The Middle-Class Revolution

All over the world, argues Francis Fukuyama, today's political turmoil has a common theme: the failure of governments to meet the rising expectations of the newly prosperous and educated.

Francis Fukuyama, 06/28/13

Over the past decade, Turkey and Brazil have been widely celebrated as star economic performers -- emerging markets with increasing influence on the international stage. Yet, over the past three months, both countries have been paralyzed by massive demonstrations expressing deep discontent with their governments' performance. What is going on here, and will more countries experience similar upheavals?

The theme that connects recent events in Turkey and Brazil to each other, as well as to the 2011 Arab Spring and continuing protests in China, is the rise of a new global middle class. Everywhere it has emerged, a modern middle class causes political ferment, but only rarely has it been able, on its own, to bring about lasting political change. Nothing we have seen lately in the streets of Istanbul or Rio de Janeiro suggests that these cases will be an exception.

In Turkey and Brazil, as in Tunisia and Egypt before them, political protest has been led not by the poor but by young people with higher-than-average levels of education and income. They are technology-savvy and use social media like Facebook and Twitter to broadcast information and organize demonstrations. Even when they live in countries that hold regular democratic elections, they feel alienated from the ruling political elite.

In the case of Turkey, they object to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's development-at-all-cost policies and authoritarian manner. In Brazil, they object to an entrenched and highly corrupt political elite that has showcased glamour projects like the World Cup and Rio Olympics while failing to provide basic services like health and education to the general public. For them, it is not enough that Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, was herself a left-wing activist jailed by the military regime during the 1970s and leader of the progressive Brazilian Workers Party. In their eyes, that party itself has been sucked into the maw of the corrupt "system," as revealed by a recent vote-buying scandal, and is now part of the problem of ineffective and unresponsive government.

The business world has been buzzing about the rising "global middle class" for at least a decade. A 2008 Goldman Sachs report defined this group as those with incomes between $6,000 and $30,000 a year and predicted that it would grow by some two billion people by 2030. A 2012 report by the European Union Institute for Security Studies, using a broader definition of middle class, predicted that the number of people in that category would grow from 1.8 billion in 2009 to 3.2 billion in 2020 and 4.9 billion in 2030 (out of a projected global population of 8.3 billion). The bulk of this growth will occur in Asia, particularly China and India. But every region of the world will participate in the trend, including Africa, which the African Development Bank estimates already has a middle class of more than 300 million people.

Corporations are salivating at the prospect of this emerging middle class because it represents a vast pool of new consumers. Economists and business analysts tend to define middle-class status simply in monetary terms, labeling people as middle class if they fall within the middle of the income distribution for their countries, or else surpass some absolute level of consumption that raises a family above the subsistence level of the poor.

But middle-class status is better defined by education, occupation and the ownership of assets, which are far more consequential in predicting political behavior. Any number of cross-national studies, including recent Pew surveys and data from the World Values Survey at the University of Michigan, show that higher education levels correlate with people's assigning a higher value to democracy, individual freedom and tolerance for alternative lifestyles. Middle-class people want not just security for their families but choices and opportunities for themselves. Those who have completed high school or have some years of university education are far more likely to be aware of events in other parts of the world and to be connected to people of a similar social class abroad through technology.  

Families who have durable assets like a house or apartment have a much greater stake in politics, since these are things that the government could take away from them. Since the middle classes tend to be the ones who pay taxes, they have a direct interest in making government accountable. Most importantly, newly arrived members of the middle class are more likely to be spurred to action by what the late political scientist Samuel Huntington called "the gap": that is, the failure of society to meet their rapidly rising expectations for economic and social advancement. While the poor struggle to survive from day to day, disappointed middle-class people are much more likely to engage in political activism to get their way.

This dynamic was evident in the Arab Spring, where regime-changing uprisings were led by tens of thousands of relatively well-educated young people. Both Tunisia and Egypt had produced large numbers of college graduates over the past generation. But the authoritarian governments of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak were classic crony-capitalist regimes, in which economic opportunities depended heavily on political connections. Neither country, in any event, had grown fast enough economically to provide jobs for ever-larger cohorts of young people. The result was political revolution.

None of this is a new phenomenon. The French, Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions were all led by discontented middle-class individuals, even if their ultimate course was later affected by peasants, workers and the poor. The 1848 "Springtime of Peoples" saw virtually the whole European continent erupt in revolution, a direct product of the European middle classes' growth over the previous decades.

While protests, uprisings and occasionally revolutions are typically led by newly arrived members of the middle class, the latter rarely succeed on their own in bringing about long-term political change. This is because the middle class seldom represents more than a minority of the society in developing countries and is itself internally divided. Unless they can form a coalition with other parts of society, their movements seldom produce enduring political change.

Thus the young protesters in Tunis or in Cairo's Tahrir Square, having brought about the fall of their respective dictators, failed to follow up by organizing political parties that were capable of contesting nationwide elections. Students in particular are clueless about how to reach out to peasants and the working class to create a broad political coalition. By contrast, the Islamist parties -- Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt -- had a social base in the rural population. Through years of political persecution, they had become adept at organizing their less-educated followers. The result was their triumph in the first elections held after the fall of the authoritarian regimes.

A similar fate potentially awaits the protesters in Turkey. Prime Minister Erdoğan remains popular outside of the country's urban areas and has not hesitated to mobilize members of his own Justice and Development Party (AKP) to confront his opponents. Turkey's middle class, moreover, is itself divided. That country's remarkable economic growth over the past decade has been fueled in large measure by a new, pious and highly entrepreneurial middle class that has strongly supported Erdoğan's AKP.

This social group works hard and saves its money. It exhibits many of the same virtues that the sociologist Max Weber associated with Puritan Christianity in early modern Europe, which he claimed was the basis for capitalist development there. The urban protesters in Turkey, by contrast, remain more secular and connected to the modernist values of their peers in Europe and America. Not only does this group face tough repression from a prime minister with authoritarian instincts, it faces the same difficulties in forging linkages with other social classes that have bedeviled similar movements in Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere.

The situation in Brazil is rather different. The protesters there will not face tough repression from President Rousseff's administration. Rather, the challenge will be avoiding co-optation over the long term by the system's entrenched and corrupt incumbents. Middle-class status does not mean that an individual will automatically support democracy or clean government. Indeed, a large part of Brazil's older middle class was employed by the state sector, where it was dependent on patronage politics and state control of the economy. Middle classes there, and in Asian countries like Thailand and China, have thrown their support behind authoritarian governments when it seemed like that was the best means of securing their economic futures.

Brazil's recent economic growth has produced a different and more entrepreneurial middle class rooted in the private sector. But this group could follow its economic self-interest in either of two directions. On the one hand, the entrepreneurial minority could serve as the basis of a middle-class coalition that seeks to reform the Brazilian political system as a whole, pushing to hold corrupt politicians accountable and to change the rules that make client-based politics possible. This is what happened in the U.S. during the Progressive Era, when a broad middle-class mobilization succeeded in rallying support for civil-service reform and an end to the 19th-century patronage system. Alternatively, members of the urban middle class could dissipate their energies in distractions like identity politics or get bought off individually by a system that offers great rewards to people who learn to play the insiders' game.

There is no guarantee that Brazil will follow the reformist path in the wake of the protests. Much will depend on leadership. President Rousseff has a tremendous opportunity to use the uprisings as an occasion to launch a much more ambitious systemic reform. Up to now she has been very cautious in how far she was willing to push against the old system, constrained by the limitations of her own party and political coalition. But just as the 1881 assassination of President James A. Garfield by a disappointed office-seeker became the occasion for wide-ranging clean-government reforms in the U.S., so too could Brazil use the occasion of the protests to shift onto a very different course today.

The global economic growth that has taken place since the 1970s -- with a quadrupling of global economic output -- has reshuffled the social deck around the world. The middle classes in the so-called "emerging market" countries are larger, richer, better educated and more technologically connected than ever before.

This has huge implications for China, whose middle-class population now numbers in the hundreds of millions and constitutes perhaps a third of the total. These are the people who communicate by Sina Weibo -- the Chinese Twitter -- and have grown accustomed to exposing and complaining about the arrogance and duplicity of the government and Party elite. They want a freer society, though it is not clear they necessarily want one-person, one-vote democracy in the near term.

This group will come under particular stress in the coming decade as China struggles to move from middle- to high-income status. Economic growth rates have already started to slow over the past two years and will inevitably revert to a more modest level as the country's economy matures. The industrial job machine that the regime has created since 1978 will no longer serve the aspirations of this population. It is already the case that China produces some six million to seven million new college graduates each year, whose job prospects are dimmer than those of their working-class parents. If ever there was a threatening gap between rapidly rising expectations and a disappointing reality, it will emerge in China over the next few years, with vast implications for the country's stability.

There, as in other parts of the developing world, the rise of a new middle class underlies the phenomenon described by Moises Naím of the Carnegie Endowment as the "end of power." The middle classes have been on the front lines of opposition to abuses of power, whether by authoritarian or democratic regimes. The challenge for them is to turn their protest movements into durable political change, expressed in the form of new institutions and policies. In Latin America, Chile has been a star performer with regard to economic growth and the effectiveness of its democratic political system. Nonetheless, recent years have seen an explosion of protests by high-school students who have pointed to the failings of the country's public education system.

The new middle class is not just a challenge for authoritarian regimes or new democracies. No established democracy should believe it can rest on its laurels, simply because it holds elections and has leaders who do well in opinion polls. The technologically empowered middle class will be highly demanding of their politicians across the board.

The U.S. and Europe are experiencing sluggish growth and persistently high unemployment, which for young people in countries like Spain reaches 50%. In the rich world, the older generation also has failed the young by bequeathing them crushing debts. No politician in the U.S. or Europe should look down complacently on the events unfolding in the streets of Istanbul and São Paulo. It would be a grave mistake to think, "It can't happen here."

Mr. Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the author of "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution."

A version of this article appeared June 29, 2013, on page C1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Middle-ClassRevolution.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323873904578571472700348086.html

Tyrannies across the world are crushing dissent. In Britain contempt for the political class is growing. Is it possible that democracy is dying?

Max Hastings, 06/22/13

Few modern prophets prove themselves wise enough to invite comparison with Moses, but Francis Fukuyama made more of an ass of himself than most.

Twenty years ago, the American academic wrote a book entitled The End Of History. In it, he announced that with the end of the Cold War and collapse of Communism, liberal democracy had triumphed. It would become forever the dominant system around the world, 'the final form of human government'.

Americans alternate bouts of flagellation about their country with orgies of self-congratulation. They loved Fukuyama's book, which represented them as the winning side, and bought it in truckloads.

For five minutes, it seemed possible that the author's thesis could be right. In the Nineties, even Mother Russia, cradle of tyranny, seemed to be embracing popular consent and freedom.

Communism was the last of the 20th century's evil 'isms' to suffer defeat, after two world wars in which the democracies battled against militarism, fascism and Nazism.

And there was more good news, with South American military dictatorships giving way to elected governments.

In South Africa, minority white apartheid rule yielded to one-man, one-vote black government without the violent struggle many had feared.

A few surviving regimes, notably in China, Vietnam and Cuba, still professed themselves communist.

But the big beasts in Beijing were as greedy and materialistic as Wall Street bankers. Only a dwindling band of British university lecturers continued to fool themselves that Karl Marx was right about mankind's destiny.

Yet today, barely a generation since the publication of The End Of History, its thesis echoes hollow.

Even if communism is a dying duck, everywhere brutal dictatorships are flourishing as if their societies' flirtations with democracy had never happened.

Naive Europeans hailed the 2010 'Arab Spring' as promising a new era in the Middle East. Yet it seems more likely that those nations - Tunisia, Egypt and Libya - will merely be ruled by new autocrats.

The truth is that democracy is ailing - not least here in Britain. Many people despise and distrust politicians.

They doubt that the energy expended on trekking to a polling station once every five years will benefit them or their societies.

A few years ago, Portuguese Nobel prizewinner Jose Saramago wrote a brilliant allegorical novel about democratic corruption, entitled Seeing. It was set in a nameless modern city during an election campaign, where three-quarters of the voters are so disgusted by their politicians that they returned blank ballots.

The government, bewildered and furious about the mass protest, orders a rerun: this produces 83 per cent of blank papers.

The writer's point, of course, is that modern politics has become meaningless to most people. It has simply descended into a struggle for power among small and unrepresentative elites, devoid of convictions or integrity, who ignore or defy the views of the people who elect them.

Earlier this month, Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, adopted one of the notorious phrases of the old fascist dictators: 'My patience is exhausted.'

He then committed thousands of riot police with batons and tear gas to remove peaceful protesters from Istanbul's Taksim Square.

Erdogan has said that democracy is an instrument to be exploited only as long as it is useful. He is thought to aspire to changing Turkey's constitution to make himself an elected dictator.

Most educated urban Turks are appalled by his desire to break with the country's century-old tradition of secularism and to once more put Islam at the heart of law.

He has restricted alcohol sales and attempted to criminalise adultery. More journalists are in prison in Turkey than in China.

Erdogan has been able to act despotically because as prime minister, he has delivered economic growth. He has won three elections through the votes of the small business class and rural peasantry, who value stability and traditional values far above personal freedom.

He can claim popular support, even though his style of rule is a travesty of democracy. Turkey is only the latest example of a nation bent on rolling back personal freedoms or resisting demands for it.

China may increasingly embrace capitalist economics, but President Xi Jinping and his politburo are implacable in denying their people liberty to do anything save make money

Russia's president Vladimir Putin is an unashamed Stalinist and his country is in the hands of a gangster elite, committed to suppressing dissent and bent upon personal enrichment.

Putin himself is thought to have accrued billions in his personal bank accounts. South America, 20 years ago, seemed to have turned its back on dictatorships, but today the continent is suffering a resurgence of personal rule.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is dead, but his successor intends to continue his disastrous tradition.

Argentina gained democracy in the wake of the 1982 Falklands War, but is now the victim of crazy Peronist economic policies that are wrecking the country.

President Cristina Kirchner can claim popular support: she wins elections by bribing the poor. But while Argentina still votes, its political system is a travesty.

Likewise in Africa, most rulers can claim legitimacy because they have won polls, but they rule in pursuit of personal or tribal profit, rather than in the national interest.

South Africa's ruling ANC party is riddled with corruption and its President Jacob Zuma has been up to his neck in it.

The government of India, hailed as the world's largest democracy, is mired in corruption. Paul Collier, professor of development economics at Oxford, wrote a brilliant book a few years ago, confessing that his own youthful faith in the ballot box as the solution to the Third World's troubles had been sadly mistaken.

Without a free Press, a tax system that forces citizens to think about what is being done with their money, an independent judiciary and an effective and uncorrupt civil service, democracy does not work.

Hitler showed back in 1933 that if a would-be tyrant can win just one election, he can bribe or fiddle the results of every poll thereafter.

Once a ruthless man or woman holds the levers of power, he can make sport with polls. The story becomes much more alarming when we see politics in deep trouble on our own doorsteps.

In the U.S., sensible people talk and write openly about a democratic crisis. The bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats have created gridlock in both houses of Congress.

The old willingness to cut deals and make compromises to keep government moving has become a dead letter.

A large chunk of the U.S., and especially its old, white, mid-Western, Western and southern heartland, feels as disenfranchised as do UKIP supporters in Britain. It sees a host of things being done, or not done, in Washington, which inspires bitter hostility on religious, economic or social grounds.

The U.S. came closest to being a single nation in the Forties and Fifties, partly as a result of World War II. Today, though, it is profoundly divided, and likely to remain so, not least as a result of the rise of the Latino population.

Different sections of U.S. society want vastly different things for the country; their political leaders lack the will or gifts to reconcile them. And so to Britain.

It is strange to think that less than a century ago, universal adult suffrage seemed a precious thing - finally granted to women only after World War I.

Consider the huge impact of some general elections, above all that of 1945, which produced a Labour government committed to creating the Welfare State.

Today, by contrast, ever fewer people trouble to vote, especially in local and European elections. They feel a contempt for our political class, which seems utterly remote.

We have leaders so excited by plunging into foreign wars that they pay scant attention to the humbler hopes and fears of voters at home. Most people who care about British politics are appalled by the weakness of the current Coalition.

This could well be the shape of things to come, with the major parties repeatedly failing to secure absolute majorities at General Elections.

The result is that we get government at the speed of the slowest ship in the convoy. Most modern ministers of all parties have spent their entire adult lives in the fishbowl of politics and know nothing of real life as lived by the rest of us.

Britain's democratic process invites almost as much public cynicism as do those of Africa or Asia. Accountability seems chronically lacking.

The EU and its distant, all-powerful bureaucracies feeds more public disillusionment. Almost every day, decisions about our lives are being made without the consent of Parliament, and often against its wishes.

Lord Denning, an unusually wise judge, presciently wrote in 1974: 'The Treaty of Rome is like an incoming tide. It flows into the estuaries and up the rivers. It cannot be held back.'

He was quite right, but his bewigged successors today have plenty of their own crimes to answer for.

More and more unpopular and visibly unjust British law is made by the judiciary, often flagrantly over-riding the expressed wishes of voters and Parliament.

We are entitled to ask: why does no other country in Europe suffer as severely at the hands of its judges - for instance, in upholding the rights of terrorists and their sympathisers at the expense of public safety - as does Britain?

The judiciary displays a sorry combination of conceit and and complacency. It has contributed substantially to the British people's mounting belief that, while they supposedly live in a democracy, they are denied their rightful voice in their own destinies.

It is another judge, Sir Brian Leveson, whose report last year into Press ethics threatens an unprecedented legislative assault on Press freedom, that vital pillar of democracy.

There are today some welcome signs that politicians are seeing the perils implicit in implementing Leveson's ill-considered recommendations. But it is dismaying to see judges repeatedly displaying their paucity of wisdom - the quality that, above all, we are entitled to expect from them.

Meanwhile, it remains true that democracy, for all its imperfections, is the least bad system of government to which mankind can submit.

But IF it is to function, we must be able to see some small correlation between what we think we have voted for and what sort of society we get.

The corruption of democracy in Africa, Asia and much of the Middle East places nations at the mercy of elected dictators.

In the U.S., Britain and much of the rest of Europe, we are instead threatened with chronically weak government, incapable of getting big, important things done to preserve our prosperity and even safety.

To restore voters' faith in democracy, we need also to restore that of our politicians. One of my favourite stories of Winston Churchill concerns a moment in 1942 when he was much troubled by the prospect of preparing and delivering a speech to the House of Commons about the war which at the time was going badly.

His chief of staff, General 'Pug' Ismay, said emolliently: 'Why don't you tell them all to go to hell, sir?' Churchill turned on him in a flash and said furiously: 'You must not say such things. I am the servant of the House.'

Who can imagine any modern British prime minister saying, far less believing, such a thing? Until we can restore to politics the legitimacy that can derive only from respect for its processes, democracy in Britain will remain in almost as sorry a condition as it is today across much of the rest of the world.

Even if someone was silly enough to buy Francis Fukuyama's book today, the euphoric vision it offered could invite only hollow laughter.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-2346217/Tyrannies-world-crushing-dissent-In-Britain-West-contempt-political-class-growing-Is-possible-democracy-dying.html

Revolts in Democracies

Paul R. Pillar, National Interest, 06/20/13

The timing is probably coincidence, but it is hard not to notice how popular disturbances that have shaken major cities in Brazil have come right after big street protests in Turkey. These are, of course, two very important countries, which pull considerable weight in affairs far beyond their own borders. One of them is one of the BRICS and the largest country in the Western hemisphere after the United States. The other is at a critical junction of Europe and the Middle East and is a key player in addressing such problems as the war in Syria. The two have even worked together on some issues of importance to the United States -- most notably in brokering a deal on Iran's nuclear program to which Tehran agreed and that, had the United States not backtracked from a formula that it had once proposed itself, might have put us on the road to settling this matter.

It would be easy to dismiss any coupling of the situations in Turkey and Brazil, given the obvious differences. The immediate explicit issues are different: proposed redevelopment of a city park and square in one case; increased transit fares in the other. The incumbent governments are not at all alike, one having a long-serving leader who heads a moderately Islamist party, and the other a newer president heading a leftist movement. But a very important similarity is that they are both democracies. Not only that, but democracies which, although each has a military that had been involved in politics in the not-too-distant past, have come to be considered stable, with their armies now expected to stay in the barracks.

That raises the question: why should there be such protests at all? The governments being protested against were freely and democratically elected. With the ballot box available, why should there be recourse to the street?

Several possible lines of inquiry come to mind. We may be seeing a process of incumbents losing touch with their constituents over time, especially when incumbents or their parties have been in power for a long time. Some have suggested this is true especially of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Even democratically elected leaders may come to have an inflated sense of knowing better than the citizenry what is in the citizenry's own best interest. And even democratically elected leaders may have a bias in favor of what is flashy or prestigious or symbolic rather than what affects most people's daily lives. In Turkey's case this includes Erdogan's desire to hark back to Ottoman glories with the structure he wants to erect in place of the park that has been at the center of protests in Istanbul. In Brazil's case this includes huge resources being spent on hosting the soccer World Cup and the Olympic Games -- resources unavailable for many other programs that would affect the welfare of ordinary Brazilians.

No doubt there is also a lot of sociology to be explored on the protestors' end. Dissertations probably can be written that can explain some of what we are seeing in terms of generational change, evolving class structures, or the like. Pending the development of such knowledge and any better explanations for what has been going on in the streets of these two countries, a few more general observations can be ventured.

One is that even relatively stable and well-established democracies are more fragile than we might like to think. And before we get too haughty in distinguishing our own democracy from those in Brazil and Turkey, recall that the United States has had its share of nasty disturbances in its streets in the not-distant past. The same question about why a democratically elected government should be the target of action in the street can be applied to the United States as well as to Brazil and Turkey.

A related observation is that, although representative democracy is still the least bad form of government and the one best able to align the actions of the rulers to the interests of the ruled, it still has deficiencies. It does not solve all problems of stability and responsiveness. We should remember this whenever we are tempted to think of democratization as a cure for whatever overseas ill we may be focusing on at the moment.

A final observation is that these disturbances evidently were a surprise even to those who were in power in the countries involved and thus had the biggest stake in being able to anticipate the trouble. We should remember this the next time we are tempted to berate our own experts or government agencies for not predicting such things that happen overseas.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/revolts-democracies-8633

The promise of political freedom raises peoples' expectations for economic and social opportunities. The success of emerging democracies depends fundamentally on whether democratization can also materially improve people's lives. When citizens do see improvements in social inclusion and living standards, they reward the politicians who provide them, creating a powerful feedback loop that helps consolidate democracy. On the other hand, if unemployment skyrockets, or if the rich just seem to get richer while nothing changes for the masses, a return to autocracy can begin to look pretty good.

Brazil's transition to democracy was consolidated in large part by socially inclusive growth, which generated widely shared benefits. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Presidents Cardoso and then Lula da Silva managed the impressive jujitsu of unleashing new talent and investment through anti-inflationary, anti-monopoly economic reforms, while simultaneously increasing social spending on the poor and middle class. Brazil used two main strategies to improve the well-being of the poor: First, they used conditional cash transfers that efficiently targeted that the neediest while encouraging positive behavior such as keeping kids in school; second, they used universal provision of social and economic rights (health care, education, and labor protections) to include blacks and other disadvantaged groups.

Mexico likewise consolidated democracy by delivering on economic opportunity for a broader cross-section of citizens. Monthly stipends to the poorest, conditioned on such behaviors as keeping kids healthy and in school, expanded greatly and now cover about a quarter of the population. This marks a shift from earlier decades when the government did little to provide material opportunities for the most vulnerable groups, even as political participation began to expand. 

When democracies fail to deliver on material expectations, by contrast, they can become breeding grounds for strongmen. To dissatisfied and excluded constituencies, a promise to fight against the rich can have sudden allure. In Thailand after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the economic and social policies of the nascent democratic government were widely perceived as exclusionary, benefiting foreign investors and domestic elites at the expense of regular Thais. This widespread resentment swept into power the populist Thaksin Shinawatra, who promised to deliver for ordinary Thais. But he put in place an electoral autocracy that prompted a coup and a streak of violent unrest.

South Africa -- two decades after the end of apartheid -- also needs to deliver better for the disadvantaged if it hopes to avoid rising discontent and unrest. Though many South Africans expected fundamental socioeconomic change to follow from their revolution, poverty and inequality remain entrenched. Today, the black share of total earned income, at 13 percent, is slightly less than it was two decades ago.

Achieving both macroeconomic stability and inclusive growth is usually a tough feat for a new democratic leader. Expectations are high; people are impatient. So identifying reforms that can immediately improve people's lives without deepening unsustainable economic policies in the longer term is critical. The specific policy options available in any country are always context-specific. What worked in Poland probably won't work in Nigeria. But a few banner headlines seem to apply:

·        Restructuring and in some cases expanding the social safety net not only improves the lives of the poor, it makes them more supportive of the new government.

·        Redirecting social spending that has been captured by special interest groups can be a tangible accomplishment. In this vein, one important but politically difficult step is the elimination of expensive and inefficient subsidies, such as those for fuel, that impose significant costs on government budgets and distort investment incentives and economic growth. Such subsidies should be replaced by targeted cash transfers to those hurt the most by rising prices.

·        Cash transfers can also play a vital role in creating shared opportunity by enabling struggling families to invest in health and education-simultaneously cushioning the hardships of the present and laying the foundation for future economic prosperity by developing human capital.

International actors have an important role. They should support the economic policies of domestic reformers through development grants and loans, sovereign loan guarantees, and debt forgiveness. Strategic outside economic help can create important fiscal space for governments to deliver on the demands of the new, democratic social contract.

5.     Double Down on Rule of Law. (堅持依法意治理)

Should I believe in this new government, or not? That is the question confronting someone in a new and often shaky democracy. To answer that question, a new democracy needs to show its citizens that it can protect their core rights and establish fair economic and political rules. It's not rocket science: If people believe that legal systems and public institutions work for them, rather than against them, it gives them a stake in the system and a greater willingness to tolerate the inevitable turbulence of a transition. An effective, transparent, and predictable legal system also prevents well-connected insiders from amassing wealth and public assets through shady backroom deals.

Contrast the experience of Poland with Ukraine. Poland today is a paragon of inclusive democracy and a market economy built from the ashes of an oppressive state. Its success can in part be attributed to the fact that structural economic reforms, particularly the privatization of state-owned assets, occurred only after policymakers had put in place a legal system that leveled the playing field and established strong safeguards against corruption. In contrast, Ukraine has failed spectacularly to establish a fair and impartial legal system, building an arbitrary one instead. Without equality before the law, predictability in legal enforcement, or any meaningful mechanisms of transparency, the vast majority of Ukraine's newly privatized wealth ended up in the hands of oligarchs by the late 1990s.

Arguably, one of the most important things that transitioning countries like Libya and Burma can do today is implement strong rule of law reforms, especially those that can be implemented in the near term and are hard to unwind. The establishment of transparent auctions to privatize public assets is critical. So too is the reform of laws constraining civil society organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). (This is why Egypt's new, even more repressive NGO law, is so worrying.) Building the capacity of the judiciary, parliaments, and civil society to implement rule of law reforms takes time, but these are investment well made. The good news is that the spread of information technology today allows average citizens to play a bigger role in combating corruption and bolstering the law through the public dissemination of revenues, expenditures, important social and economic statistics, and the disclosure of the income and assets of public officials.

6.     Spread Out the Power. (分享權力)

Spreading power out to local regions has strong benefits. It helps dilute the dangerous concentration of central authority often inherited from authoritarian regimes; it also increases accountability by bringing administration closer to the people. 

Indonesia's democracy has benefited from devolution of power. Though a decentralized system seems an obvious fit for the vast and diverse archipelago of Indonesia, Jakarta-based elites long resisted giving up any control. The chaotic political and economic environment of the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, led them to grudgingly accept greater devolution as a way of maintaining national unity in the face of growing separatist demands. The move brought clear benefits: separatist agitation diminished as local and regional governments gained authority, budget transparency increased, and policies improved as competition at regional and local levels for investment grew.

Spreading out power also had a positive impact in Poland. After the failed economic and political centralization of the communist government, Poland's early reformers made a priority of establishing local self-governance. By the late 1990s a series of reforms gave local communities control over almost half of Poland's budget. 

Decentralization of power of course is not a panacea. It requires effective local governance structures, and it can be risky in situations where centrifugal forces threaten the stability of the state. But it can also blunt violent separatist movements. Transitioning countries should therefore decentralize thoughtfully, in ways that help deepen and sustain democratization. For countries like Libya, Mali, and Burma, each facing disaffected populations, addressing regional needs must top the list of their priorities. Foreign governments, multilateral organizations, NGOs, and others seeking to strengthen democracy can support decentralization by providing technical assistance, nurturing partnerships and building capacity at local levels through community-driven development initiatives.

7.     Lean on Good Neighbors and Compensate for Bad Ones. (重視鄰國與盟邦的影響)

Good neighbors can help fragile democracies succeed through tough times by providing critical economic and technical assistance and exerting constructive political pressure. Conversely, bad neighbors can undermine transitions by fostering power-grabbing and corruption -- or simply by failing to provide support for democratic consolidation. Neighborhoods are not merely geographic, although shared borders are an important element of interdependence between countries. Neighborhoods are also economic communities, such as the European Union; political-military alliances, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and cultural groups based on a common heritage. Neighbors exert a powerful force on the trajectory of countries with which they share interests and destinies. 

In Poland, Indonesia, and Mexico, positive neighborhood influences provided important leverage for internal reformers intent on challenging entrenched interests and proved a powerful bulwark against backsliding. In Ukraine, on the other hand, Russia has been a destructive influence, fostering corruption and shady dealing in the vast energy sector. 

Given the importance of good neighbors, foreign governments and international and regional organizations must strive to compensate for bad ones. The multilateral development banks have a strong role to play. Their existing relationships, deep pockets, and strong expertise should be mobilized to give domestic democratic reformers support in economic restructuring and investing for inclusive growth. Regional organizations such as the Economic Community of West African States and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations could also play a more robust role in bolstering democratic transitions, as the European Union did for Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union crumbled. 

Economic and political "neighbors" can wield two influential instruments to support domestic reformers in their difficult work of building democracies: conditionality and technical assistance. Good neighbors can also provide technical assistance and facilitate knowledge sharing to help build the capacity and expertise of government bureaucracies, the judiciary, civil society, and other important actors.

* * *

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for the difficult challenge of transforming oppressive states into free and open societies. History has made fools of those who believed that they could determine the fate of nations by following a playbook. But these insights can serve as valuable guideposts on the long and difficult road to democratic consolidation.

Isobel Coleman is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and director of CFR's Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy program. Terra Lawson-Remer is a CFR fellow in that program. Both are co-authors of Pathways to Freedom: Political and Economic Lessons from Democratic Transitions.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/18/a_users_guide_to_democratic_transitions