Senior Fellow Michael Bratton compares political transitions in Sub-Saharan African to the current uprisings and demonstrations calling for political change in the Middle East and North Africa.
April 21, 2011
Senior Fellow Michael Bratton compares political transitions in Sub-Saharan African to the current uprisings and demonstrations calling for political change in the Middle East and North Africa.
- The Arab world is not the first region where mass protesters have called for democratization. What are the most relevant precedents?
- How similar were previous political transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa? How different?
- If Africans have lessons to impart to Arab protest movements, what are these?
- What lessons can the international community learn for the Arab world from democratic experiments in Africa?
The Arab world is not the first region where mass protesters have called for democratization. What are the most relevant precedents?
In an insightful article in Foreign Policy (March 2011), Thomas Carothers asks whether the dramatic wave of political upheaval across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is a transformative moment akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Though tempted by this analogy, he finds it less than completely apt. The authoritarian regimes in East and Central Europe were satellites of the Soviet empire, controlled from Moscow to a far greater degree than Washington’s current influence over authoritarian allies in the Arab world.
Moreover, Middle East regimes are not all one party communist systems; they range from monarchies, through family dictatorships, to tribal and failing states, each with differing levels of wealth (from oil riches to extreme poverty) and distinctive elite cultures (from conservative to reformist). Thus, political transitions in the MENA region are unlikely to imitate the common pattern of democratic transition achieved by many European states from the Baltic to the Balkans. Instead, argues Carothers, the more relevant regional precedent is the wave of regime transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the 1990s. In his view, “it would behoove policymakers to quickly study up on the…African experience to understand how and why the different outcomes evident on the continent… took place.”
How similar were previous political transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa? How different?
As in the Arab world today, political change in Africa occurred as a wave that swept across a region. In the short decade from 1991 to 1999, all of SSA’s 48 states experienced internal and external pressures to open up politically. In response, all but half a dozen countries held multiparty elections and some 20 states – from Benin in 1991 to Nigeria in 1999 – installed fledgling democratic regimes. In the remaining majority of cases, transitions from authoritarian rule stalled or never got off the ground. In short, political change in Africa –and prospectively in the MENA region – was an uncertain process with varied outcomes.
Prefiguring recent events in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab region, mass protesters led the way in much of Africa. Young people, soon joined by workers and professionals, took to the streets with economic grievances against rulers who had lost popular political legitimacy. Protest movements were inspired by events in neighboring countries, such as the constitutional conferences in the francophone bloc and the release of Nelson Mandela from a South African jail. Once protestors began to demand political change, however, ancien regimes hit back with arrests and violence, sometimes blocking reform (as in Togo, Cameroon and what was then Zaire). In other cases, incumbent presidents attempted to get ahead of the game with gradual liberalization, for example by legalizing opposition parties and independent news outlets (see Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi). In the best case outcomes, constitutional reforms and well-conducted elections gave rise to promising new democratic regimes (as in Ghana and South Africa).
The prospects for democratization in SSA depended in part on the nature of preceding regimes. Generally speaking, progress was most likely in places with some previous experience with political competition, either through white settler politics (South Africa, Namibia) or within one party regimes (Benin, Zambia). Democratic outcomes were less likely in transitions from traditional monarchies (like Swaziland), military regimes (like Sudan) or personal dictatorships (like Mobutu’s Zaire). Given the variety of authoritarian regimes in the Arab world, a similar variety of outcomes can be expected there. For example, democratization is most likely in countries with a previous history of competitive politics (like Lebanon) or a viable civil society on which to build political parties (like Egypt and Jordan). It is least likely where a individual dictator or entrenched ruling family has long held power (as in Libya, Syria or Saudi Arabia). And failing states like Yemen risk a similar fate to Somalia.
Despite these similarities, the SSA-MENA comparison draws attention to differences across regions and over time. Since the 1990s, a revolution in information and communications technology has amplified the contagion effect of popular protest. In one symbolic example, the Facebook group Syrian Revolution 2011, which boasts more than 120,000 followers, renamed the protest site in Homs as Tahrir (Liberation) Square, after the one in Cairo. Moreover, compared to most states in SSA, which suffer from weak institutions, several core MENA countries possess strong states backed by oil revenues, repressive capabilities, and international alliances. Saudi Arabia and Syria, for example, look relatively invulnerable to the demands of protest movements, which rulers can probably manage by carefully combining concession and repression. In this light too, the end of the Cold War and the withdrawal of superpower support contributed to the demise of African dictatorships. But there are no indications today that the United States will undercut the Saudi monarchy anytime soon or that Iran is about abandon its support for the Assad family in Syria.
If Africans have lessons to impart to Arab protest movements, what are these?
Comparisons between protest movements in African and Arab cases are helpful in identifying factors that facilitate or inhibit a transition to democracy. Two lessons stand out.
The first is opposition cohesion. To consummate a democratic transition, a protest movement requires a capable leader who can unify a disparate following in order to win power in an open election. The contrasting cases of Zambia and Kenya help to make this point. In Zambia, trade unionist Frederick Chiluba pulled together the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), a multi-ethnic, cross-class coalition that decisively defeated incumbent Kenneth Kaunda at the polls in 1991. In Kenya, however, transition was delayed for a decade because the opposition remained split among a bevy of small ethnic and personal parties. These challengers lost 1992 and 1997 elections to Daniel Arap Moi, even though the incumbent could command votes from only about one-third of the electorate. A democratic transition was completed in Kenya in 2002 only after smaller parties rallied behind a single presidential candidate, Mwai Kibaki of a broad National Rainbow Coalition (NaRC). It therefore remains to be seen whether diverse and leaderless opposition groups in Egypt and Tunisia can organize a coherent front in time for elections planned for late 2011.
The second factor is the disposition of the military. In SSA, the armed forces were a wild card in the game of political transition. Whether army officers remained loyal to the incumbent or defected to the opposition had a decisive impact on the course of political events. Take two key cases. In Nigeria, the military government of Ibrahim Babangida, which had planned a managed transition to civilian rule, stepped in to annul results from presidential elections in 1993 and imprison the winner, Moshood Abiola. Not only did this intervention negate the most credible electoral contest in the country’s history but ushered in six years of despotic and corrupt military government. A counter-case is Mali. In 1991, in response to popular demands for reform, one-party dictator Moussa Traoré ordered troops to open fire on student protesters. In reaction, General Amadou Toumani Touré arrested the president as he tried to flee to the airport. Thereafter, an interim administration convened a national conference, a constitutional referendum, and free and fair elections, a process that culminated in a smooth handover to civilian government in 1992. The contrasting cases of Nigeria and Mali suggest that, as goes the military, so goes the transition. This observation seems pertinent to the present situations in Egypt, where the military is overseeing an interregnum, and Libya, where the military has splintered into fighting factions for and against reform.
What lessons can the international community learn for the Arab world from democratic experiments in Africa?
Authoritarian regimes are most susceptible to reform when domestic and international pressures converge. In SSA, democratic transition was most likely when international actors used diplomatic dialogue and development assistance to back up the organized demands of domestic political protest movements. Heavy-handed outside pressures for political change – whether in the form of economic sanctions or aid conditions – seldom worked in isolation. Moreover, where recalcitrant African leaders did not depend on foreign aid, perhaps because of access to oil revenues – as in Angola, Gabon or Equatorial Guinea – international actors could do precious little to induce changes in elite political behavior. The same was true where the domestic forces of political opposition were feeble or nonexistent.
Experiences from Africa also suggest that international support to civil society can be helpful in counteracting strong states and supplementing weak ones. Protest movements usually originate within civil society and international networks of civic organizations act as conduits for disseminating liberal ideas and demonstrating democratic practices. But successful political transitions also require a sequence of institution-building initiatives including the reform of constitutional rules and the convocation of founding elections. Even so, elections alone do not a democracy make. The experience of African governments has confirmed that democratization is a long-term process that involves the construction of a wide range of political institutions to ensure that citizens hold politicians accountable and civilians control the military.