James L. Payne: The Prospects for Democracy in High-Violence Societies

What does it take to implant democracy in a foreign land? For more than a century now, the United States has been sending troops into troubled countries, holding elections, and hoping democracy will take root. The results, overall, have been disappointing.

The results of one of the first efforts, the 1898 intervention in Cuba, are typical. Following the Spanish-American War, the United States administered Cuba for four years, turning power over to an elected Cuban president in 1902. A violent revolution forced him from office, and U.S. troops came back in 1906. After more reforms and new elections, the United States again turned power over to the Cubans in 1909. More instability ensued, including another violent revolt. The U.S. Marines came back yet a third time in 1917, restored order, held elections again, then withdrew in 1922. Since that time, Cuba has endured a succession of unstable and autocratic regimes, most recently Fidel Castro’s totalitarian dictatorship.

Recent nation-building efforts—in Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iraq—seem to indicate that our understanding has not progressed since the days of the Cuban intervention. The problem is not that we have the wrong theory about nation building. A bad theory can be corrected and improved. The problem is that U.S. policymakers do not have any theory. They dogmatically assume that wherever U.S. troops end up as a result of this or that foreign-policy initiative, democracy can be made to flourish.

Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky expresses this mindset: “One should not make the mistake of believing that there is anything inherent in Islam, or any other faith or culture, that will prevent the emergence of democracy” (2004, 76, emphasis added).

Perhaps Dobriansky is correct in saying that Islam does not preclude democracy, but her sweeping insistence that there can be no possible cultural barriers to democracy—anywhere, anytime—flies in the face of the U.S. experience. Common sense suggests that there are bound to be countries in which democracy cannot be made to succeed, at least not within any reasonable time. We might save ourselves frustration and guide policy more intelligently if we began to understand what the limits to democracy are.

Democracy’s Minimum Requirement

Although the nation builders have casually assumed that democracy can be established anywhere, the scholars have gone to the opposite extreme. For them, democracy is a delicate flower that requires a host of social and institutional prerequisites. Over the years, they have compiled a long list of requirements. One scholar suggests that democracy requires a populace endowed with nine psychological traits, among which are tolerance, realism, flexibility, and objectivity, and, further, that the country must have economic well-being, economic equality, and an educated citizenry (Cohen 1971). Another political scientist names seven conditions necessary for democracy, including “a strong concern for the mass of people” and “high social mobility” (De Grazia 1952, 546–47). Two other scholars claim that democracy rests on seven basic beliefs, including “respect for individual personality,” “belief in rationality,” and “equality of opportunity” (Corry and Abraham 1958, 29, 33, 35).

Such comprehensive lists overshoot the mark greatly, however. They represent an effort to describe the perfect context for democracy—or, indeed, the perfect context for the perfect democracy. They are thus largely irrelevant to the task of understanding real-world democracy, which is always compromised and flawed. Instead of pointing to all the desirable features, we need to focus on the bare minimum needed for even an imperfect democracy to exist.

What is that minimum? I would put it this way: a restraint in the use of violence in domestic political affairs. In a functioning democracy, we tend to take this condition for granted. We assume that opposition leaders do not routinely take up arms to try to shoot their way into power. We assume that presidents do not routinely jail and murder their critics and opponents. In many foreign lands, however, this assumption about peaceful participants is not satisfied. Many people are disposed to resort to violence in political disputes. They are willing to kill—and to risk being killed—to counter a perceived wrong or to implement what they believe to be right or just to get themselves into power. These places are “high-violence” societies, and in them democracy cannot thrive.

A good picture of a high-violence society is this description of the Haiti of the early part of the twentieth century, before the United States occupied the country in 1915: “No man in those times ventured on the public roads for fear of being drafted in a revolutionary or, perhaps worse, a governmental army. They stayed in their hills, and all marketing to the towns was done by the women. Numbers were killed in each revolution, towns looted and sections burned, and no life was safe and no justice existed once the government in power marked a man as its enemy and could lay hands upon him” (Davis 1929, 266).

Haiti is another example of failed U.S. nation building, by the way. After spending eighteen years fighting local terrorists and trying to administer the country, U.S. forces left in 1934. Since that time, the country has suffered the dictatorship of the Duvaliers, father and son, and more waves of political violence, prompting another U.S. intervention from 1994 to 2000 and yet another in 2004.

To say that a high-violence society cannot support democracy does not mean that a democracy requires perfect domestic peace. It can survive violence if the violence is independent of the political elite. There is an enormous difference, which observers usually ignore, between an assassination carried out by a lone killer and one planned by political leaders and condoned by a large segment of the public. The former has no more political significance than a fatal automobile accident. The latter—which I call a “political murder”—sets the stage for a civil war or a dictatorial crackdown.1 It is not the assassination, riot, or terrorism that identifies a high-violence society. Rather, the distinguishing mark is some leaders’ deliberate use of these acts of violence as tools in their struggle against others.2 Leaders who employ such acts are not repudiated; their followers excuse their bloody deeds as necessary, understandable tactics.

Democrats Refuse to Fight for Democracy

The idea that nations differ in the disposition to resort to political violence takes some getting used to. For one thing, it seems politically incorrect these days to suggest that one group of people may differ significantly from another. However, we are not speaking of a biological or genetic difference. The inclination to resort to violence is a cultural orientation. It is transmitted from one generation to another, and, as the historical record shows, it can be unlearned.

We resist the notion that some cultures are more politically violent than others for another reason, too: we assume that motives completely explain violence. At least since the time of John Locke, we have been taught to interpret violence as the understandable response to an “intolerable” situation. The American Revolution is a classic example. The cause of this violence is supposed to have been the colonists’ justified anger at King George’s “long train of abuses and usurpations.” Using the same logic, we say that if people are revolting in this or that foreign land, they have a strong reason to do so: they are hungry, or they are a disparaged minority, or they are fanatics who want to impose their religion or ideology.

Of course, motives, ideals, and ideologies do play a role in political violence. No one takes up the sword for no reason. Possible motives for violence always exist in every country. People everywhere resent certain injustices and abuses, and some always embrace extreme worldviews and ideologies. What we overlook, however, is that in some cultures, participants readily respond violently to their grievances, whereas in more peaceful cultures the same grievances do not produce a violent reaction.

For example, a common complaint of those who start civil wars is that they have been the victims of an unfair electoral process, that they were “cheated” out of their rightful victory. At first glance, this grievance seems an adequate motive for a revolt. A closer look reveals, however, that elections in democracies frequently involve serious errors and ambiguities, irregularities that the losers believe robbed them of victory. Yet they do not turn to violence. George W. Bush’s election in 2000 is an example. Besides giving rise to claims of ballot irregularities in Florida, this election violated a core principle of democracy: the candidate who obtained the most popular votes nationwide was denied victory (by the Electoral College arrangement). Many Democratic Party leaders were—and still are—angry about that election, but they did not resort to force to retaliate.

The point is profoundly paradoxical: in an established democracy, participants do not take up arms to protest even a transgression of democratic principles, such as (real or imagined) electoral fraud. The hallmark of these societies is a relatively low disposition to resort to political violence for any reason. In a high-violence society, in contrast, all sorts of complaints, even apparently trivial ones, seem to provoke a violent reaction.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

Also impeding our ability to recognize a high-violence society is our inclination to take sides in foreign political disputes: one political group is the gang of thugs, and almost everyone else is peaceful. Unfortunately, we tend to perceive all politics everywhere in these terms. We see a dictator using force to repress and persecute his opponents, so we naturally condemn him, but then, as part of the psychological mechanism of taking sides, we further assume that his opponents are blameless. Although this assumed condition may be the case, our impulse to look for “good guys” in many Third World situations leads us to overlook the fact that many or most of the other participants in those situations are also violent and thuggish by democratic standards.

Iraq affords a good illustration of this process of distortion. Saddam Hussein was certainly a nasty dictator who engaged in every sort of violence, from murdering rivals and massacring minority groups to invading neighboring countries. In the process of taking sides against him, however, many observers supposed that he alone was responsible for the violence in Iraq. Thus, they saw all the other participants—Shiites, Kurds, and so forth—as blameless and peaceful. From this perspective, simply removing Saddam would result in a stable, peaceful regime. Unfortunately, this assumption was, and is, wrong. Iraq is a high-violence society, a place where many people are disposed to act in thuggish ways, and their violence makes a democracy untenable.

It is understandable that we should condemn a foreign dictator’s violence, but our disapproval should not lead us to assume that the ruler is the only one in that society disposed to use force.

The Evolution Away from Force

How does a high-violence society get to be that way? Although this question is a natural one to ask, it betrays a misunderstanding. It suggests that a violent politics is a variable condition, like an illness that can be contracted, got over, and then contracted again. If we study the political history of different cultures, however, we will not see such an up-and-down pattern. Instead, we will find that all countries seem to begin as high-violence societies and then evolve away from this pattern. Many years ago countries such as England, France, Italy, and Norway were characterized by an extremely violent politics. For example, the regime of Henry VIII in England (1509–47) was as violent and as vicious as any modern dictatorship. Henry murdered not just inconvenient wives, but scores of noblemen as well as loyal aids, advisors, and even children. Nor was he the only one who lived by the sword in those days. He faced revolts in Lincolnshire, Scotland, Ireland, and Yorkshire. The Yorkshire revolt was put down with the aid of a promise of amnesty, which Henry subsequently betrayed, ordering his henchmen to perform “dreadful execution” on “the inhabitants of every town, village, and hamlet that have offended” (Henry’s edict qtd. in Durant 1957, 566–67). Today we call this kind of action genocide; in the old days, it was politics as usual.

Hence, a high-violence society does not get that way because of any particular cause or condition. It is better understood as a society mired in the past, a society that has failed to make the transition away from primitive, counterproductive modes of interaction. With regard to political violence, Iraq in the early twenty-first century is almost exactly what England was in the mid–fifteenth century. The question we need to ask, then, is not “What went wrong with Iraq?” Instead, it is “What went right with England—and the other areas that evolved away from the violent politics of an earlier time?”

The latter question is not a simple one to answer. Both historians and political scientists have all but ignored the topic of political violence, and as a result we have little knowledge about how and why a society evolves away from a violent politics. The best I can do at this point is to offer some preliminary observations....