Democracy: Absence makes yearning grow stronger

Democracy: Absence makes yearning grow stronger

B. Herry-Priyono, Jakarta

It is consoling to read Ziad Salim's perceptive article
(Economy and democracy: Don't turn out the light, The Jakarta
Post, June 22, 2004). I could not agree more with his plea. As
history has given us ample lessons, the drive for making any
socially consequential exercise of power accountable -- which is
the essence of democracy -- will never die.

It is within this spirit that I wrote the brief article to
which Salim responded insightfully. There are two technical
points that may be useful in this brief rejoinder.

First, when I wrote the article (JP, June 16, 2004), the title
was Many entrepreneurs prefer stability to democracy. The title
was in fact given by The Jakarta Post editors. It has altered the
nuance of the original title I gave, The Strongman Syndrome. Of
course the alteration gave a different impression to the literary
direction than the one I intended.

Second, there are many styles of writing whose literary
application depends on the intention of the writer. I employed in
my article a genre that is perhaps close to satire. Having
observed electoral power struggles in which the business sector
is always deeply involved, I could not help but being engulfed by
a sense of poignancy -- because of the so-called "strongman
syndrome".

This time, many business tycoons resort to putting their
enormous amount of money into candidates who'll guard their
business interests, regardless of their orientation toward
democracy.

It was against this tendency that my article ended with a pang
of satirical poignancy: "As with all the talk about democracy,
will the last speaker to leave the podium please turn out the
lights?"

Of course, as Salim rightly suggests, the light of democracy
should not be turned off. However, despite all good will, I would
suggest the following analytical principle. To envision that
something must benefit everyone (the business sector included) is
not to confuse the normative with the factual.

The concluding question was one of many ways to express the
urgency of the normative (of democracy), but at the same time was
not unaware there is a yawning gap between the two.

Within this gap stand, among others, many business magnates
who could influence the election outcome with their financial
clout. Their stand is extremely important, for money is one of
the most potent weapons of political power. No doubt, at the
normative level, we want tycoons to support the democratic
movement. But nothing in the real world of Indonesian politics
should prevent us from suspecting what factually happens is a
different story.

There is nothing new about the idea of business conservatism.
In her comparative study of several countries (Mexico, South
Korea, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Zambia, Egypt and
Indonesia), Harvard University political scientist Eva Bellin
suggested the following conclusion in 2000: "private sector
capitalists in Indonesia have proved consistently reluctant to
embrace projects to democratize the country" and have a close
"alliance with authoritarianism".

Of course, an empirical pattern is one thing, normative
direction is another.

Endless debates are still underway about the precise link
between the two. One of the most popular -- though popularity is
not to be confused with validity -- argument is that democracy is
an endogenous product of economic development.

Putting it bluntly, it is to say democracy has emerged as a
result of economic development -- in the same way a dictatorship
dies as a country ruled by an authoritarian regime becomes
economically richer.

As a country develops its social fabric becomes more complex,
its increasingly educated population begins to assert its
autonomous energies. Such a society can no longer be run by
authoritarian dictates. As society develops economically, various
groups will rise against the dictatorial regime, and it will
fall.

There is something odd here. In this view, democracy is being
secreted out of dictatorships by economic development. That is,
democracy is an endogenous result of economic development under
dictatorship.

But, since dictatorships generate economic development while
economic development leads to democracy, democracy becomes a
circuitous process. Indeed, the emergence of democracy is not
brought about by economic development. Rather, democracy appears
exogenously as a deus ex machina.

This logic is perhaps too academic, but it may be useful to
remind us that things are not as clear as they first appear. What
seems to be a pattern is that democracy (at least in its formal-
procedural form) is prevalent in countries with per capita
incomes above US$ 4,000. It is this pattern that seems to lead
us, somewhat too haphazardly, to conclude that economic
development brings about democracy in a causal manner, while in
fact the link is far from being a form of causality.

If economic development is measured by growth, the experience
of the Philippines under Marcos as well as Chile under Pinochet
was instructive. What has all this to do with the business
sector? I completely agree with Salim that many business
oligarchs who drive growth under such regimes are not "real
entrepreneurs" but "robbers". What is implied is that the former
are those who stick to an open market, whereas the latter are
seekers of monopolies.

Yet, as the fate of transition economies like many Eastern
European countries attest, even a so-called open market is not
always compatible with the value of democracy. The root, as some
economists, sociologists and political scientists increasingly
observe, is the growing power of financial clout of the business
magnates to capture policy making and to veto public policies
intended for those who need democracy most.

Indeed, democracy does not stop with the state being
democratized, for the nature of uncontrolled power shifts with
the river of history. After the saga of anti-authoritarian
struggle against state-based powers, the other story of democracy
concerns the struggle to make money-based powers accountable. It
is the unfolding of this parallel story that also interests us,
no less, crucially.

So, no qualms please, Salim, for the light of democracy
remains alive and bright!

The writer is a Postgraduate lecturer at the Driyarkara School
of Philosophy, Jakarta.