Liberal Constitutional Democracy Research Articles

Burma's Uneven Struggle

Burma’s Uneven Struggle Josef Silverstein (bio) The unequal struggle to restore democracy and freedom to Burma has been going on since the military seized power in 1962 and replaced the country’s original liberal-democratic constitution with an authoritarianism that, in one form or another, has prevailed ever since. 1 The contest took a new turn in May 1996, when 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and other leaders of the National League for Democracy (NLD) called a national meeting of their party on the sixth anniversary of its overwhelming victory in the 1990 balloting to choose a new Pyithu Hluttaw (Burma’s unicameral National Parliament). The NLD leaders were reminding Burma and the world that the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), the military junta that seized power in September 1988, is governing illegally and denying the people’s elected representatives the right to carry out their mandate. The ruling party that SLORC displaced in 1988, the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP), was itself a creature of the military, operating under a constitution written by generals in 1974. In 1988, deteriorating economic conditions, official mismanagement, and violence against protesters finally provoked massive demonstrations demanding a return to civilian democratic rule. The military response was government by the gun, featuring the brutal suppression of peaceful demonstrations and the imposition of the worst repression in modern Burmese history. 2 Most of these events took place in the ethnic-Burman heartland of the country, which includes the capital of Rangoon and the valley and delta of the Irrawaddy River, and is home to about 70 percent of Burma’s [End Page 88] estimated 42 million people. Less well known have been the long struggles for greater self-government waged by various minority peoples living in less populous upland areas closer to Burma’s long land frontiers, which border Thailand, Laos, China, and Bangladesh. 3 Following Burma’s independence from Britain in 1948, many of these minorities took up arms against the new postcolonial state. They complained that the overwhelmingly ethnic-Burman government in Rangoon was breaking promises made to them before independence, and in some cases attempting to “Burmanize” smaller ethnic groups. Some of these peoples have continued holding out against SLORC through years of armed clashes, negotiations, and brutal sanctions. Until 1988, Burman democrats and minority activists waged separate struggles, with neither group paying much attention to the other. After the military coup that year, however, thousands of Burman students, monks, and other civilians fled to minority-controlled areas in Burma and minority enclaves in neighboring states. There they sought protection, aid in continuing the fight against the military, and support in their political struggle. This was the first step in uniting the dictatorship’s two sets of opponents. SLORC’s Program When SLORC seized power, it announced a four-point program: 1) protect national and territorial unity; 2) preserve sovereignty; 3) improve the economic and social well-being of the people; and 4) hold a multiparty national election. SLORC stressed that it meant to keep power only as long as it took to achieve these goals. 4 The military dictatorship sought to meet its first three goals through the use of force and the denial of human and civil rights. Backed by an army enlarged to a strength of more than 300,000 and equipped with more than $2 billion worth of new weapons, SLORC banned or severely restricted freedoms of speech, assembly, and movement. Military courts enforced these martial-law edicts; torture of suspects and prisoners became common. To meet its fourth goal, SLORC allowed parties to form and issued a law to provide for the election of the Pyithu Hluttaw. 5 Of the 93 parties that fielded candidates, the NLD (with Aung San Suu Kyi as secretary-general) quickly emerged as the most important prodemocratic formation. The popular appeal of Aung San Suu Kyi, whose late father is considered the founder of modern Burma, led a worried SLORC to isolate her under house arrest in July 1989. She was denied the right to meet or speak with anyone other than her guards; in February 1990, she was barred from running for office. Despite...

Modes of Immigration Politics in Liberal Democratic States

The politics of immigration in liberal democracies exhibits strong similarities that are, contrary to the scholarly consensus, broadly expansionist and inclusive. Nevertheless, three groups of states display distinct modes of immigration politics. Divergent immigration histories mold popular attitudes toward migration and ethnic heterogeneity and affect the institutionalization of migration policy and politics. The English-speaking settler societies (the United States, Canada, and Australia) have histories of periodically open immigration, machineries of immigration planning and regulation, and densely organized webs of interest groups contesting policies. Their institutionalized politics favors expansionary policies and is relatively immune to sharp swings in direction. Many European states (France, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium) experienced mass migration only after World War II and in a form that introduced significant non-European minorities. Their immigration politics is shaped by what most see as the unfortunate consequences of those episodes and are partially institutionalized and highly volatile and conflictual. European states until recently sending countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece) deal with migration pressures for the first time in their modern histories, under crisis conditions, and in the context of intensifying coordination of policies within the European Union. We should expect the normalization of immigration politics in both sets of European states. Although they are unlikely to appropriate the policies of the English-speaking democracies, which should remain unique in their openness to mass immigration, their approach to immigration will, nevertheless, take the liberal democratic form.

Southern Africa in the Post-Apartheid Era: The Freeing of Domestic Politics

On 1 February 1991, at the opening of the new session of South Africa's parliament, President F.W. de Klerk announced his government's intention to scrap three of the 'pillars' of apartheid the Land Act, which reserves 87 per cent of South Africa's land for the white minority; the Group Areas Act, which mandates residential and business segregation; and, perhaps most significantly, the Population Registration Act, which underpins the whole system of apartheid by providing for the classification of all South Africans according to race.1 This announcement does not yet mean that apartheid is dead, but, coming after a turbulent year of change that began with the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990, it is one further proof that apartheid is dying. The death throes of apartheid come at a time when profound changes are occurring throughout the region of southern Africa. In Namibia, independence has been successfully achieved, a liberal-democratic constitution harmoniously agreed upon, and moves begun towards national reconciliation and reconstruction. In both Angola and Mozambique, talks are under way between the government and its guerrilla opponents, offering the prospect, though not yet the reality, of the end to years of bloody civil war. Meanwhile, even as the wars continue,

DEVELOPING DEMOCRACY WHEN CIVIL SOCIETY IS WEAK: THE CASE OF BOTSWANA

ANALYSES OF AFRICAN POLITICS increasingly eall for the development of demoeratie eontrols on the continent's political elites. They believe that such eontrols will help to overeome the serious eeonomie and legitimacy crises with which many governments are eonfronted. 1 These well meaning proposals are only realistic in so far as existing socio-eeonomie structures have the eapaeity to sustain organized forms of eitizen influence. The prevailing theory in political science is that demoeraey, partieularly in its liberal democratic form, requires a developed economy with a substantial middle class. Members of this class possess the knowledge, wealth and time to organize groups which influenee government deeisions regarding important interests of civil society.9 Most proponents of this pluralist theory reeognize few exceptions to this generalization. The most prominent are the United States in the nineteenth century and India currently. Pluralists argue that, in these deviant cases, a traditional political culture existed which could sustain the necessary multiple group linkages between civil society and government required for a liberal democracy to persist over time.3

Democracy and Economic Crisis: The Latin American Experience

The debt crisis has raised serious concerns about the future of democratic governance in Latin America. The prevailing assumption is not merely that economic decline undercuts prospects for democratic consolidation; because of their vulnerability to popular political pressures, democracies—particularly new democracies—have been seen as incapable of mounting effective policy responses to critical economic challenges. A comparative study of policy outcomes in Latin America since the outbreak of the debt crisis challenges this assumption. If we control for the magnitude of the debt burden at the outbreak of the crisis, no statistically significant differences emerge between democratic and authoritarian regimes, or between new democracies and more established regimes. The findings suggest that the conventional wisdom about democracy and economic crisis exaggerates the relationship between political regime characteristics and policy choice, and fundamentally misconstrues the strengths and weaknesses of liberal democratic forms of governance.

Parties and elections in Greece: the search for legitimacy

Although Greece acquired the formal institutions of liberal constitutional democracy early in her independent history, her politics have been characterized by clientelism, instability and frequent military intervention. The most blatant instance of 'praetorianism' was the military dictatorship of 1967-74. Yet in the years since the Colonels' downfall, the political system appears to have acquired a new legitimacy. Although many features of the 'old' politics remain, recent years have seen the collapse of the traditional centre and the emergence of new political formations, reflecting the rapid pace of post-war socio-economic change. And 1981 saw the election by a convincing majority of a socialist government, the first ever in Greece, committed to radical domestic transformation and to a major reorientation of external relations.

Autonomy, Want Satisfaction, and the Justification of Liberal Freedoms

By ‘Liberalism’ or ‘a liberal-democratic theory of justice’ I understand the thesis that a modern, affluent society is just only if it respects and enforces certain rights. Among these are rights to free speech, the liberty to make one's own self-regarding choices (free from excessive paternalistic meddling by the state), privacy, due process of law, participation in society's political decision-making, and private property in personal posessions. By a ‘justification’ of these core rights of liberalism I understand a moral theory (plus necessary empirical assumptions) from which they are derivable. A moral theory which justifies the core rights will, ipso facto, condemn slavery, totalitarianism, and other social arrangements incompatible with a liberal-democratic constitution. What shape that moral theory should have is a matter of some dispute. According to philosophers like Ronald Dworkin it must be ‘rights-based.’ The core rights of liberalism in his view are derivable from the fundamental human right to ‘equal respect and consideration.’ A widely held alternative view is that the core rights are simply social rules the existence of which promotes human welfare.

The political debate and the struggle for democracy in Nigeria

The cream of political scientist in Nigeria met in Lagos under the auspices of the Nigerian Political Science Association in May 1986 to discuss the theme, Alternative Political Futures for Nigeria: 1990 and Beyondas part of the debate towards a new political system. During the deliberations, oneof the major issues that arose was whether there should be a recommendation that Nigeria should return to some form of liberal democratic arrangement in 1990. The Conference resolved not to make any such recommendation. What was important about that decision was that a sizable number of both right wing and left wing protagonists converged on the conclusion that political scientists had no business proposing a liberal democratic framework. For the right wing, the reasoning was straight forward. One of their representatives, Inno Ukaeje argued that if Nigeria wants to develop, it must develop a Garrison‐Managerial State System which means that: by 1990 the country should adopt a new form of government based mainly and purely on the rule of the armed forces and the police utilising coercionas the proper basis for securing the compliance of citizens with the laws of the polity, (emphasis in the original). Many of the left wing protagonists at the Conference correctly identified the multiparty liberal democratic form of government as bourgeois but wrongly concluded that socialists had no business struggling for a ‘bourgeois form’. Most of them argued that Nigeria should have a popular one party socialist system, some form of corporate system based on representation of popular organisations or at the very least a two party system with a conservative capitalist party face to face with a socialist revolutionary party. This situation they argued would simplify and bring to the fore the ideological struggle and thereby hasten the transition to socialism. The views expressed at the Conference were fairly representative of the general tenor of the present political debate in which liberal democracy is no longer assumed to be part of the desired civic culture and in which authoritarian political forms are being openly propagated as inevitable or even desirable. This is a new development in the Nigerian political psyche that could be a harbinger of the new reassertion of fascism, spearheaded by the Americans and their institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank the world over, the policies and the world views of which are beginning to take root in this country. It is worthy of note that in the 1940s and 1950s, there was an unquestioned linkage between the acquistion of independence and the establishment of a Parliamentary form of bourgeois democracy. The debate that occurred concerned the structure around which this form was to be organised. The crisis generated by the contradictions inherent in the structures and processes chosen led to a collapse of the whole system by 1966 and the entry of the military into politics. The military were, however, seen and they saw themselves as a transitional team to steer the country until a new democratic form could be arrived at. This is why until the time of the handover of power to the Shagari regime in 1979, the desirability of some form of democratic government for the country was never seriously questioned. The political debate at that time was directed at solving some of the perceived constraints and contradictions of the previous democratic experiment. It is only in the present political debate that there is an orchestrated open campaign against liberal democracy and for some form of authortarian government. This new tendency started becoming clear in 1982 when the Nigerian ruling class began to articulate the necessity for control and coercion to resolve the country's economic crisis. The inability of president Shehu Shagari and General Muhammadu Buhari to properly ‘manage’ this control and coercion played a major role in the inability of their regimes to survive. The Babangida administration is learning from their mistakes and striving to surpass them. It is thus not surprising that any political debate conducted under this atmosphere would reflect the state of the nation. The central political question that arises at this point is that as much as the Nigerian ruling classes are being compelled to move towards fascism, liberals and socialists have a stake in combatting that move. Their survival as well as their capacity to advance their politics might well depend upon being able to block the advance of fascism, hence the need for a liberal intervention in the current political debate. Against this background, left‐wing authoritarianism tends to weaken the much needed anti‐fascist solidarity of socialists and liberals.

Controlled Repression in Salazar's Portugal

The first of Portugal's two experiments with liberal democratic forms ended in 1926 when the civilian right, the landed oligarchy, and the military joined forces in a counter-revolutionary movement that seized power and laid the ground for Europe's lengthiest dictatorship of the right. For the next forty-eight years, organized opposition to Portuguese authoritarianism was miniscule and ultimately it was contradictions within the apparatus of state that caused the regime to topple in 1974. This was a sudden demise, but over the long term, the regime's dependence on the capability of a single individual Professor Ant6nio d'Oliveira Salazar had been a fatal weakness. At no time did the dictator virtually a reclusive personality encourage internal debate or establish mechanisms for choosing a successor. His was an informal personalist regime that might have come under sustained challenge sooner but for a key mitigating circumstance. Portuguese authoritarianism consistently displayed a high degree of rationality in the area of internal security. For many years, an extremely efficient undercover police apparatus kept down opposition without resorting to total repression: over four decades, political murders committed in metropolitan Portugal amounted to less than 500. However, opposition forces remained continually diffuse and inactive in a country where, after the first few years, the governing elite was not popular, to say the least.

The Struggle for Control of the Japanese University

SINCE the founding in 1877 of the first university in Japan, Tokyo Imperial, the Japanese university has been autonomous. After the president and the deans are nominated by the faculty, the Minister of Education formally and automatically appoints the pre-selected candidate to his post. This procedure has evolved into a proud tradition of Japanese university autonomy, zealously guarded by teachers and administrators. Postwar political and social developments have introduced factors which threaten this tradition. Now, as never before in the history of Japan, students are encroaching upon administrative prerogatives through well-organized demonstrations, class boycotts, and other harassments conducted by national student associations to support their increasing demands. In some national institutions student influence in determining university policy has already reached proportions considered revolutionary in the American state university. As with so many other controversial issues in contemporary Japanese education, the inexorable growth of student participation in the realm of administration has its roots in the American Occupation. During those seven historic years, American educational ideology and methods were introduced into Japan in an effort to demilitarize and democratize education, a venture the success of which is still to be determined. As a direct result of the liberal-democratic constitution drawn up by the Occupation authorities, public elementaryand secondary-school teachers were organized into the powerful Japan Teachers' Union, led during its incipient period by left-wing teachers and communists who had been waiting for the opportunity to become legally active. In addition, those with Marxist sympathies at other levels of education found strong support during the postwar depression and confusion plaguing Japan up to the early I950's. Thus the ten-year period immediately following the war found teachers from the elementary school to the university heavily influenced by left-wing liberal thought. The new teacher began a wholesale condemnation of Japanese

The West German Federal Constitutional Court: An Evaluation After Six Years

T HE FEDERAL CONSTITUTIONAL COURT of German Federal Republic has been characterized in numerous ways since it began to function in 1951 1 It has been viewed as guardian of a liberal democratic constitution; as final coordinating agency in political system; as an experiment in judicial pioneering; as a judicial oligarchy; and as a Trojan Horse which conceals behind a judicial facade certain of realities of German political life. In words of one of its judges, the wide range of its jurisdiction, applauded by many as true safeguard for a government by law, is derided by some as an unrealistic aiming at legal perfectionism bound to involve Court in political quarrels and ultimately headed for a government by courts.2 It is too early in life of Federal Constitutional Court to attempt any final appraisal. The position of Court is an evolving one, and its work must be interpreted in light of changing political background in Western Germany. But there are several justifications for another examination of its work and role at this time. One is passage in 1956 of an Act amending Law of 1951 on Federal Constitutional Court; a second justification is series of significant decisions during period between summers of 1956 and 1957, which provide new material on which to base an evaluation of work of Court.3

Comparative Politics of Non-Western Countries

There is wide recognition that in the non-Western world profound social and cultural changes are taking place as traditional societies have been exposed to the ideas and the ways of the West. There is also general agreement that new political patterns and relationships are evolving in these countries. However, with respect to most non-Western countries, it remains difficult to foresee whether the consequences of social change are to be stable, viable political practices or endemic instabilities in government. In many cases, it is still an open question whether the future will bring them a liberal democratic form of politics or some type of authoritarian rule such as communism.This state of affairs can be a challenge to the comparative method of political analysis. This is particularly so because most of the non-Western political systems have many features in common. They are generally the product of a traditional past in which the administration of government was the preserve of a select few. Many show the influence of a previous colonial rule, some even that of the same country. More important, they are often quite self-conscious about the problem of moving from a definite past to an idealized future.