Category Archives: democracy

by | 28 March 2010 · 12:00 pm

Mawdudi and “Theodemocracy”

From: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, by Vali Nasr (Free Press, 2009), Kindle Loc. 2645-76:

The fundamentalist founders argued that the decline of Islam began not, as popular wisdom held, with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, but much earlier, in 661 C.E., when the Umayyad dynasty rose to power and turned the caliphate into a monarchy. Muawiyah who founded the Umayyad caliphate was not a companion of the Prophet or respected for his religious standing. He was a general who strong-armed his way to the top to rule an empire that he then passed on to his son. From that time on, went the argument, clerics had betrayed the faith by submitting to the will of religiously unqualified rulers who in turn sustained them through patronage. They had allowed for religion to be separated from politics, which fundamentalists thought ran counter to the religion’s intent. “The chief characteristic of Islam,” wrote Pakistan’s Mawdudi, “is that it makes no distinction between spiritual and secular life.”

Mawdudi was particularly effective in articulating this vision of history and politics. He taught that Islamic history after the seventh century was therefore “un-Islamic”—a shocking assertion, rejecting as it did centuries of impressive achievements of Islamic society in the sciences and arts, culture, and the building of powerful empires. Those achievements did not impress him, and he found fault with the manner in which, throughout history, as Islam spread to new regions of the world, it had found expression through local cultures. Such compromises he thought had altered the true meaning of Islam. He also dismissed the moral efforts and spiritual accomplishments of the countless Muslims who had lived by and handed down their faith’s teachings across all those centuries.

Mawdudi did not preach violence; on the contrary he argued that the goal of an Islamic state would be achieved by a steadfast process of proselytizing. To Mawdudi fundamentalism was all about a practice of educating; he would write and give speeches, argue and persuade, and his followers would do the same. The process would be slow and tedious, but by this means, more and more believers would be converted, until everyone was in the fold. The Islamic state would then follow naturally. He told his followers in 1941, “we desire no demonstrations or agitations, no flag waving, slogans, or the like … [for us] such display of uncontrolled emotions will prove deadly. … You do not need to capture your audience through impassioned speeches. … but you must kindle the light of Islam in your hearts, and change those around you.” There was more than a pinch of elitism here. Mawdudi wished first to convert the educated—professionals, bureaucrats, and intellectuals; the same class upon which Ataturk and Reza Shah had pinned their hopes. If the best and brightest converted to Mawdudi’s cause, then an Islamic state could not help but follow, he argued, as the educated elite would be running the state.

His teaching was also not expressly antidemocratic. The Islamic state was not conceived of as a true democracy, but through tautological reasoning, Mawdudi and his followers did claim that their Islamic state would be democratic. If democracy is a cherished quality in a state, then the Islamic state must by definition have it too, so Mawdudi described his imaginary republic as a “theodemocracy” or a “democratic caliphate.” The state’s duty was not however to enact the will of its citizens but to make sure that its citizens followed religious dictates in their daily lives. Mawdudi assumed that this in itself would win the state popular support. After all, he argued, in a gemlike example of the closed-circuit rhetoric at which fundamentalists excel, if a state truly reflects God’s will and its citizens are good Muslims, then how could they possibly want otherwise or disagree with their rulers? If you offered sovereignty to the people, they would give it right back, assuming they had been properly educated in what is expected of them. Fundamentalism is therefore not, in its own mind, antidemocratic; it merely thinks democracy is irrelevant.

Mawdudi doesn’t sound all that different from a million other revolutionaries—religious or secular—who have no use for democracy until everyone is properly (re)educated and therefore can be expected to vote the approved way.

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Filed under democracy, Pakistan, religion, science

by | 18 March 2010 · 9:27 pm

Secularist Delusions in Revolutionary Iran

From: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, by Vali Nasr (Free Press, 2009), Kindle Loc. 2325-50, 2372-87:

The chasm between the Shah and his people had become glaringly obvious. What was less clear, but equally important, was a chasm between the communist and socialist visions for the country of the secular intellectual elite and the middle-class professionals and the hopes of the ardent lower-class followers of Khomeini. At least the chasm was misunderstood by the secularists. Among the secular agitators against the monarchy, clerics and their followers were widely regarded as harmless hangers-on to the great bandwagon of revolution. The secularists failed to perceive both Khomeini’s true intentions, and the surging momentum—and force in numbers—of the backing for him among the teeming urban and rural lower and working classes. The exploding numbers of urban factory workers had no infatuation with the ideologies that fascinated the middle class; Khomeini’s populist call for freeing Iran of dictatorship and spreading the oil wealth among the population is what appealed to them.

Azar Salamat studied at Berkeley in the late 1960s, and there joined radical Iranian students agitating against the Shah. When she went back to Iran in the late 1970s she was determined to do Lenin’s work, spreading the gospel of communism, organizing the working class, and setting Iran on the path to a communist revolution. With comrades in tow she would visit factories on the outskirts of Tehran looking for the proverbial proletarian laborers to convert to the cause. Workers on their lunch break listened politely to the Marxist harangue, humoring the young idealists, but understood little about dialectical materialism or capitalist exploitation. Communism was an alien tongue; so “when we turned to leave,” remembers Salamat of one telling lunchtime encounter, “one of them called to us, waving his hand. ‘Bye bye,’ he said in English, grinning with amusement. Nothing seemed to express more clearly the foreignness of our contingent to those workers whom we thought our natural allies.”

It was as if years of thinking secular thoughts and following secular ideologies had blinded these secular activists to reality. They correctly perceived that their support for Khomeini was vital in building widespread support for a revolution. Leftist jargon did not percolate down into society very well, and the revolution needed the support of larger numbers—of the poor and traditional Iranians who looked to the clergy for moral and political leadership. But the secularists failed to appreciate the intensity of Khomeni’s mission to establish an Islamic state, or to think through what would be in store for them if and when the clergy took power.

Secular revolutionaries stayed deliberately silent on the issues of Islamic government and Islamic law, hejab and women’s rights, and engaged in little discussion of how individual liberties, economic aspirations, and democratic goals could be affected by clerical rule. This absence of serious discussion in speeches, rallies, meetings, manifestoes, media, and everyday conversations is astonishing on reflection. So strong were their opposition to the Shah and their trust in the clergy—their conviction that the only issue that mattered was ridding Iran of the Shah—that they forgot all about those other hard-earned cultural freedoms that were so vital to their lives and future. When they did finally wake up to the reality of the revolution, it was too late….

With the revolution triumphant throngs of class warriors banded together in revolutionary committees and militias, and backing Khomeini’s cause, came out of slums and working-class neighborhoods, bazaars, and poorer quarters of the city to claim their prize. They were quick learners. None knew what dialectics of history was about or what Marx had penned in his Das Kapital. Khomeini had taught them it was not necessary to convert to Marxism to be a revolutionary; it was more important to make the revolution Islamic.

The middle-class pro-communist and pro-democracy protestors were shocked by the numbers of Khomeini’s forces and their zeal, and they quickly came to understand they were outgunned. The clergy drew large crowds to demonstrations day after day, and even larger numbers to voting booths for a national referendum and constituent assembly elections that were to decide the fate of the revolution. The middle class cringed at the takeover unfolding, and efforts were made to better organize and resist. But leftist and pro-democracy rallies were disrupted by club-wielding thugs, who also stormed Tehran University to purge it of leftists. When in March tens of thousands of middle-class women poured into the streets to demand freedom of dress, vigilante thugs attacked them. Pro-democracy forces formed a new party, the National Democratic Front, and at first large crowds showed up at its rallies. But after only a few confrontations with Khomeini’s stone-throwing and club-wielding mobs, the Front melted away.

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Filed under democracy, economics, Iran, nationalism, religion

by | 16 March 2010 · 7:44 pm

Downsides of Kemalism

From: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, by Vali Nasr (Free Press, 2009), Kindle Loc. 1902-23:

Looking back over the decades since Ataturk and Reza Shah ruled we can see that much in way of economic development and social change has been achieved in the Middle East. Kemalist presidents, kings, and generals unified countries, and built roads, modern school systems, and hospitals. But those authoritarian regimes also often lost their way, succumbing to the temptation of despotism, and in the process growing corrupt. The leviathans they created also stifled market forces and hindered true economic change.

Top-down modernization had its limits. States can do things faster and more efficiently than markets, but only to get things moving; they are notoriously bad at managing economies once they are out of the gate. Kemalist states did not know when and how to stop growing, and that was their undoing. Unchecked by parliaments and unaccountable to the people, the Kemalist states have lived up to the saying: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Kemalism never had a problem garnering support in the West. Defenders of Kemalism, such as the historian Bernard Lewis, had hoped that by promoting secularism and modernity the state would serve as handmaiden of democracy, believing that modernity must come before democracy, especially given Islam’s strong hold on the structures of power, and the hearts and minds of the populace. Democracy would have to follow dictatorship.

But by the 1970s, Kemalism was running aground everywhere. The state remained imposing, but its modernizing edge was gone. The juggernaut of swift reform, secularism, and rapid change had ground to a halt. Accolades for the state and trust in its ability to transform society and economy had given place to widespread cynicism and doubt among the populace. In the Arab world modernizing states became platforms for the dynastic machinations of strongman presidents; their best-functioning institutions—impressive in their efficiency—became their dreaded mukhabarat, intelligence and security services.

One of Kemalism’s legacies is pent-up rage among the lower classes, to whom so few of the economic benefits flowed, and who greatly resented the assault on Islam. This pent-up rage has in time inflicted much travail on the region—as well as on the West. It was the driving force that tipped the balance of power toward fundamentalism in the Iranian Revolution, and it has been the fuel driving the support around the region for Islamic extremism. Crucial to Kemalism’s failure to generate more robust economic growth, and to distribute economic benefits more equitably, was the manner in which it bred a highly dependent, rather than entrepreneurial, middle class.

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Filed under democracy, economics, Iran, Middle East, military, nationalism, religion, Turkey

by | 25 November 2009 · 5:24 am

Lind on Patrician Do-gooder-ism vs. Populist Producerism

Old-style Democrat Michael Lind asks a timely question in a Salon essay entitled Can populism be liberal?

There remains the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented more in Congress than in Obama’s White House — and more in the House than in the Senate, a dully complacent millionaires’ club. Can congressional progressives compete with conservatives to channel popular outrage? Unfortunately, progressivism in the form in which it has evolved in the last generation does not resonate with populist producerism.

To begin with, most of the moral fervor of the contemporary center-left has been diverted from the issue of fair rewards for labor to the environmental movement. In theory, environmentalism ought to fit the populist narrative of defending shared goods against special interests. Indeed, clean air and water legislation and public parks and wilderness areas are broadly popular with working-class Americans, not least hunters and fishers. But many environmentalists insist that global warming must be combated not only by low-CO2 energy technology but also by radical lifestyle changes like switching from industrial farming to small-scale organic agriculture and moving from car-based suburbs and exurbs to deliberately “densified” cities with mass transit. Whether environmentalists propose to engineer this utopian social transformation by tax incentives or coercive laws, the campaign triggers the populist nightmare of arrogant social elites trying to dictate where and how ordinary people should live.

Even if it had not been eclipsed by moralistic lifestyle environmentalism, contemporary economic progressivism would be crippled by its own priorities. New Deal liberalism was primarily about jobs and wages, with benefits as an afterthought. Post-New Deal progressivism is primarily about benefits, with jobs and wages as an afterthought. This inversion of priorities is underlined by the agenda of the Democrats since the last election — universal healthcare coverage first, jobs later.

It is only in the post-New Deal era that universal healthcare has become the Holy Grail of the American center-left, rather than, say, full employment or a living wage. Sure, Democrats from Truman to Johnson sought universal healthcare, and Medicare for the elderly was a down payment for that goal. But the main concern of the New Dealers was providing economic growth with full employment, on the theory that if the economy is growing and workers have the bargaining power to obtain their fair share of the new wealth in the form of wages, you don’t need a vastly bigger welfare state. Having forgotten the New Deal’s emphasis on high-wage work, all too many of today’s progressives seem to have internalized the right’s caricature of FDR-to-LBJ liberalism as being primarily about redistribution from the rich to the poor.

This shift in emphasis is connected with the shift in the social base of the Democratic Party from the working class to an alliance of the wealthy, parts of the professional class and the poor. And progressive redistributionism also reflects the plutocratic social structure of the big cities that are now the Democratic base. Unlike the egalitarian farmer-labor liberalism that drew on the populist values of the small town and the immigrant neighborhood, metropolitan liberalism tends to define center-left politics not as self-help on the part of citizens but rather as charity for the disadvantaged carried out by affluent altruists. Tonight the fundraiser for endangered species; tomorrow the gala charity auction for poor children.

via RealClearPolitics

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Filed under democracy, economics, industry, labor, U.S.

by | 5 September 2009 · 8:08 am

Suva, Fiji, in the Wake of the 2000 Coup

From “Papua, O‘ahu, Viti Levu” by Stewart Firth, in Pacific Places, Pacific Histories ed. by Brij Lal (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 63-65:

The map of Suva, with only a few Indian names, reflects the historic alliance between the British and the Fijian chiefs in ruling Fiji and the exclusion of Indo-Fijians from the upper reaches of society for much of the colonial era. None of this might matter if it did not resonate so strikingly with contemporary developments in Fiji. The Fijian nationalist demonstrators who gathered at the Parliament on the morning of May 19, 2000, the day of George Speight‘s coup, had marched along Victoria Avenue and Ratu Sukuna Road, thoroughfares named after a queen and a chief who had little time for democracy.

To live in Suva in the year 2000 was to have a brief glimpse of the abyss of disorder into which political passions threatened to plunge the country. After the riots and looting of May 19th, shattered glass littered the streets, people fled, and buses ceased to run in a city where the bus station is normally crowded with people seeking transport all over the island of Viti Levu. Desperate shopkeepers boarded windows, covered them with heavy mesh, or dumped containers on pavements. The northern end of town resembled a war zone, and for a few days a deathly quiet replaced the normal bustle of Suva’s commercial life. A burned-out building near the post office, shown repeatedly on foreign TV, symbolized the depths to which Fiji had sunk. Yet these early days were just the beginning of a crisis that would grip the capital for the next two months, during which Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara was deposed as president, the 1997 constitution was abrogated, the Parliament hosted a bizarre carnival of nationalist posturing, and the army gradually asserted sufficient control to be able to install a government to its liking. The University of the South Pacific is situated close enough to the Parliament for the gun battles of a few streets away to be heard and even felt as reverberating thumps. The vice-chancellor, Esekia Solofa, suspended classes and repatriated students from other countries, including the hapless Solomon Islanders who returned in early June to a far more serious coup in their own country.

Suva became a city of curfews, rumors, premature closings, and sudden traffic jams as people fled home on the strength of the latest disturbing report about developments. Foreign journalists, sensing the potential for drama but mostly ignorant of Fiji, poured into town booking hotel rooms and renting cars. Some soon left after an armed mob, enraged by a television interview critical of Speight, invaded Fiji TV on the night of May 28, smashed equipment, and chased journalists into the nearby Suva Centra Hotel. In the hills of Viti Levu the landowners of the catchment area of Monasavu Dam, where hydroelectricity is generated, sabotaged the turbines and seized the opportunity to demand compensation for their loss of resource. As the Fiji Electricity Authority pressed wheezing and outdated diesel generators into service to meet the shortfall, Suva was subjected to rolling blackouts, and people became used to evenings spent in the dark and workdays without power. Since Suva these days is also subject to intermittent breaks in the water supply, sometimes lasting three or four days, life in the city was not only insecure—no one knowing when Speight’s crowd of supporters might burst through the roadblocks set up around the Parliamentary area—but also inconvenient in a characteristically Third-World way. Suva was not Kisangani in the Congo or Bulawayo in Zimbabwe, prosperous towns reduced by conflict to penury, but such a fate for the city was no longer beyond imagining.

The root of the political unrest was a struggle for power between different groups of Fijians, a reprise in modern form of similar struggles that have characterized Fijian history for centuries. The Indo-Fijians, condemned to be guests in the land of their birth, were the victims not just of Fijian ethnocentrism, but also of Fijian infighting. I should have known all this, having taught Pacific history and politics for years. Why should we be surprised that a liberal, multicultural democracy is so hard to construct in a country whose traditional politics were deeply hierarchical, whose colonial masters perpetuated that hierarchy until independence, whose immigrant population was kept strictly separate during the colonial era, and whose indigenous population continues to think to a greater or lesser extent of those who live in Fiji as divided between vulagi (guests, visitors) and itaukei (hosts, owners)? As Steven Hooper has argued, “an ideology of complementarity, involving at some level the categories chiefs and people, prevails among the majority of Fijians” and still “to a large extent conditions attitudes towards and relations with those people beyond the Land, be they of Indian, European, Chinese, Banaban or other descent.” In Henry Rutz’s view, most Fijians “see themselves less as citizens of a democratic nation-state than as supporters of a local chief who holds rank in a hierarchy of chiefs from village to ‘nation.”‘ Yet the hatreds, intolerance, and disorder unleashed by Speight still came as a shock, and I was brought face-to-face with the depth of my own attachment to order, civility, tolerance, and modernity—the modernity that delivers education, health care, convenience, efficiency, and opportunity to large numbers of people in the developed countries even as it generates inequality and atomization. Fijian tradition, so easy to romanticize, turned out to be a political resource readily exploitable by ambitious politicians and, if allowed to determine events, likely to consign Fiji’s people, whatever their race, to a bleak future of stunted lives and restricted opportunities.

Having plumbed the depths through the curfews and roadblocks of 2000, Suva suddenly blossomed after the 2001 elections, which returned Fiji to a constitutional and internationally acceptable path. An energetic new Indo-Fijian mayor cleaned up the streets, planted gardens, and reconstructed footpaths. Businesses responded with a burst of refurbishment and repainting, and decorations festooned the streets as Christmas approached. This time, though, no one was under illusions about how difficult it would be to restore long-term political stability and to realize the country’s potential. Too many people, especially in the Indo-Fijian community, had had enough. In a sign of the times, scores of thousands of Fiji citizens entered the United States’ green card lottery in the hope of winning entry to a country where they would be judged on ability and hard work alone, not on race or inherited status. Nurses in Fiji’s hard-pressed hospitals queued up to take jobs somewhere else in the world, from Australia to the United Arab Emirates.

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Filed under Britain, democracy, Fiji, migration, military, nationalism

by | 23 August 2009 · 9:36 am

Hawai‘i Turns 50, Theroux Stays Misanthropic

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Hawai‘i becoming the 50th state, Paul Theroux in the New York Times expresses his fondness for its natural attractions and misanthropy toward its people—just as he does when he writes about anywhere else.

Back then, as the newest star on the flag, Hawaii was a thinly populated place, with most of the people living in Honolulu and predominantly young — the state’s average age was among the youngest in the nation. Its soul was Polynesian, but its popular culture and its institutions were Small Town U.S.A., with drive-in eateries, carhops and a passion for Elvis (a frequent visitor) and for high school sports; on every island the social highlight of the year was the senior prom….

Other plantation lands have become bungaloid subdivisions or luxury housing or golf courses. Some children of the plantation workers have become doctors and lawyers, or construction workers and caddies. And an immense number have become politicians — each island has its own local government — which may account for its reputation for political buffoonery and philistinism. Public intellectuals do not exist; public debate is rare, except on issues that transgress religious dogma. Hawaii is noted for its multitude of contentious God-botherers….

Some of this seems either dysfunctional or annoying, and yet there are compensations. All my life I have thought, Give me sunshine. Hawaii has the balmiest weather in the world, and its balance of wind and water gives it perfect feng shui. No beach is private: all of the shoreline must be accessible to the casual beachgoer or fisherman or opihi-picker. And since people’s faults are often their virtues when looked at a different way, the aversion to self-promotion is often a welcome humility; the lack of confrontation or hustle is a rare thing in a hyperactive world. Islanders are instinctively territorial, but bound by rules, so privacy matters and so does politeness and good will.

Although many of its birds and flora have been wiped out by humans or alien species, Hawaii’s other Edenic attributes are just about indestructible. I keep telling myself that no one can taint the orchidaceous air, or flatten the gigantic sea cliffs, or still the great waves, or obliterate the rainbows.

The comment thread offers fewer mahalos than auwes.

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by | 21 August 2009 · 4:50 pm

Religious Warfare in Japan, 1400–1600

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 184-186:

For the clergy, the Warring States Era was a time of intense competition for believers and confrontation with the military authorities. In general, the older sects in Nara and Kyoto lost out; Rinzai Zen became weaker with the collapse of the Muromachi bakufu. On the other hand, believers in Sōtō Zen, the Pure Land, and the Lotus Sutra increased greatly. Jesuits brought Roman Catholicism to Japan and they succeeded in making many converts. The emerging thought system, Shinto, chose its sacred texts and drew pilgrims to shrines at Ise and Mount Yoshida in Kyoto.

The fate of Enryakuji, headquarters to the Tendai faith, symbolized the hard times faced by older sects. Already in the 1400s, Enryakuji had begun to lose its lands to warriors and to lose revenues to Kyoto moneylenders. The Muromachi bakufu generally ignored the frequent demonstrations so frightening to the court in the twelfth century. Finally, in 1571 after the warlord Nobunaga had taken control of Kyoto, he had his troops surround Mount Hiei where the temple complex was situated and, shockingly, ordered them to burn the mountain, ending Enryakuji’s pretensions to independent political and economic power. One of the most venerable institutions in Japanese history had been reduced to cinders.

By contrast, Sōtō Zen expanded rapidly into the countryside between 1450 and 1590, primarily because of warrior patronage. Along the Japan Sea littoral, local “men of the province” founded new temples, even as prelates promised them salvation and worldly benefits. The population in Sōtō Zen monasteries and temples grew exponentially in the 1500s, partly because Buddhist monks ignored their behavioral precepts and served potential warrior patrons rice wine in elaborate rituals.

True Pure Land Buddhism benefited from the enlightened rule of its eighth head, Rennyo (1415–1499), who had five wives and twenty-seven children. He proselytized far and wide, writing hymns and pastoral letters to guide his followers. He was especially successful around his home temple Honganji near Kyoto, in eastern Honshu, and along the Japan Sea littoral. The families that became his followers formed congregations as grassroots units, and soon they were known for their cohesion. For example, during a famine, farm families would reserve grain for like-minded artisans and merchants. These congregations numbered between twenty and a thousand and met monthly for religious discussion and worship. They also received rules checking wild behavior, such as slandering other sects or attacking political leaders. By the early 1500s, True Pure Land Buddhism had emerged as a powerful religious organization.

Eventually, this sect came to be known as the “Single-minded” (Ikkō) school because of its adherents’ devotion to Amida Buddha. The cohesion of believers made them difficult for daimyo to control, and in 1488 between 100,000 and 200,000 of the faithful drove a warlord from his domain in Kaga located along the central Japan Sea. The Kaga devotees established an “estate of the Buddha,” resisting local warrior rents and labor dues. Like-minded local samurai willing to accept the new regime soon joined, sharing power with the Ikkō sectarians. Warrior armies failed to suppress the wayward province until 1580, slaughtering thirty to forty thousand religious soldiers in fierce battles.

Meanwhile, the focus moved to the Ikkō sect’s headquarters in the Kinai. When Honganji was burned in Kyoto in 1532, the tenth patriarch had it rebuilt as a fortification in Osaka and recruited an army of twenty thousand. Soon the Single-minded sect became a rallying point for all those opposing warrior rule. During the 1570s, the warlord Oda Nobunaga launched an all-out war against Honganji, using armored ships brimming with cannon to blockade the fortress. In the face of such overwhelming military power, the sect sued for peace on Nobunaga’s terms in 1580. Warrior power had triumphed over the religious network of the Single-minded sect.

The Lotus Sect was no less militant, espousing an ideology of “succeeding in this world.” Kyoto merchants and moneylenders joined in droves, because they felt that the Lotus Leagues, as they were known, helped to protect their profits. These radicals were also popular because they rejected the rents and labor dues imposed by warriors and clamored for the abrogation of urban taxes. Thousands of adherents chanting “Hail to the Lotus Sutra” demonstrated in the streets in long, circular processions, frightening commoners and aristocrats alike. Eventually they came to occupy twenty-one temples protected by moats and earthen walls.

Finally, between 1532 and 1536, the Lotus Leagues in Kyoto revolted against a powerful warrior in the region. Taking over the administration of the city, they kidnapped aristocrats, decided lawsuits, apprehended arsonists, and blocked rent payments. A type of “popular justice” meted out by the Lotus sectarians reigned in the city. In 1536, however, the tide turned against them, as Enryakuji, supported by samurai and the older Buddhist sects, counterattacked. Enryakuji and its allies burned many Lotus temples over a period of thirty-six hours. Survivors fled to the imperial grounds but were nevertheless killed there. Like the Single-minded believers, devotees of this urban religious movement succumbed to the forces of order.

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Filed under democracy, economics, Japan, religion, war

by | 15 August 2009 · 8:57 am

Two Afghan Candidate Profiles

In the Wall Street Journal of 13 August 2009, Ann Marlowe profiles two of the leading candidates campaigning to replace Karzai as president.

It was midnight this past Sunday when I left the house of Abdullah Abdullah, Hamid Karzai’s leading challenger for the presidency of Afghanistan. Twenty or so men were still waiting to see the candidate, some sitting cross-legged in the grassy courtyard.

When I arrived at 10:30 p.m., one dignitary after another filed into the meeting room: a finance executive, a counter-narcotics official, a former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, and a female professor at Kabul University. Lesser notables spilled out into the courtyard of the concrete villa, some in Western garb, some in traditional dress. Earlier, the diplomat brother of the slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud came to pay his respects.

These Afghans don’t believe the line the foreign press is pushing—that Mr. Karzai has the election sewn up. With 10 days until the vote, they’ve come to offer help or cut deals, believing that they’re backing the winner.

Dr. Abdullah, 49 years old, is an ophthalmologist and a former foreign minister of Afghanistan who entered politics by organizing medical care for the Afghan resistance after the Soviet invasion in 1979. He’s running on a platform of overhauling the 2002 Afghan Constitution. He advocates a parliamentary system, political parties, and direct elections of mayors and provincial governors. (They’re currently appointed by the president.)

Dr. Abdullah has single-handedly turned this election into a much-needed referendum on governance. How much direct democracy is enough? When is a people “mature” enough to elect its leaders? Is legitimacy derived from an election, from performance, or from the power of the gun? These are questions that resonate in Afghanistan as much as they do for Americans considering the merits of democracy promotion overseas….

Mr. Ghani, 60 years old, has focused his campaign on bread-and-butter issues. As finance minister, he started the much-lauded National Solidarity Program for rural development, which introduced economic policies like privatization, a flat tax and a rational tariff system. He is an expert on development economics, and is renowned for his incorruptibility.

But it isn’t clear that Mr. Ghani’s solutions match Afghanistan’s most pressing problems. Foreign journalists tend to focus on rural Afghan poverty. Yet the standard of living for those in towns and cities (about one-third of the population) has improved greatly after nearly a decade of 5%-10% annual GDP growth.

Afghanistan expects 8.5% GDP growth in the fiscal year ending March 2010, up from 3.5% last year, according to Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal. Afghans are natural capitalists, and, thanks in part to Mr. Ghani, they have laws that allow them to prosper. What they lack is laws that allow them to govern themselves effectively.

Mr. Ghani told me in an interview on Aug. 5 that he believes the problem isn’t with the constitution but with corruption. Dr. Abdullah told me he disagrees. He points to the single nontransferable vote electoral system, in which requirements for candidates are so low that dozens compete for one slot. This system has produced members of parliament with only a few percent of the vote. There’s also the lack of accountability of governors and mayors.

Dr. Abdullah’s fundamental point is that good institutions are more important than goodwill. “Even if a person does not want to abuse power,” Dr. Abdullah tells me, “others around him will.” This is a not-so-veiled reference to Mr. Karzai’s brothers. One is an alleged drug dealer and another allegedly demands kickbacks. Then there’s Mr. Ghani’s brother Hashmat Ghani Ahmadzai, the wealthy chief of the Ahmadzai tribe and an MP notorious for his belligerence.

Is a relatively peaceful (by Afghan standards) transition after a democratic election too much to hope for?

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by | 3 August 2009 · 10:50 pm

Foreign Policy on Indonesia vs. Burma

In Foreign Policy‘s Shadow Government, Dan Twining compares recent positive developments in Indonesia with negative developments in Burma.

Indonesia’s political revolution was also spurred by a regional wave of democratization that spread from the Philippines in 1986 to South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Mongolia, and beyond over the following decade. After free parliamentary elections, Indonesia held its first direct elections for president in 2004, followed by those which have just given President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono a decisive mandate for a second term.

The popular and performance legitimacy required by a system of democratic accountability has led SBY, as he is popularly known, to aspire to lead Indonesia to new heights. With the country’s respected former central bank governor as his new vice president, the leadership team has set a target of matching China’s economic growth rate and attacking entrenched corruption, a corrosive legacy of Suharto‘s clientelistic rule. Democratic Indonesia is finally beginning to punch its weight geopolitically: international newspaper headlines celebrate “Indonesia Rising” and suggest Indonesia as “Another ‘I’ in the BRIC Story.” The U.S. National Intelligence Council predicts that Indonesia will have an economy larger than those of most European nations by the 2020s. Leading Indonesian public intellectuals like Rizal Sukma ambitiously propose “a post-ASEAN foreign policy” of “strategic partnerships with global powers” grounded in Indonesia’s values as a democracy. Yudhoyono speaks proudly of Indonesia’s democracy as a source of soft power in the world and wants to leverage it to expand respect for human dignity and government accountability as sources of regional security, including through new institutions like the Bali Democracy Forum.

Burma is a different story. Its widespread poverty and brutal autocracy are a cancer in the heart of ASEAN, the club led by Asia’s “tiger” economies that inducted Burma in 1997 in the hope that doing so would spur the kind of opening of Burma’s economic and political system that has transformed the fortunes of its neighbors. It hasn’t. Leaders in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and elsewhere are embarrassed by the Burmese junta’s misrule and have been increasingly outspoken in saying so — including during the debate over ASEAN’s new charter, which creates a regional human rights body and is grounded in a framework of political and economic modernity that is anathema to the generals in Naypyidaw (Burma’s new capital, built deep in the jungle and featuring plush underground bunkers for the country’s paranoid leadership).

Since the junta rejected the results of the country’s last elections in 1990, Burma’s people have grown poorer as its ruling elite have grown richer from trade in gems, timber, narcotics, and other commodities, as well as the development of offshore natural gas fields that will deliver billions of dollars in revenues to Burma’s governing elite over the coming decade. Civil conflict stemming from the junta’s rule has produced millions of internally displaced people and refugees. Forced and child labor are rampant. The regime’s security forces fired on peacefully demonstrating monks and rounded up large numbers of innocent civilians following non-violent protests in 2007. The country’s political opposition has been eviscerated. The junta may be cooperating with North Korea to develop nuclear weapons.

In short, the pathologies that afflict Burma’s failing state, all either derived or exacerbated by political misrule, make its regime a threat to its people, its neighbors, and the wider world. Burma’s descent is in many respects a mirror-image of the success of Indonesia’s vibrant democracy next door.

via Oxblog

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by | 30 June 2009 · 10:27 pm

Aristocrats Corrupt the Clergy, 800-1050

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 74-75:

The Buddhist clergy continued to serve as an adjunct to the aristocracy, not only performing state rituals but also helping the privileged gain salvation. During these centuries, however, several changes overtook this class and Japanese religion in general. Buddhism and the native cult, already starting to meld in the 600s, became amalgamated and local gods and goddesses turned into protectors of the Buddhist law and then manifestations of Buddhist deities. Buddhist temples and shrines combined into powerful religious complexes, such as Kasuga Shrine and Kōfukuji, and helped the religious class acquire even more wealth and power.

The gender and class composition of Buddhist devotees also began to change. The state all but stopped ordaining women and banned them from some sacred sites because they might be a temptation to sin. Still, some women, especially of aristocratic birth, continued to accept unofficial ordination. The class origins of powerful monks began to shift as rank holders with many sons and no other outlets for them started to place them in high positions at famous temples. For example, between 782 and 990, ninety-seven percent of these powerful monks were of commoner background, studying for and attaining ordination. Between 990 and 1069, however, that proportion slipped to fifty-two percent. In other words, the crowded aristocratic class began to seek religious appointment as a way to produce an income for their children. Temples no longer followed rules of seniority but instead rewarded their aristocratic patrons, despite loud protests from well-qualified ordinands.

The increased role of aristocratic offspring in administering the daily affairs and extensive estate lands of these temple complexes helped to politicize these institutions and increase factionalism. By the mid-tenth century, violence occasionally broke out among factions within and between religious complexes. These confrontations could cause considerable damage, as when more than forty buildings were destroyed on Mount Hiei in a factional dispute in 993. Many monks of minimal education were there merely for the tax exemption—and readily took part in scuffles. These same clerics engaged in all sorts of behavior once banned by monastic rules, including eating meat, drinking rice wine, and engaging in homosexual and heterosexual liaisons. Some abbots such as Ennin (794–864) condemned these violations of religious conduct, but until 1050 the anticlericalism implied in terms like “evil monk” (akusō) [悪僧] was not yet widespread.

Ryōgen (912–985) was a powerful monk of this time. Born to a poor commoner family, he ascended Mount Hiei at the age of eleven, found a suitable teacher, and was ordained in the Tendai sect at sixteen. Lacking a powerful sponsor and ambitious for a career that included more than just performing everyday ceremonies, Ryōgen succeeded in attaching himself to more powerful monks and showing off his knowledge in a series of religious debates. This attracted the attention of court aristocrats, especially members of the northern branch of the Fujiwara. In exchange for his expertise at various esoteric rituals employed when Regent Fujiwara no Tadahira died, Ryōgen became a protege of Tadahira’s son Morosuke. Morosuke obtained a series of important appointments for Ryōgen and cemented his alliance with the monk. Eventually, Ryōgen was appointed to the headship of the Tendai sect. In that post, he strengthened monastic discipline and helped rebuild many structures on Mount Hiei after the disastrous fire of 966. He also expanded Tendai power into the provinces and aided in the ordination of women. He remained the head of the Tendai sect until his death.

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