shin Fein, the IRA, and people said, "Oh, this
is a new kind of politician. "He wears business suits, he
talks like Western politician, "maybe there can be a
settlement in Northern Ireland." But, of course, in 1983, you had a conservative
government in Westminster that was crucially dependent
on the Northern Irish for its parliamentary majority. So, there was no question. Far from the status quo
being a wasting asset, the sand shifting under their feet, there was no possibility that the Tories would make a deal with the IRA. 1997, when Tony Blair comes in, Labour's not dependent on
the Northern Irish vote so then it becomes a possibility, and eventually we get
the Good Friday Accords, which semi-unravel later. So, you can think usefully
about the conditions here. What is it that's gonna move the elites, and will they think that they can't move? Empathy and strategic
judgment, hugely important. One thing de Klerk said to me that I thought was very
interesting in that interview. At the end of it, I said to him, "What do you think explains the difference "between the South African "and the Israel/Palestine negotiations?" And he said, "Well, one
important difference was "that when we decided to legalize the ANC "and the opposition movements,
we had no preconditions, "and when the ANC, three months later, "decided to suspend the armed struggle, "there were no preconditions. "We didn't ask them to
recognize our legitimacy. "We wanted them to decommission "but we didn't make it a
requirement, no preconditions." Of course, there are
implicit preconditions, in the sense that if you
don't deliver within a, before the window of opportunity closes, it'll all fall apart. But he said, "The fact that we, "there were no explicit
preconditions meant that "we had more room to maneuver." And, of course, it meant the spoilers couldn't violate the preconditions. If you say, "These talks will go on "as long as there are no rockets," there will be rockets, right? So, no pre... That's empathy, it's understanding. It's understanding what people need. Mandela understood that
even though the ANC was opposed to power-sharing
in the permanent constitution, de Klerk had to get it in
the interim constitution or there wouldn't have been a transition, so he agreed to it and
later on it went away. In April 1993, a black radical leader, Chris Hani, was murdered, and the violence erupted and it threatened to
engulf the whole process. And one of the ways in
which it was tamped down was that de Klerk agreed
that the election would occur no later than a year after Hani's death. So, it had to be by April 1994, so a definite date that it had to occur, and that enabled Mandela and
the ANC to quell the violence and move things forward. So, that's hugely important, that you understand what
the other side needs and make sure they can get what they need, otherwise it's gonna fall apart. Exit options, right? People have to find it
possible to give up power. In South Africa, they
promised an amnesty process. They processed civil service
jobs, security for five years. This hearkens back to
our earlier discussion of the Soviet Union, that
the exit costs were lower because of the way privatization occurred. And when we think about the
demonstration effects here of the ways in which Gaddafi and Mubarak met
their end, their fates, it doesn't all go well
because the leaders in other countries that might be
facing opposition movements think about what'll happen
to them if they leave. So, good things don't always go together. Let's give de Klerk the last word before we head out. - I think it was an absolute necessity that he had to be released. As his image grew over the years, as he became an icon, as he became a crucial flashpoint in the whole international
situation also of South Africa, it became clear to me that, that he has a pivotal role to play and that he was playing it, irrespective of the fact
that he was in jail. He was leaner than I thought,
he was taller than I thought, and my very first impression was that he was a very dignified man. We were both reserved, but there was immediately a sort of a good, good spark between us. He had a few habits. Firstly, he was a very good listener. He would rarely or almost
never interrupt one when one was making a point. On the other hand, he got highly irritated
if he was interrupt. I was scoring points in the debate. He leveled the score by, fairly near to the end but
before we reached the end, suddenly reaching out and taking my hand. - I am proud to hold your hand, for us to go forward together.
(audience applauding) - It was a masterpiece,
that taking my hand. He's good at it. Ah, I took his hand,
nothing I could do about it. And lifted quietly my, in my mind, my hat to him
and said, "Well done." - Okay, we'll see you on Tuesday. (bright ascending notes)
