The Impairments of Democratization: Haiti in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

behavior. While democratization eliminates the most flagrant tyrannical aspects of old regimes and ushers in electoralism to select ruling elites, it builds on the constraining foundations of authoritarianism. Thus, the exceedingly fragile organism generated by the third wave is profoundly flawed, and the paradigm of democratization suffers from serious impairments and a debilitating benignity in its portrayal of democracy.2 The recent history of Haiti illustrates this argument. Analysis of the fall of the predatory Duvalier dictatorship and the subsequent rise, collapse, and restoration of the freely elected populist regime of Jean-Bertrand Aristide shows that the transition from authoritarianism to populism rested on the ascendancy of a popular civil society. The old balance of class power as well as the vital repressive organs of the Duvalierist state, however, survived the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier and caused the redictatorialization of Haitian society. The 1991 coup that overthrew President Aristide reflected the persisting capacity of the Haitian ruling class to unleash the most brutal violence against those forces that threatened to render the change of regime a change of state. Haiti's democratic transition engendered the backlash of privileged classes whose fear of being overwhelmed by a people's movement caused in turn the breakdown of the transition and a domestic impasse. The American military intervention that resolved the impasse and restored President Aristide to his office in October 1994 represented the only viable means of ending redictatorialization. The intervention, however, has had contradictory consequences. While it revived the difficult process of democratization and facilitated the relative neutralization of the repressive organs of the state, it protected the old balance of class power and set constraining parameters for economic transformation.3 The result is a change of regime rather than the creation of a new state. Still, such a change of regime may generate wider popular struggles portending more profound alterations in the nature of the state. Thus, democratization can ultimately cause a change of state, even if its integument and the constellation of forces that generated it make such an outcome unlike-