The Power and the Money

Mexico’s democracy is already in bad shape

I am on record as being relatively unworried about the AMLO administration. That is not because I do not think that President López Obrador will make capricious and counterproductive decisions. Rather, it is because I do not think that he will do major damage to Mexico’s institutions. And the reason I do not believe that he will do damage is because Mexico’s governing institutions are already in rather bad shape. It is hard to wreck a car that is already totaled. 

Consider Hungary and Poland. The Hungarian prime minister has been assaulting democracy and the rule of law in his country for almost a decade now. The country’s liberal democracy rating (measured by the Varieties of Democracy project) has declined from around 0.7 (on a scale of 0-1) in 2010 to 0.5 today.

The Polish ruling party has been weakening its country’s institutions for rather less time but with similar success: its rating has crashed from 0.8 in 2015 to 0.6 today. 

But both countries still rank above Mexico, which has hovered around 0.5 since 2000. That is to say, despite a multi-year and sustained assault, the quality of democracy in Hungary and Poland is still no worse than in Mexico.

To make another comparison, in South America only Ecuador and Venezuela rank below Mexico. (Bolivia falls inside the error bars.) Peru, Paraguay, all the same or better.  

Now, that is not to say that democracy and the rule-of-law cannot get worse. They certainly can. But that will not happen because AMLO built a political machine or engaged in populist politics. To get worse than Mexico’s current level AMLO will have to openly assault democratic institutions, in the style of Turkey or Venezuela.

That could happen, but there is no evidence of it yet, not even with the fraudulent electoral consultations or the idiotic cut in top bureaucratic salaries. When it happens, if it happens, you will be able to see it happening ... because Mexico is already on the bottom edge of what you see in normal countries.

Dictatorship rising

In 2011, John Quiggin hypothesized that we were on the verge of eliminating old fashioned tyranny, “in the historical sense of absolute rule by an individual who has seized power, rather than acquiring it by inheritance or election.” 

I can understand his optimism. In the below photo, I am standing atop an abandoned monument to the absolute dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in Albania. There are a lot of former dictatorships in the world.  

But ...

In 2011, in response to a post by John Quiggin, Doug Muir pointed out that there were still quite a few dictatorships left. We defined dictators as (1) a solitary leader, who (2) wields tremendous personal power, and (3) rules in a generally illiberal manner, and (4) will not leave office or surrender power unless compelled by force majeure, and (5) is not a traditional monarch. So we do not include Arab monarchies (like Saudi Arabia), collective one-party states (like Vietnam), illiberal democracies (like Hungary), elected governments formally limited by unelected bodies (like Iran), or military juntas (of which there seem to be none at this moment.) 

Still, back in 2011, you could see a pattern. The New World was free of dictators outside Cuba. Every other dictatorship other than Syria was either in post-colonial Africa or the post-imperial Soviet space. And the Syrian dictatorship, many thought, was not going to be with us for much longer. 

Another but ...

Today that pattern no long exists. Dictatorship is everywhere. Consider the countries that were dictatorships in 2011 and are still dictatorships in 2018: Angola, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chad, Congo Republic, D.R. Congo, Cuba, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.

The only two three countries to leave are Gambia, Zimbabwe and South Sudan ... the latter by dint of falling into prolonged civil war. (In comments, J.H. pointed out that Gambia is no longer a dictatorship.)

What about newcomers? Well, we have Fiji, Maldives, Nicaragua and Tanzania, and Togo ... plus Egypt, Russia, Turkey and Venezuela. It seems as though China has joined them and Honduras is making a play after the incumbent got the Supreme Court to nonsensically overrule the constitution and then blatantly stole an election. 

In total we have six small newcomers and five major ones. Only two are in sub-Saharan Africa. Two have nuclear weapons.

The world is still more peaceful than ever before. But inasmuch as you believe that said peace is due to the spread of democracy, we may have some frightening years ahead.

I would like to be wrong. Please tell me that I am wrong.

Outside the box #2 for Venezuela: An oil-for-food program?

Foreigners (including Venezuelans in el extranjero) want to find an international response to Venezuela’s descent into dictatorship that won’t kill children. We aren’t yet in a situation where inaction will lead to the deaths of even more children. Which means that a lot of people want to find something new. 

Julian Adams has such a suggestion: imposing an oil-for-food program on Venezuela. Under Oil-for-Food, created in 1995, the the U.N. permitted Iraqi oil exports under its control. Payments for Iraqi oil went to the U.N. and could only be spent on U.N.-approved imports. The idea was to prevent the Iraqi government from being able to finance its war machine without starving the Iraqi people. In the Venezuelan case, the idea would be to prevent the Venezuelan government from distributing oil largesse to its cronies without starving the Venezuelan people.

One problem is that the U.N. is not about to impose such sanctions. Adams points out that most Venezuelan exports go to the United States and India, but he is not quite right that there is no capacity to refine Venezuelan crude elsewhere. In point of fact, Venezuela could find alternative markets, albeit at a large discount. If the regime really believed that oil-for-food threatened its control, then it would find those markets.  

Second,  Iraq managed to collect illegal surcharges on the export of its oil. These surcharges were not that large: Yujin Jeong (American) and Robert Weiner (GWU) found that they came to about 0.8% of the total value of oil exports. Iraq had to discount its oil by 11%, so the surcharges did not match the losses, but they earned Saddam Hussein an additional $91 million per year in 2000-02. The equivalent number for Venezuela would be about $135 million per year.*

But the real problem is that the Venezuelan state would continue to control the internal distribution of food and medicine. That would provide a massive source of largess to distribute. Imports could be given to middlemen and sold on the black market. That might be slightly less efficient that the current way the government redistributes its export income, but when was the Bolivarian Republic ever about efficiency?

It is a very neat idea, but I do not see how it could work. Is there something I am missing?

In Venezuela, the system worked, and the leaders did not care

 Under Hugo Chávez, the Bolivarian Republic developed an excellent election system, which made cheating impossible without detection. Under Nicolás Maduro, the Bolivarian Republic just held a ludicrously fraudulent “election.” 

One might conclude from this that the system President Chávez bequeathed was flawed. Such conclusion would be wrong. The fraud in the recent “election” has been blatant. The National Election Commission’s (CNE) own data, publicly available, showed that only 3.7 million people had voted by 5:30pm on election day. With the polls scheduled to close at 6pm, the government first ordered the CNE to stop reporting data and then held polls open to 7pm. The company that managed the electronic voting system, Smartmatic, almost immediately reported that the final counts had been tampered with. 

In other words, the Chavista voting system worked! The government could not manipulate the results without being found out. 

Of course, the fact that they have been found won’t make any difference. Venezuela is now a full-on dictatorship, ruled by Nicolás Maduro through a supine “constituent assembly” that is putatively charged with writing a new constitution but which has now assumed de jure authority over the state. (President Maduro holds the de facto power.) Another democracy has bitten the dust (at least for now) and Doug Muir has sadly won his argument that dictatorship is not dying.

Thinking outside the box on Venezuela

Boz, one of the most perceptive analysts of Latin America out there, wrote the following: 

If the only Venezuela policy options you can think of are no sanctions, targeted sanctions and oil sanctions, you lack imagination.

— boz (@bloggingsbyboz) August 4, 2017

So I thought about it! Mexico City is conducive to the imagination. And here is what I came up with, in order of reverse crazy.

(1) Blockade: I do not mean “bloqueo” the way Cubans hyperbolically refer to it. I mean a real genuine blockade, nothing in or out. That would strangle the Venezuelan economy. It would also kill small children. And be an act of war. Not a good idea.

(2) Covert action: Venezuela is a perfect target for American covert action. We have full intelligence. We have full cultural understanding. Hell, POTUS is practically venezolano! So it is certainly tempting. But it is still a bad idea. Playing with coups is dangerous, even at home. 

(3) Oil sanctions: The United States could stop buying Venezuelan oil. How much would that hurt? Badly, but not as badly as banning American exports to Venezuela. Right now, Venezuela is exporting about 1.9m bpd, expected to fall to 1.7m bpd by the end of the year. Of that, the U.S. takes about 750,000.

Venezuela produces heavy sulfurous crude. That requires specialized refineries to process it. American Gulf coast refineries are so specialized. Elsewhere, not so much: as of 2011, the United States possessed a bit more than half of all heavy-crude refining capacity. (Figure 4.) That has been changing, however, as China builds new capacity. In addition, Europe has some refineries that could process heavy crudes if need be. In other words, alternative markets exist for that 750,000 bpd.

It would cost Venezuela. First, shipping cost estimates run as high as $6 per barrel. (Page 15 and page 25.) That is around $4 more per barrel than to ship to the gulf coast. Second, foreign refineries would need to be bribed to take Venezuelan oil over its counterparts. Third, Venezuela currently imports light oil to blend with its exports in order to make them more palatable for refineries; it would have to import even more if it had to move its oil to refineries less optimized to take it. Switching to other suppliers there would cost another dollar per barrel. Call it a worst-case loss around $7 per barrel. Considering that the Venezuelan export basket fetches around $44, that is a lot. 

But it is not catastrophic. The U.S. could wreck Venezuela by imposing a ban suddenly, but that would also hurt U.S. refiners and raise oil prices at home. A phase-in would avoid that, but it would also give the Venezuelans some time to adjust. If the U.S. imposes sanctions, there will be a phase-in, so count against catastrophe. 

The awful drawback is that oil sanctions would kill children from the resulting (further) contraction in imports, since the current regime seems to have no compunctions about cutting off supplies to its enemies. And the best case is that the resulting hardship promotes either a coup (see above) or civil war. (Luckily the Russian Federation is broke; otherwise it would also result in a giant Russian naval base in the Caribbean and Tupolevs buzzing U.S. airspace from the south.) I am not a fan of this option.

(4) Criminal indictments: Not a terrible idea, but not likely to work. First, while European law is clear, American law is far fuzzier. Second, it would have the effect of making the regime dig in for fear of what might happen should they step down. And unless we are willing to do a bigger version of Operation Blue Spoon — call that Option Zero — it would not have much effect.

(5) Targeted sanctions: Already happening. Note that people are willing to pay money for power. So good luck with that. 

(6) Diplomatic isolation: A great idea, but you run into the problem of the West Indian microstates. Venezuela will not be able to keep buying them off for long, but it has done a good job of it for longer than anyone expected. This resulting diplomatic fracaso is another reason why the West Indies should become one country as of yesterday, as if more reasons were needed, but that’s unlikely to happen before my children battle robot armies in the world revolution or Skynet kills us all. 

The list shows imagination, even if the images are mostly stupid. So what else? Well, Boz suggests trying to help the Venezuelan population. I am all in favor of that. But I do not see how it would weaken the regime. Consider Africa: aid has been blamed for propping up dictatorships and prolonging civil wars. (The link is a to a paper by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian.) Still, the Nunn and Qian paper suggests that food aid has little to do with starting civil wars, which is what we want to head off in Venezuela. It also finds that the effect is more pronounced in countries with a recent history of civil war, which Venezuela does not have. (Mostly.) So it probably will not lead to war but it could prop up the dictatorship.

Is this missing anything? Help! A great American nation needs your ideas. 

The Philippines is not a democracy

Philippine democracy was always sick, but it died the day President Duterte took office. You cannot have a democracy in which the executive branch can kill people at will. Full stop.

The impetus for this observation came from the recent assassination of Mayor Reynaldo Parojinog, of Ozamiz, Mindanao. Parojinog was not a good man. He was corrupt; his family ruled through intimidation and patronage. Philippine elections have never been free from violence and coercion, let alone lesser forms of bribery. But you cannot combat impunity by impunity. All you do is move the impunity from lesser weaker patrons to the national executive. 

Right now, there are only two things to protect you from the Philippine state. One is obscurity. The other is the protection of powerful private interests. Under those conditions, democracy is dead. 

Duterte will push until he comes up against a stronger force. A full Marcos would not surprise.

Venezuela’s 1999 constitution always contained a press-here-for-dictatorship button

Francisco Toro has an excellent translation of Venezuela’s political crisis into an American context in today’s Washington Post. Read it!

It does have one flaw, however, which is that it intimates that the 1999 constitution prohibits Maduro from trashing the constitution. That’s not quite right.

Part of Toro’s translation of Venezuelan events to an American context runs as follows:

President [Trump] is not out of the woods yet. He’s still massively unpopular, protests rock the streets of Washington every day,and he still has to face the voters in November 2020. Realizing he can’t win — his approval rating hovers around 20 percent — he opts for a radical course of action: He invokes Article V of the Constitution to convene a Constitutional Convention, and signs an executive order setting out an unprecedented method for selecting members of that convention.

Article V of the constitution of the United States is pretty clear: the president has nothing to do with calling a convention. That power resides with state governments:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three-fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year 1808 shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

Articles 347 to 349 of the constitution of the Bolivarian Republic are rather less clear. In fact, if read literally, they contradict each other. First click the link and read the Spanish. Now my translation:

Article 347: The original constituent power rests with the people of Venezuela. In exercise of this power, it may call a National Constituent Assembly for the purpose of transforming the State, creating a new juridical order and drafting a new Constitution.

Article 348: A National Constituent Assembly may be called by the the President of the Republic in consultation with the Cabinet; the National Assembly via the approval of two-thirds of its members; by the county councils in open session via the vote of two-thirds of same; or by 15% of the voters inscribed in the civil and electoral registry.

Article 349: The President of the Republic shall not have the power to object to the new Constitution. The existing constituted authorities shall not be permitted to obstruct the Constituent Assembly in any way. Once the new Constitution is promulgated, it shall be published in the Official Gazette of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela or in the Gazette of the National Constituent Assembly

Some lawyers claim that Article 347 implies that a referendum is needed in order to call a constitutional convention. Maybe it does, but it sure doesn’t say that. And the next article, Article 348, explicitly says that the President can call up a constitutional convention by his or her very own lonesome, limited only by the cabinet.

It seems like old Hugo Chávez knew what he was doing back in 1999 by including a reset button in his constitution. I have no idea when or if he might have thought it would be needed, but it was there. Press here for dictatorship, indeed. 

Economic growth is not weakening the North Korean dictatorship

The New York Times recently published an interesting article with a weird headline: “As Markets Spring Up, Leader’s Grip on North Korea Slackens.”

Apparently somebody noticed that the substance of the article showed no such slackening of the leader’s grip on the DPRK, since the on-line headline has been changed to “As Economy Grows, North Korea’s Grip on Society Is Tested.” 

The article shows an increase in market activity and corruption, but shows zero sign of less state power. In fact, most of its evidence comes from one person who had to flee, which undercuts the message in the print headline. 

It is (probably) true that high Stalinist totalitarianism cannot survive economic growth and the introduction of private markets.

But Italian fascist totalitarianism did just fine in a wealthy market society ... and one made up of Italians, not exactly a culture wedded to obediance to authority. Saudi totalitarianism does just fine today. And if we step back from totalitarianism to simple authoritarianism, it becomes even clearer that dictatorial societies have no problem surviving market forces, even in the age of the internet. There is the People’s Republic of China, but also the Russian Federation, its little Belarussian brother, the regime in Gabon. I do not know whether the Islamic Republic of Iran should be considered authoritarian or totalitarian, but either way it does not seem to be losing its grip on power. 

Here is a picture of modern totalitarianism, Jeddah circa 2007:

Looks pretty nice, no? Jeddah circa 2007 had markets, a large middle class, and a great deal of immigration. It also had the Internet. At the time, wireless service was better than in the United States. But it was thoroughly totalitarian, as the badge around my neck might indicate. The grip of the Saudi state was not to be challenged.

A prosperous but dictatorial DPRK will not look like Saudi Arabia. It might not even be totalitarian; something more like China or Russia is likely. But there is no reason to think that economic growth or modern communications will by themselves make it any more free. In fact, the modern panopticon, manned by artificial intelligences in addition to human surveillors and wedded to an elite enriched by its control over old-fashioned real estate could create a dictatorship of a power unimagined in the 20th century. 

So, please, cut it out with the Whiggian optimism. Especially an American newspaper in the age of President Trump. 

Venezuela is not having a coup, but who cares, because it already had a coup

What little was left of Venezuelan democracy died when the Supreme Tribunal usurped legislative authority back in March, even if it later reversed parts of its decision. 

But the Maduro regime keeps insulting what remains of democracy in Venezuela. On May Day, President Maduro called for a convention to write a new constitution. He did not do that because the current one grants him insufficient power. Partisan control of a supreme court unbound by any norms has shown that the existing document basically lets him do whatever he wants to do. 

Rather, the reasons are subtler. I will get to them at the end. But first, is his call itself unconstitutional?

One response might be, who cares? The government does not consider itself bound by the constitutional anymore. That said, the government runs a risk in violating the Magna Carta too blatantly. So the question is worth asking. After all, many have claimed that Article 347 of the current constitution bans the President from calling for such a convention. (Here is an English version of the constitution.) 

For what it is worth, President Maduro is acting within his powers, as unreasonable as it may be to grant the President the unilateral power to call a constitutional convention.

Here are articles 347 and 348: 

Article 347: The original constituent power rests with the people of Venezuela. This power may be exercised by calling a National Constituent Assembly for the purpose of transforming the state, creating a new juridical order and drawing up a new Constitution.

Article 348: The initiative for calling a National Constituent Assembly may emanate from the President of the Republic sitting with the Cabinet of Ministers; from the National Assembly, by a two-thirds vote of its members; from the Municipal Councils in open session, by a two-thirds vote of their members; or from 15% of the voters registered with the Civil and Electoral Registry.

Most observers are yelling about Article 347, claiming that Maduro needs a referendum to call a constitutional convention. But that is not what the article says. What the article says is that the people will have to elect a constitutional convention. Article 348 pretty clearly gives him the power to call one whenever he wants. (Weirdly, the version of the Bolivarian constitution on the Georgetown website changes the “or” in Article 348 to an “and,” which would in fact make it much harder to call a convention. But I assume that Hugo Chávez knew what he was doing when he wrote the thing back in 1999.

But don’t worry. Maduro still may manage to violate Article 347 in his decree. (Text of the decree is here.) Consider the second article of the decree calling for the convention:

Article 2: The members of the National Constituent Assembly will be elected on a sectoral and territorial basis, under the supervision of the National Electoral Council and by universal, direct and secret suffrage.

We have as yet no idea what he means by “sectoral and territorial.” But the indications are that representation will be rather less than proportional. The link, from the Ministry of Information, says that half the representatives will be elected “from the working class, the missions, the peasants, the social movements.” In addition, “the elderly, the youth, the workers, the indigenous, and others will have a directly selected representative.”

That sounds like a lot less than one person-one vote. And then there are the territorial representatives. Presumably the districts will be of equal size, but who the hell knows?

Anyway, it does not matter. Maduro will say that whatever system he chooses does not violate Article 347, since the wording is vague and who is anyone to say how the power of the people is to be exercised? 

Which brings us back to the question of what it is that Maduro intends to accomplish. Well, it seems pretty clear:

1. Divide the opposition by luring parts into negotiations about irrelevant issues;
2. Call elections under rules that might allow the Socialist Party to win without blatant fraud;
3. Use the new constitution to retroactively legitimize the games of the past few months, which is what Chávez managed to do back in 1999.

The risk? Well, Francisco Toro called it: each step of the process will provide a focal point for the opposition. Each one could get violent and snowball into mass revolt. 

The stakes keep getting higher. I was wrong in 2013. To my partial credit, I began to see disaster coming by February 2014, but I was still wrong four years ago. Civil unrest is here and explosive violence is starting to seem inevitable. 

I wish I had been right. Is there any chance that the constitutional hail Mary can avoid a confrontation? 

Hoisted from the archives: Cracks in the Maduro machine

I wrote this on April 4th and then forgot about it. I am now exhuming it for those who are interested.

Short version of recent Venezuelan events:

1. The Supreme Tribunal, packed with regime loyalists, invalidates every legislative action.
2. For reasons unclear, the Tribunal goes further and abolishes the legislature.
3. The Tribunal reverses action (2), but makes it clear that it will continue to hamstring the legislature.

Longer version:

1. In December 2015, the opposition wins the legislative elections; they get 112 out of 167, for a two-thirds supermajority.
2. Candidates of the ruling party from opposition-controlled Amazonas sue over an alleged tape of someone in the state government offering money for votes. The Supreme Tribunal annuls the election of three opposition deputies. This decision is of questionable constitutionality, but I am an American in the age of Bush v. Gore and probably should not throw stones. I invite Canadian readers to do so in comments. 
3. The opposition says “screw you”  to the Tribunal. That was stupid.
4. The Tribunal holds the legislature in contempt of court and invalidates all its actions. The deputies in question resign, but the legislature refuses to approve a formal agreement stripping them of their offices. 
5. The Tribunal, unilaterally, not as the result of a case, issues two very strange decrees (155 and 156, no longer on their website, but partially translated below):
   1. It is ordered that the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in accordance with Article 337 and Decree no. 113 of March 20, 2017, among others, shall take such international measures as he deems appropriate and necessary to safeguard the constitutional order, as well governability fo the country, as well as, in the exercise of its constitutional powers, take such civil, economic, military, criminal, administrative, political, juridical and social actions as it deems appropriate and necessary to avoid unrest, and in the context of the state of emergency and in the face of contempt and continued legislative inaction by the National Assembly, exceptionally revise all substantive and secondary legislation ...
   2. ... this Constitutional Chamber resolves that there are no impediments preventing the national executive from establishing joint ventures in the spirit of Article 33 of the Hydrocarbons Organic Act ... as long as the situation of contempt and nullification of acts by the National Assembly persists, this Constitutional Chamber will guarantee that parliamentary functions will be exercised by this Chamber or whatever body that it puts in place in order to ensure the rule of law. 
6. On March 28th, the Tribunal turns around and issues two more decrees, clarifying that legislators will not be stripped of their immunity under Decree 155 nor lose their legislative power to the Tribunal under Decree 156.

What seems to have happened is that the people within the Socialist Party thought these actions were a bridge too far and forced Maduro to walk it back. That assumes, of course, that Maduro was responsible; this easily could have been the Tribunal going off the reservation. 

Plus, Maduro keeps his authority over oil fields and other assets. Not that it matters; everything he does is still subject to being overturned by the next government. But at least he can now pretend to have the power to sign stuff should any foreign companies want to take the risk. 

North Carolina in historic and geographic perspective

Political events over the past few years in North Carolina have been quite depressing. Extreme gerrymandering diluted representation. In 2012, the Democrats won the popular vote for the federal House but lost most of the seats. In 2016, a 53% GOP margin for House votes won them 77% of seats; a 55% margin for state senate turned into 68% of the seats; in the state lower chamber, 53% of the vote got them 62% of the seats. (See here. For maps showing the power of gerrymandering in the state, see here.) 

Then, when the Republican governor lost re-election in 2016, the legislature moved to strip the Governorship of most of its power. 

But this is not unprecedented.

First, let us compare across space: Maryland is as gerrymandered as North Carolina, only in favor of Democrats. Is is true that Republicans benefit more nationally from gerrymandering (only Illinois and Maryland have a strong Democratic bias) but N.C. is not at all unique.

Second, the legislative power grab after the election is unique in the 21st century — the Maryland legislature did not try to strip Governor Hogan of his power in 2014 — but it is not unique across American history. First, consider Louisiana under Huey Long. For all the shenanigans, Governor McCrory did not move to destroy the opposition when he was in power the way Long did back in 1928-35. 

More ominously, consider Redemption in North Carolina. In the 1868 election, Republicans solidly trounced the Conservative Party. In 1870, however, the Conservatives managed to come back by effectively casting themselves as the white people’s party ... and using terror tactics by the Ku Klux Klan. Governor William Holden called out the militia to fight the KKK, but the Conservative nonetheless won the legislative elections. They first moved to prevent legislators from being seated from districts where the state militia arrested KKK terrorists. They then impeached Governor Holden. In 1876, the Conservative Party renamed itself the Democratic Party, becoming part of the national Democratic coalition. It took them until 1898 to fully disenfranchise the black population. (See also here.)

By those standards, North Carolina has so far been quite civilized. No riots, no extrajudicial killings or warrantless arrests, no declarations of martial law, and the courts have reined in the lame duck power grab and may reverse the gerrymander. Vigilance is warranted. Protest is warranted. And political mobilization is needed. But worse things have happened and worse has been overcome. 

Wagging the Dog: Lessons from France and Gabon

In 2011, France was wracked by corruption scandals in which African leaders, from Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon in particular, passed off millions of dollars in cash to the Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin. It was the flip side an earlier scandal in which the French national oil company, then called Elf Aquitaine, funneled millions of dollars per year into the coffers of Gabonese leaders. The African tail had begun to wag the French dog; some politicians called it “reverse colonization.”

And now it looks like something similar could happen under President Trump. Consider our own former colony in the Philippines. President Rodrigo Duterte has appointed Jose E.B. Antonio to be Manila’s special representative to the United States. Antonio also happens to be the CEO of Century Properties Group, which is building the Trump Tower Manila and paid the organization around $5 million for the privilege of using the Trump name. More payments are due: one Trump deal in Puerto Rico involved a 12.5% share of profits plus a 4% slice of operating revenues in addition to the up-front fee. 

What happened in France was illegal. What is happening in America appears to be legal: the payments from the Philippines are not coming directly from the government.

But what happened in France had tangible effects on Africa. France continued to prop up the execrable Bongo dynasty well past its sell-by date. In 2008, for example, the French government shut down an investigation into the provenance of Omar Bongo’s Parisian real estate portfolio. In 2010, the American embassy in Cameroon reported that the Gabonese government embezzled funds from the Banque des Etats de l’Afrique Centrale — that is to say, one of the two central banks serving French West Africa — and used them to support President Nicolas Sarkozy. When Bongo’s son, Ali, won the 2016 election with a razor-thin (and clearly fraudulent) margin the country erupted into riots. Ironically, the 2011 corruption scandal made France reluctant to pressure Gabon with anything stronger than mild language: not because Gabonese oil is so important, and not because Hollande received Gabonese money, but because the public scandal itself made any French actions in Gabon appear to be a continuation of the illicit ties between the two nations. 

Right now, a legal battle between President Bongo and his sister is bringing some of the looting to light and the European Parliament threatened sanctions on February 2nd. But Bongo is still there and Gabon is looking far more fragile than an oil-rich coastal statelet of 1.5 million people has any right to be. 

So now in the Philippines you have Duterte running death squads and cozying up to China. Maybe no U.S. president would have been able to do much about the former (and the latter likely deserves no response). But President Trump is not even going to try. And maybe he would not have tried no matter what. But the stench of corruption lies about it. Françafrique, meet Philamerica.

And worse yet, there are other, even more depressing places involved. Wagging the dog, indeed.

A new dictatorship?

 Back in 2011 (it feels like ten years ago, not five) my co-blogger, Doug Muir, published a list of old-fashioned personalized dictatorships. To be clear, these were not merely authoritarian governments: rather, they were non-monarchies where power was centralized in one despotic individual. Three years later, in 2014, I was shocked to find that the respected Polity database had downgraded Venezuela to a dictatorship. While the country was clearly sliding down the democracy league tables, little had happened to merit a fall into open authoritarianism. The opposition legislative victory in 2015 proved me correct. Finally, in 2015, Doug revisited his list of dictatorships. The big change was Russia, although he worried about where the Bolivarian Republic was heading.

There is now growing evidence that Venezuela may has finally have tipped over into dictatorship.

On October 17th, in a decision that was hard to find and gave me a headache to read, the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice altered the procedure for approving a recall petition. Short version: the National Electoral Council decided that the opposition would have to get 20% of the voters in each and every state rather than 20% of the voters across the nation. Considering as opposition is not evenly spread across the country, this would make a recall impossible.

When there was a recall petition in 2004 the signatures were gathered across the country. Article 72 of the Constitution says only that the signatures must be gathered in the “corresponding district,” which logically is the entire country for a presidential election.

But the Tribunal decided, in effect, that since the Constitution does not say that the Electoral Council cannot require signatures by state, then it is fine to require signatures by state. At least I think that is what they decided. Seriously, it gave me a headache.

That decision would have been bad enough, but then a bunch of Socialist governors declared that the opposition was gathering fraudulent signatures in their states. (The governors were Tareck El Aissami of Aragua, Francisco Ameliach of Carabobo, Francisco Rangel Gómez of Bolívar, and Ramón Carrizales of Apure.)The National Electoral Council then suspended the signature drive. Poof, end of referendum.

This comes on top of another Supreme Tribunal decision giving the President the unilateral authority to approve the budget. 

I think that this qualifies Venezuela for straight-up dictatorship.

Thoughts? 

Democracy is bad for capitalism?

 The answer is no, not really. But it is interesting that democracies show no sign of the Marxist definition of exploitation, whereas non-democracies do. 

In need a new tag for posts like this one.

Dictators, revisited

 Four years ago this week, I had a debate with John Quiggin over at Crooked Timber. Briefly, he said that dictatorship was on the way out as a form of government. I sharply disagreed. Four years seems like a reasonable amount of time to circle back and ground-truth.

Here is the original post. Take a moment to click through, so that we’re all agreed on definitions. Good? Okay, then: Who are the world’s remaining dictators, and have their numbers changed since 2011? The 2011 list is below, with original comments in italics and 2015 updates in parentheses.

Angola: Dos Santos has been the President nonstop since 1979. There are significant limits on his power, but IMO he qualifies. (Dos Santos celebrated 35 years in power last year. NO CHANGE.)

Azerbaijan (NO CHANGE)

Belarus (NO CHANGE)

Cambodia: Hun Sen, a bland and retiring little man, has ruled unchallenged since the middle 1980s. (He rules still. NO CHANGE.)

Cameroon: Paul Biya since 1982. The country has kept the trappings of a democratic republic, including opposition parties, but Biya is in charge and he’s not going anywhere. (He hasn’t gone anywhere. NO CHANGE.)

Chad (It’s still Idriss Déby. NO CHANGE.)

Congo Republic (NO CHANGE)

Congo, Democratic Republic: President Kabila, son of the late President Kabila, is likely to stay in power for the foreseeable future. He’s in a tie with Aliyev of Azerbaijan for youngest dictator — they’re both just 40. (And now they’re both 44. But otherwise, NO CHANGE.)

Cuba: Raúl, not Fidel. It’s surprising how many people think it’s still Fidel. (NO CHANGE.)

Djibouti (NO CHANGE.)

Equatorial Guinea: This is a nasty one. Doesn’t get much attention, of course. (It’s still nasty. NO CHANGE.)

Eritrea: Afewerki is another nasty one. A shame, since his rule started with really high hopes. (NO CHANGE.)

Ethiopia (Ethiopia’s long-term dictator Meles Zenawa died in 2012. However, his successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, has been governing in much the same manner — centralized one-party rule with no public opposition or criticism. In May 2015 Ethiopia held parliamentary “elections”; the ruling party won 90% of the seats and its allies took the rest.  Ethiopia’s human rights record continues to be dire, and it looks like Desalegn has settled in for the long run. NO CHANGE.) 

Kazakhstan (NO CHANGE.)

North Korea (Supreme Leader Kim died in late 2011, and was replaced by his son, Supreme Leader Kim. NO CHANGE.)

Rwanda (NO CHANGE.)

South Sudan: I’m jumping the gun here, because the country of South Sudan is just a few months old. But President Kiir has already made it pretty clear that he’s not going anywhere. (And he hasn’t. Four years later, Kiir is a post-colonial African dictator in the classic style. But the country is in the middle of a civil war, and therefore by definition not stable. So ... CHANGE.)

Sudan (NO CHANGE.)

Syria: At least for the nonce — I think Assad has a decent chance of sticking around. (And four years later he is still around. You can argue whether he’s a proper dictator, though, as he has now lost control of about half his country’s population and ¾ of its territory. I’ll give this CHANGE.)

Tajikistan (NO CHANGE.)

Turkmenistan (NO CHANGE.)

Uganda: To nobody’s surprise, President Museveni won a fourth term a few months ago. (And he’ll likely win a fifth next year. NO CHANGE.)

Uzbekistan (NO CHANGE.)

Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe, still hanging in there at age 87, has been the world’s oldest dictator for a while now. (And, good grief, he’s STILL hanging in there at age 91. NO CHANGE.)

So, of 24 clear dictatorships in 2011, two have perhaps slipped out of that category — South Sudan is in the middle of a civil war, and Syria’s Assad has lost control over much of his country.

Did we overlook anything in our original list? Gambia has a good case: Yahya Jammeh came to power in a 1994 and shows no sign of leaving soon. So did Burkina Faso, but Blaise Compaoré fled at the end of 2014. Acting retroactively, that would make Burkina the third country to have left dictatorship since the original post. 

Have any new dictatorships been added? We would say yes, three. Two of these are pretty minor and one is not minor at all. The minor ones are Fiji and Togo, both of which I listed as borderline cases back in 2011. In Fiji, the Prime Minister operates within what looks like a British-style constitutional framework, but a permanent legislative supermajority, a hand-picked judiciary and an unfree press means he can basically rule at will. In Togo, President Gnassingbe has just won another “election” and looks good to stay in power indefinitely.

The not so minor one is Russia. Back in 2011 I said that Russia was authoritarian, but not a dictatorship. But in the last four years, Russia has become dramatically more illiberal, power has been ever more centralized, multiple critics and opponents of the regime have been prosecuted, imprisoned, or murdered outright, and the cult of personality around Putin has grown extreme. All of these things were just getting started in 2011, but they’ve moved very rapidly since. At this point we think it’s reasonable to call Russia a dictatorship.

We also have two new borderline cases. The small one is Burundi, where President Pierre Nkurunziza plunged his country into unrest after what looks to have been a power grab. He hasn’t established full control, however, so it’s not a dictatorship and looks unlikely to become one. The big one is Venezuela. A while back, we argued that the Polity IV database had jumped the gun by classifying the country a dictatorship. It still isn’t there yet — President Maduro does not rule by decree and he is facing contested legislative elections in December. But the trend since Chavez’s death has been sharply authoritarian. The government has banned opposition candidates, refused to permit foreign observers, and arrested opposition leaders. We hesitate to call it a dictatorship yet, however — partly because this trend is fairly recent, and partly because it is not clear how much power is really consolidated in President Maduro’s hands. The December elections should provide strong evidence one way or another.

In summary: two medium-size countries have fallen out thanks to ongoing civil wars. One small one has ousted its dictator. Meanwhile two small countries and one large important country have joined the club.

In other words, dictatorship does not seem to be on its way out as a form of government.

Dumb and dumber as the U.S. tries to overthrow the Cuban government

 Remember that dumb USAID plan to create democracy in Cuba by bringing it “Twitter-like” social media? Well, it turns out that USAID managed to be even dumber: it decided to use an HIV-prevention workshop as a front to recruit young Cubans for anti-government activities.

Yeah, you read that right. USAID, in another attempt to imitate the CIA at its silliest, decided to use an anti-HIV campaign to work against the Castro government. It is like something out of one of Vladimir Putin’s fever dreams. 

And it was carried out with typical competence. From the A.P.: 

In the HIV workshop effort, the AP’s investigation found the Latin American travelers’ efforts were fraught with incompetence and risk. The young workers nearly blew their mission to “identify potential social-change actors.” One said he got a paltry, 30-minute seminar on how to evade Cuban intelligence, and there appeared to be no safety net for the inexperienced workers if they were caught. In all, nearly a dozen Latin Americans served in the program in Cuba, for pay as low as $5.41 an hour ...

Drawing on documents and interviews worldwide, the AP found the travelers program went to extensive lengths to hide the workers’ activities. They were to communicate in code: “I have a headache” meant they suspected they were being monitored by Cuban authorities; “Your sister is ill” was an order to cut their trip short. 

To evade Cuban authorities, travelers installed innocent-looking content on their laptops to mask sensitive information. They used encrypted memory sticks to hide their files and sent obviously encrypted emails using a system that might have drawn suspicion. 

“These programs are in desperate need of adult supervision,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican.

Yes, quite. I will add that there seems to have been the same sort of contractor-capture as in the weird social-media-for-revolution case: Creative Associates International kept sending underpaid agents to Cuba even when the U.S. told them to stop after the Cubans arrested Alan Gross. 

So what have we accomplished? We have given Castro and Putin talking points, put innocent people at risk of arrest, recruited zero Cuban rebels, and discredited USAID health operations. The next time Pakistani militants go on a rampage against vaccinations, it is going to be that much harder to convince people that they are making things up.

Can we fire Rajiv Shah now?

The underpants business model as applied to democracy promotion in Cuba

For those who missed it, it appears as though USAID recently and clandestinely tried to establish a twitter-like service inside Cuba. Contractor documents reveal a CIA-like plan to start the program up with innocuous postings but later introduce political content in order to organize “smart mobs” and “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”

On the pro side, an admirable goal. The United States has long used USAID to help people self-organize against odious regimes. This happened during the Cold War, of course, and most notably the organization played a significant role in bringing down Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. But it also helped tip over Vladimir Voronin in Moldova, a role that was not at all secret even at the time.

I can’t blame USAID for wanting to give it a go in Cuba. The agency appears to have crossed the line from discreet into covert distinction, but the line is fuzzy. It is hard to operate openly in closed societies. A close personal friend has seen the torture scars on an Otpor member who was caught organized protests against Milosevic. The Castro brothers are no less oppressive. So even though the secrecy was ultimately counterproductive, I would cut the agency some slack in that respect.

But.

This plan was moronic.

You can sum it up as follows. (1) USAID money, (2) Twitter in Cuba, (3) ????, (4) Democracy!

The goal was unclear beyond “get young Cubans on social media.” There was no way to scale up. There was no exit strategy. USAID employed a sketchy contractor using an even sketchier subcontractor. There was little to no oversight within USAID or the State Department. (We appear to have trusted the contractors to stay quiet, but we did not trust our own internal watchdogs.) In the process, we managed to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars to Cuba’s state telecoms operator.

You might think that USAID would have a strong bench of people who have carried out this sort of operation. But none of them seem to have been involved. My discussions with people connected to American aid work chalk this up to a series of systemic problems with the agency. First, it has a short institutional memory: salaries are low, so the best people tend to leave for the private sector. Often they leave to become contractors with the agency ... but the contractors don’t talk to each other. Second, there is regional stovepiping: the Latin American experts don’t talk to the Eastern European ones, etcetera. Finally, there is a lot of contractor capture, and that clearly happened here: the contractor tail wagged the USAID dog.

One sad possibility is that USAID kept this ridiculous operation alive longer than it should have in order to suck up to Congressperson Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), who chaired House Foreign Affairs in the last Congress. I could sympathize with that if I thought it would actually buy the agency any credit with the Republican house majority. Sadly, I don’t. And not telling Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) about the operation? That was probably USAID head Rajiv Shah trying to be cunning. Only it was not cunning. It was stupid.

The overall impression is very Amateur Hour.

I am not impressed with Director Shah’s vision of turning USAID into a stepped-up version of the Gates Foundation, where government money leverages private financing for private ventures. Contrary to the New York Times headline, Shah’s vision is not a “switch.” Rather, it’s just more of the same outsourcing, with all the loss of oversight and knowledge transfer that outsourcing involves. I saw the result of that up-close-and-personal in Afghanistan and it was not pretty.

I have to agree with my colleagues in the aid world that Secretary Kerry should ask Obama to wait a decent interval, say six months, and then fire Director Shah. I’m sure that Shah will make a great Congressman. Maybe he’ll even make a great executive someday. But right now he should not be running this nation’s premier aid agency.

Is Venezuela a democracy?

Let me caveat the rest of this post with a reiteration of the fact that I am not a defender of the Venezuelan government. Nor should you be. Mark Weisbrot, a smart fellow, makes a bit of a fool of himself by trying. (One of our commentors makes a rather better effort, but ultimately fails.) I am on the record as thinking that the current bout of violence and repression is both the government’s fault and rather inexplicably stupid.

Had Maduro held his calm, the violence would have been minimal and passing. The fact that he did not and put gasoline on the flames comes as a surprise to me.

In short, the Venezuelan government is run by incompetents. But is it a dictatorship?

To my surprise, I discovered on Caracas Chronicles that one of the most-prominent political databases, Polity IV, says yes, the Bolivarian Republic is a dictatorship.

What is Polity IV? In the words of Anabella Abadi and Bárbara Lira it is “a project of the Center for Systemic Peace, which codifies characteristics of political regimes in order to classify them — in opposite extremes — as ‘Institutionalized Democracies’ or ‘Autocratic Regimes’. To formulate the indicator, Polity IV considers the election mechanism for the Executive Power (meaning regulations, competition and open participation); institutional constraints on the exercise of power by the Executive Power; and the degree of regulation and political competition.”

It is a good database; I have used it myself in academic work. But something seemed odd about the rapid decline in Venezuela’s polity score after the establishment of the Bolivarian Republic:

So I decided to dig into the numbers and see what was going on.

The basic polity score has two components: democracy and autocracy. The total score is determined by subtracting one from the other. In 1998, when Hugo Chávez first won election, the democracy score was 8 and the autocracy score was zero, for a total score of 8. That made it a solid democracy: France was 6 in 1958 and ranks at 9 today.

So what happened?

Well, in 1999 the score dropped by one. The fall was due to a fall in the “executive constraints” score from 6 to 5, presumably as a result of the new constitution. The highest value is 7. By definition, the index gives all parliamentary systems a value of 7, since the legislature can depose the executive. The U.S. also gets a score of 7, since the president cannot introduce legislation. A value of 5 is defined as “substantial constraints on the executive” and still falls well within democratic norms. (Page 24.)

There is a little bit of wiggle room here since a ranking of 6 on “executive constraints” is just an intermediate placeholder. In other words, the difference between 6 and 5 is not defined. But to be honest, the drop was fair: the 1999 constitution gave the president the power to dissolve the National Assembly, which is a powerful tool. (One might not consider executive constraints to be the best measure of democracy and quibble with the way parliamentary systems get the highest score, of course.)

OK, then, fall in 1999 explained. No problem.

In 2001 the score falls again by one point. This time, the fall in the was due to a fall in the “competitiveness of participation” score from 4 to 3. This variable is a little odd. The top value is 5, or “competitive.” OK, gotcha. A value of 4 is an ill-defined transitional category. A score of 3 means that “parochial or ethnic-based political factions that regularly compete for political influence in order to promote particularist agendas and favor group members to the detriment of common, secular, or cross-cutting agendas.” (Page 26.)

I am not entirely sure that I understand what that means in the Venezuelan case.

Even if I did, the fall does not have to do with the Second Enabling Act of 2001, under which the Assembly gave President Chávez temporary decree power. That should have changed the executive constraint score, not the political competitiveness score. (The law did not change the executive constraint score because the Act was constitutional; moreover the previous constitution contained a similar provision.) Anyway. the Second Enabling Act had been preceded by the First Enabling Act in 2000.

But what did happen in 2001 to cause the fall in the “competitiveness of participation”? I do not know. The drop is a bit mysterious. Not necessarily wrong, but not immediately obvious. Help?

In 2006, the executive constraint variable drops by another point. Now, one problem is that a score of 4 is still an undefined transitional category (page 24) but it seems justifiable. The Bolivarian Republic is still a point above the early years of the French Fifth Republic on the executive constraint tip, meaning that Hugo Chávez was more constrained than Charles de Gaulle.

A bigger problem is that the drop seems a little inexplicable. The Chavistas won a two-thirds majority in 2005, so the timing is off. Is it the scale of the Chavista presidential victory in ‘06? A score of 4 still involves an independent judiciary and some legislative autonomy, so it is not unreasonable, but it has a Potter Stewart feel to it.

Thus, 2006 is when Venezuela loses its status as an institutionalized democracy, but not as a democracy. Such a loss does indeed pass the Potter Stewart test, even if the timing is odd.

I am not entirely sure I understand it, but it is not unreasonable. Opinions on what happened in 2006? Right move, wrong timing?

Things fall apart in 2009, though, and that is where I get confused.

First, the summary. The polity score plunges eight points from 5 to −3. How do we get there?

1. A one-point rise the “regulation of participation” variable from 2 to 3 raises the autocracy score from 0 to 1. (Polity = 4.)
2. A one-point fall in executive constraints takes off two points by dropping the democracy score from 5 to 4 and raising the autocracy score from 1 to 2. (Polity = 2.)
3. A one-point fall in “regulation of chief executive recruitment” from 3 to 2 drops democracy from 4 to 3. (Polity = 1.)
4. A two-point fall in executive competition (to be explained) gets us the rest of the way there by dropping the democracy score from 3 to 1 and raising autocracy score from 2 to 4. (Polity = −2.)

How reasonable are these changes? From most to least:

1. The first one makes sense, even if the timing is off. A value of 2 for “regulation of participation” means that “there are relatively stable and enduring political groups which compete for political influence at the national level — parties, regional groups, or ethnic groups, not necessarily elected — but there are few, recognized overlapping (common) interests.” (Page 26.) It also implies that political parties are unstable. The new value, 3, indicates that “political demands are characterized by incompatible interests and intransigent posturing among multiple identity groups and oscillate more or less regularly between intense factionalism and government favoritism.” That sure does define Venezuela under Chavismo! I might disagree with the timing, but not the change.
2. The fall in executive constraints from 4 to 3 is still in the democratic zone, more or less, since it allows for an independent judiciary. But I am not sure that the constitutional changes approved that year justifies the drop. It seems reasonable, but once again, why 2009? There is an ad hockiness to the fall that I do not like.
3. The fall in “regulation of chief executive recruitment” does not seem reasonable. A score of 3 means that chief executives are selected by a constitutional process, democratic or not. A score of 1 means violent transition. Venezuela moved from 3 to 2 in 2009, meaning that “chief executives are chosen by designation within the political elite, without formal competition (i.e., one-party systems or ‘rigged’ multiparty elections).” (Page 21.) I do not buy that Venezuelan elections were rigged after 2009.
4. Finally, the drop in executive competition from the highest score of 3 to the lowest score of 1 means that the Polity IV index-makers believe that there was no democratic way to vote the president of the Bolivarian Republic out of office from 2009 onwards.

Really?

A skeptical analyst could argue that the one-point drop in 2001 and five of the eight-point drop in 2009 do not make sense. That would give Venezuela an overall polity score of 3. That is low. It would put the Bolivarian Republic in the same range as Gabon and Iraq, a point below the Russian Federation and Sri Lanka. It is a bad score. But a believable one.*

The putative −3, on the other hand, puts Venezuela with Ethiopia, Jordan, Burma, and Tajikistan and one point worse than Angola, Chad, Mauritania, Sudan, Togo and Singapore.

All ten of the countries in the above sentence are far less democratic than Venezuela. For all the incompetence of the Maduro government, a score of −3 does not pass the smell test.

Am I wrong?

When the facts change ... and what Assad could learn from the Zetas

It seems as though the United States has some evidence that the chemical attack in Syria was not ordered at the highest levels of the government. Rather, U.S. intelligence intercepted the following last Wednesday, August 21: “In the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people.”

Now, it would be a screw-up of unprecedented proportions for a regime to use chemical weapons by order of a low-ranking Army officer. One might imagine how it could happen in the midst of an invasion from another state, during which all sorts of authority would be pushed down the chain of command. Letting it happen during a civil war when your side is gaining the initiative and against civilians is criminal stupidity.

If correct, however, it changes my calculus regarding a punitive strike ... but only a little. Criminal stupidity deserves punishment to make sure that it does not happen again. I think. (Counterarguments welcome!)

But if lower-downs were responsible, it opens a way for the Syrian government to avoid a strike. Consider that when the Zetas accidently ambushed USDA vehicles in Tamaulipas, they released the Americans and apologized. When the Zetas idiotically shot and killed an ICE agent in San Luis Potosí, the Zetas practically handed the man responsible over to American authorities. That is, in fact, Zetas SOP for anything that might bring down the heat from either the United States or the Mexican industrial elite. (See page 5.) If your people do something stupid that could cause trouble for the organization, kill them or turn them in.

If it is true that low-level Syrian officers ordered the use of sarin without higher approval, then Assad could take a page from the Zetas’ book and turn those officers over to the International Criminal Court. It would be strongly in his interest both in terms of winning propaganda points and heading off intervention. Moreover, the ICC might refuse to take them, in which case it is win-win-win for Mr. Assad.

He won’t do the above, of course, because that would mean conceding that the Syrian state has no right to use chemical weapons despite having refused to sign any of the international conventions on the subject. He should, the weapons serve no real purpose, but he won’t.

Miguel Angel Treviño may have been a better student of the dictator’s handbook than Bashir Assad. Which is somewhat sad.

Why I am in Colombia: Spreading the word on the resource curse, or lack thereof

I am in Colombia for many reasons. One is to start a big research project. Another is because I like the country. But the main one was to attend a conference on mining put on by the Universidad de los Andes.

El Tiempo reported on the conference. Here is a translation of part of their report:

“In his presentation, Noel Maurer, a professor at Harvard Business School, said ‘there is no curse’ from the resources created by mining discoveries. For him, there is no evidence from any country where either democracy or development has severely deteriorated after an increase in income generated by mining activity.”

That is worded a little more strongly than I would like (you can find some evidence of a resource curse in Nigeria and Zambia, and it is unlikely that the 1997 crisis would have unseated Suharto at a time of high mineral prices) but it does about sum up my opinion. To be fair to El Tiempo, they added my caveat in this tweet.

Lina Holguin of Oxfam-Québec tweeted in response to my caveat, “Congo, Chad and Niger...????” I would answer by saying that while all three countries are poor and unstable, there is no evidence that they would be less poor or less unstable without natural resources ... with an additional caveat that natural resources may have increased violence in particular regions of Congo. Possibly.

El Tiempo also tweeted a few other quotes from yours truly. First: “The decrease in Venezuelan democracy started before the oil boom.” Second, a somewhat misquoted, “No resource boom has affected countries rich in resources.” (I am mildly unhappy with that one: my argument was only about democratic stability.) Third: “Colombia ought to avoid wasting the current mining boom.”

While my discussion was about democracy, that last quote is correct: lots of countries have blown resource booms, leaving them no better off than they entered. Colombia should avoid that. Of course, that is something easier said than done!

Finally, let me end by presenting the (weak) evidence for a resource curse in Zambia.The red line measures the country’s Polity score, a commonly-accepted measure of democracy. The blue line measures the government’s real direct income from the copper industry; the green line measures the percentage of government revenues from copper.

Zambia’s polity score dropped precipitously between 1968 and 1972, while copper revenues boomed. The country then democratized in 1991, after a period of prolonged low copper prices. The argument would be that copper revenues made it easier for Kaunda to establish a one-party state, while the period of low prices was essential to see the fall of that state.

The rub, of course, is that lots of countries in Africa followed the same trend around the same time. (See the below chart.) But you cannot rule out a curse for Zambia.

Not Happy To Be Right

It looks like I’ve won another bet with John Quiggin. February 2013 has come and gone, and Hafez Assad remains in power in Damascus.

If you’re interested in my analysis of the Syrian conflict — and, really, why would you be? — here’s what I wrote two months ago. Basically nothing has changed since then. Assad is still going to lose, it’s still going to take a long time, and a lot of people are going to be killed, maimed, impoverished or otherwise immiserated first.

For the record, here’s what I wrote back in August 2011: “Assad will still be in Syria, and still the leader of an internationally recognized (though very diplomatically isolated) government. It’s possible that he might be assassinated by then, but I don’t think it likely. I don’t see a blue-on-blue coup taking him out now, and I don’t think he’s anywhere close to cutting and running. Foreign military intervention is (for reasons I’ve discussed) unlikely... the regime may well have lost control of large swathes of the country. Syria will probably be increasingly violent, impoverished, and immiserated. And Assad may well be — in effect — just a powerful warlord in a country that has a number of warlords. But he’ll still be there, and will still be at least nominally the head of state. More’s the pity.”

I’ve been arguing with myself as to whether I want to re-up the bet for yet another six months. I’ve won twice now; why not go for the trifecta? Well ... in my opinion, those first two wagers (Assad will last a year beyond August 2011; Assad will last another six months beyond August 2012) were sucker bets. That first bet was something like 10-1 in my favor. I could have lost, but the odds were quite firmly on my side. The next six months... eh, the odds are still on my side. But not by as much. It’s still a good bet, but it’s no longer in the candy-from-a-baby category.

But that’s not why I’m hesitant about betting again. 2-1 is still good odds, after all. But I’m getting a little weary of betting on the loathsome dictator who is plunging his country into blood and horror. “Oh hey, another week, looks like I’m going to take some more of John Quiggin’s money” is fun. “Another week, another thousand people mangled or dead in the Syrian meat grinder” is not. Wagering on the outcome is starting to seem tasteless.

That bet grew out of a debate in August 2013 about dictators. John Quiggin thinks that dictatorship is an institution in decline, and that the number of dictators around the world is likely to decrease; I think that it’s an institution that’s in reasonably good health, and that the number of dictators around the world is likely to remain more or less stable. It’s only 18 months since we started watching this, so it’s certainly too early to declare a trend. But... in that time, the number of dictators has not changed significantly. One dictator (Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia) died of natural causes and has not yet been replaced. Zenawi was an old-fashioned charismatic revolutionary. His replacement as President is a mild-mannered figurehead, with a junta of revolutionary veterans really running things from behind the scenes. Those sorts of arrangements don’t tend to be long-term stable, so let’s see how this evolves over the next little while. Ethiopia’s an interesting place, and I could imagine a range of outcomes, from “heading for liberal democracy! hurrah!” to “more dictatorship” to chaos.

Meanwhile, though, Presidents Bongo of Gabon and Gnassingbe of Togo — two authoritarian African leaders who inherited the positions from their fathers — have both been growing steadily more dictatorial. Bongo, in particular, seems to be evolving into a classic old-fashioned African kleptocrat. I put both these guys on my “borderline” list back in August 2011. Today I’d move Bongo, at least, into the full-fledged dictator category today.

So, no net change. It’s still early days, but I have to say there’s more evidence for a “dictatorship is doing fine, thanks” hypothesis than the “dictatorship is inevitably doomed” position.

Finally, let’s note that Syria is proving a useful cautionary tale for dictators around the world. You want to tacitly tolerate those street protests, people? See where that leads! You want to end up like Syria? Guys like Lukashenka of Belarus and Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan — both of whom were visibly jumpy about the fall of Qaddafi back in August 2011, and clearly concerned that the Arab Spring might be heading their way — have visibly calmed down since then. State-controlled media in authoritarian countries around the world have been quick to depict the Syrian conflict as a plucky Assad attempting to hold the breach against terrorism, civil war, foreign intervention and chaos. At this point the Syrian conflict has turned into a small but real net positive for dictators around the world, and will continue so for a while no matter how it turns out.

Ethiopia, North Korea, and Some Half-Formed Thoughts on Dictatorship

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il died late last year. He was promptly succeeded by his twentysomething son. Some observers questioned whether the son would be able to take over and impose effective personal rule, but nearly a year has passed and he seems to be doing just fine.

Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi died last month. He hasn’t been succeeded by anyone yet. (Formally, officially, the Deputy Prime Minister has stepped up. But nobody seems to be taking him too seriously. He’s a mild-mannered guy, not a member of the revolutionary generation, and the wrong ethnicity to boot.) Zenawi was a “slash the tallest flowers” kind of guy; years of life on the run as a guerrilla in the bush seem to have rendered him permanently paranoid. Anyone who seemed too popular or too competent got demoted. At best demoted. So there’s no obvious successor.

I think the odds of Ethiopia staying a dictatorship are pretty good. It’s a country that has never known democratic rule or any sort of pluralism. Since the Emperor Haile Selassie consolidated his rule in the late 1920s, Ethiopia has had exactly three rulers: Selassie himself, Stalinist dictator Haile Meriam Mengistu, and the recently deceased Mr. Zenawi. That’s just three guys in almost 90 years, all of them absolute rulers with little or no tolerance for dissent. The country has almost no liberal traditions. Civil society does exist — there are NGOs and labor unions and even a few lawyers who are willing to sue the government — but it’s young and small and weak. It won’t be too surprising if a new strongman emerges. But it may take a while, and Ethiopia may go through a period of oligarchic rule and jockeying for power before things sort out.

Regimes with clear lines of succession are generally stronger regimes. Part of the reason is that they’re slightly harder targets — you not only have to take out the top guy, you have to get rid of his designated successors as well. But I think the bigger reason is that everyone knows what’s coming next after the dictator. Even if the successor is a dubious character, he’s likely to seem better than chaos and uncertainty.

Traditional monarchs have known this for millenia. But the lesson applies to dictatorships as well. We currently have at least five extant examples of non-royal dictatorships that have been successfully transferred to a son or brother of the dictator: Azerbaijan, Congo, Cuba, Syria, and North Korea (twice). Gabon and Togo are authoritarian regimes run by sons of former dictators; if we include them, the club expands to seven.

Examples of transfer to a non-relative are much much rarer. There have been a couple in the past. (Ataturk hand-picked his successor; Mexico in 1934-94 had an extremely powerful president who chose his successor from the party leadership, but they did not meet the definition of dictator. After all, they had to leave after six years in office.) But not a single extant dictatorship fits this pattern! (Burma’s dictator chose a successor who is still in power, but the successor seems to prefer being primus inter pares to being a true lone ruler.)

Now, it’s a long established principle that old age is a dangerous time for a dictator. All three of the dictators picked off by the Arab Spring were in their golden years. (Porfirio Díaz in Mexico and Juan Velasco in Peru also went down in their dotage.) More generally, an old dictator with no clear successor is pretty clearly putting himself at risk. That said, some dictators do run the course and die, more or less peacefully, in office.

So what happens when a dictator manages to pull this off — grows old and dies without first being overthrown or losing an election or whatever? Well, we can sketch out a tentative typology.

1. A son or other close relative steps up. (Several extant examples, see above.)
2. A hand-picked successor takes over. (Rare; no extant examples.)
3. There is a party or other system independent of the dictator that chooses a new dictator. (Rare outside of the Communist world; Mexico in 1934-94 comes closest. No extant examples, though we might see one soon in Cuba.)
4. After a period of uncertainty, brief or prolonged, a new dictator takes over. (A couple of extant examples — Turkmenistan, South Sudan.)
5. There’s a shift to authoritarian but non-dictatorial rule, either by a single ruler, an oligarchy or junta, or a party system. (China, Vietnam, Ivory Coast.)  This seems to be the single most common outcome in the last decade or two.
6. There’s a relatively rapid shift to relatively liberal or democratic rule. (Portugal, Spain. In the former, it took six years and revolution to get democracy.) This happens, but it’s less common than we might like to think. A shift in the direction of liberalism is much more likely when the dictator has been overthrown, or has voluntarily stepped down (Indonesia, Tanzania, Singapore), or agreed to elections (Chile, Zambia, Senegal). A system that lets the dictator die in office seems less likely to produce democracy at first go.

Numbers 2 through 6 include the possibility of foreign intervention; the United States, France and the Soviet Union have all intervened in this manner at one time or another. We may call these 3a (party picks a new dictator, foreign approval makes the difference: the Eastern European model, 1945-1990), 4a (new dictator takes power subject to foreign approval) and so forth. There aren’t really any extant examples of these at the moment — the U.S. seems to have lost interest in installing dictators in Central America and the Caribbean — but I would not be surprised if Russia’s “near abroad” in Central Asia were to throw up a 4a or 5a in the next little while.

6a is damnably rare, actually nonexistant: Panama would be one of the rather few cases since WW2 in which foreign intervention replaced a dictatorship with a democracy. Iraq sort of maybe kinda if you squint really hard. The jury is out (to be charitable) in Libya. And all of those interventions happened when the dictator in question was very much still alive and in power.

Anyway. There are enough elderly dictators out there that we should expect to see some more examples in the next few years. I expect that (5) “a shift to authoritarian but non-dictatorial rule,” will continue be the most common outcome. Which means that some countries that are currently dictatorships will drop off the list! If the number of dictatorships is to remain constant, then new ones will have to emerge. How likely this is ... well, this post is long enough. In a bit.

Counting chickens, jumping guns

So I think my first bet on the Assad regime is looking pretty safe. For those of you coming late, a year ago I bet that Syrian dictator Bashir Assad would still be in power one year later — that is, at 5:00pm EST on August 31, 2012. John Quiggin of Crooked Timber took the other side. The loser will pay $50 to a charity of the winner’s choice.

A quick glance at the calendar will show that I haven’t won this yet. In theory, the rebels could storm the presidential palace tomorrow. Or Assad could get on a flight to Moscow next Tuesday bound for a long quiet retirement in a beachside villa outside of Uglegorsk. But I don’t think it’s very likely. Assad has some problems! But he’s probably not going to fall in the next 18 days.

Close followers of this blog may recall that back in April, I challenged John to a second bet: viz., that Assad would continue in office for another six months beyond August 31. He accepted. So it’s entirely possible that I could win this bet, but lose the second one. These things happen; let’s see how it goes.

Meanwhile, two things. First, you may recall that this bet arose out of a more general discussion on the topic of dictators and their place in the world of the early 21st century. I’m mulling over a “one year later” post on this topic. Comments and suggestions are welcome! Second, I have to think about what charity I’d like John to pay his $50 towards. Suggestions on this are most definitely welcome. (No, I’m not going to ask him to contribute $50 to the Scaife Foundation. Play nice.)

Dictators

 In a recent thread over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin averred that with fall of Qaddafi, the world is running out of dictators. I sharply disagreed. I’d like to distill the ensuing discussion into a post, because it led to an interesting question: who are the world’s remaining dictators?

Let’s start by defining our terms. I define a dictator as (1) a solitary leader, who (2) wields tremendous personal power, and (3) rules in a generally illiberal manner, and (4) will not leave office or surrender power unless compelled by force majeure, and (5) is not a traditional monarch.

(1) “solitary leader” eliminates juntas and oligarchies. There are several borderline cases where a country is ruled by a group, but one member of the group is clearly primus inter pares. It also eliminates regimes that are repressive, but run by a party or oligarchy rather than one guy.

(2) “tremendous personal power” is obviously pretty slippery. But as the judge said, we know it when we see it. A dictator may have to deal with other power centers, and may face various and sharp constraints on his rule. But if the leader can do pretty much as he pleases, provided that he wants something badly enough, he qualifies. (Note that this one disqualifies rulers who are “merely” authoritarian.)

(3) “illiberal”: a leader who can and does ignore human rights, freedom of the press, inconvenient constitutional provisions, and so forth. Note that this does not disallow elections, as long as the dictator always wins them. A free-ish press is also possible, as long as it can be curbed or suppressed if it presents a serious problem.

(4) “will not leave”: this is close to the heart of the definition. A dictator is a guy you can’t get rid of, ever. Dictators may  — very rarely  — step down voluntarily, but they don’t lose elections and they can’t easily be compelled to leave otherwise. If you’re going to rule indefinitely absent a coup, revolution, civil war, or at least massive and sustained protests accompanied by major social and economic disruption, good chance you’re dictator.

(5) “not a traditional monarch”: this one is more for convenience than anything else. There are several traditional monarchs, all in the Arab world, who are very much like dictators. For now, I’m choosing to view them as their own category.

Obviously this is a fairly ad hoc definition that is going to scoop up a wide range of characters. The resulting group is likely to be, as the biologists say, paraphyletic. And it’s going to be a bit blurry around the edges, too. Nonetheless I think it’s an interesting exercise: if we apply these standards, who do we end up with? Well, I get the following list:

Angola: Dos Santos has been the President nonstop since 1979.  There are significant limits on his power, but IMO he qualifies.

Azerbaijan

Belarus

Cambodia: Hun Sen, a bland and retiring little man, has ruled unchallenged since the middle 1980s.

Cameroon: Paul Biya since 1982. The country has kept the trappings of a democratic republic, including opposition parties, but Biya is in charge and he’s not going anywhere.

Chad

Congo (Republic)

Congo (Democratic Republic):  President Kabila, son of the late President Kabila, is likely to stay in power for the foreseeable future. He’s in a tie with Aliyev of Azerbaijan for youngest dictator -- they’re both just 40.

Cuba: Raúl, not Fidel. (It’s surprising how many people think it’s still Fidel.)

Djibouti

Equatorial Guinea: this is a nasty one. Doesn’t get much attention, of course.

Eritrea: Afewerki is another nasty one. A shame, since his rule started with really high hopes.

Ethiopia

Kazakhstan

North Korea

Rwanda

South Sudan: I’m jumping the gun here, because the country of South Sudan is just a few months old. But President Mayardit has already made it pretty clear that he’s not going anywhere.

Sudan

Syria: At least for the nonce. (I think Assad has a decent chance of sticking around.)

Tajikistan

Turkmenistan

Uganda: to nobody’s surprise, President Museveni won a fourth term a few months ago.

Uzbekistan

Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe, still hanging in there at age 87, has been the world’s oldest dictator for a while now.

There are some borderline cases:

Algeria: I’d put Algeria right on the border. M. Bouteflika is president for life, has built an immense personal and family fortune, is the subject of a personality cult, and rules illiberally. On the other hand, his power is relatively limited; in particular, he must deal with rival power centers, most notably the military and the security services.

Burma: Burma was run by a military junta until the middle 2000s. Then Than Shwe drove his last serious rival out of power. He then ruled — but from behind the scenes; he was a dour, withdrawn character who mostly shunned the limelight. Then Than Shwe stepped down last year, appointing a hand-picked successor. It’s a bit soon to say whether the new guy qualifies.

The Central African Republic: Francois Bozize took power in a coup a while back, but I’m not sure he qualifies; he came close to losing the last election, and might have accepted defeat if he had.

Fiji: the current leader came to power in a military coup and shows no sign of stepping down. However, to me he looks “authoritarian” rather than “dictator” — Fiji still has a somewhat-functioning constitutional framework that seems to place some real limits on his power.

Gabon: the current President Bongo is the son of the late President Bongo. Bongo pere was the real deal  — he ruled without serious opposition for decades. It’s not clear to me whether Bongo fils is in the same league.

Togo: It looks like Gnassingbe fils, after a tricky couple of years, is on track to fill his father’s shoes. Not sure if he’s there yet, though.

And some that don’t come close:

Afghanistan: even putting aside the fact that half the country is at war with him, Karzai just doesn’t seem to have that much power.

Iran: theocracy, very authoritarian, but also weirdly constitutional — the powers of both the President and the Supreme Leader are vast but constrained. Iran is sui generis, its own strange thing.

Nicaragua: Ortega has certainly played around the edges of standard democratic practice, but if he lost an election, then he would lose power.

Russia: Actually, I don’t think Russia is very close to the border at all. Authoritarian, yes, but not any kind of dictatorship. I’m only including it here because people are going to ask.

Venezuela: Oh, come on. Obnoxious narcissist with authoritarian tendencies, not a dictator. As with Russia, included only because someone’s going to bring it up.

That makes 24, plus six borderline cases.

So: is this list meaningful? useful or interesting in any way? or is this just a parlor game?

There are some patterns. There’s not a single dictatorship left in the New World other than Cuba. The complete disappearance of the classic Latin American strongman is an interesting historical development that my co-blogger is annoyed to learn doesn’t seem to have attracted much attention in the rest of the world. 14 of the 24 are in Africa, and six more (the four ‘Stans, Azerbaijan and Belarus) are from the former Soviet Union. In fact, if we include Cambodia, Cuba, and North Korea, then every single dictatorship except for Syria is either African or a relic of Communism.

I’ve excluded the Arab absolute monarchies. But if we included them, then you could argue with a straight face that every remaining dictatorship falls into one of just three groups: African, Arab, or Communist/ex-Communist.

Is there any meaning in that pattern?

Around the Arab revolutions

 Usually an “around the Revolution” entry on this blog refers to left-wing Bolivarian governments on this continent. Here, though, it refers to Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, and Yemen. It will be brief: these are just observations; I have a bad head cold and a boatload of work. (See Laffer blogging.)

In Libya, it is surprising how quickly government forces withdrew from the east in the face of Allied airstrikes. The rebels still seem like a mob, by all accounts. The rapid withdrawal seems like a sign that discipline inside government forces is cracking, but that does not necessarily mean that the regime is about to fall. Gaddafi has a lot of support in Sirte; if his army holds together enough to crack Misurata (which will not be easy with Allied planes overhead) and hold Sirte, then he will probably hold on for a while. On the other hand, my prediction that oil would soon start flowing again seems to have been correct. The rebels now control export facilities with a capacity of 827,000 bpd, and it appears as though Qatar is willing to help with marketing. Oil markets reacted as you would expect. Ironically, it looks as though Chinese and Indian oil companies may in fact help, by being willing to purchase rebel oil without fear of what might happen to their interests in Gaddafi-held territory. That is the exact opposite of what observers expected when the violence first erupted.

I would very much like to go to Benghazi to see how Agoco is faring.

In Bahrain, 11 members of Wifaq have resigned from parliament, which is not a good sign. The party seemed to be willing to compromise in its conditions for talks with the government: all they want now is the release of 250 detainees. the idea of Kuwaiti-brokered talks now seems off the table. Reports are vague about the presence of GCC troops. There are reports that the Saudis are running checkpoints, but those should be taken with a grain of salt. Saudi troops wear the old U.S. three-color DCU pattern (on the right below), whereas Bahraini defense forces wear British-style camoflague patterns (on the left). Unless you are familiar with the uniforms, it is not easy to tell them apart.

The unrest is not good for the economy. The Grand Prix has been cancelled, as have other events. The 2008 race contributed $600 million to the economy, or 2.9% of GDP. Combine that with the proliferation of cancelled events and collapse of tourism, and Bahrain has a problem. The central bank has leaned on local banks to go easy on businesses affected by the slowdown. (It also insists that the financial industry is stable, but it would.) More importantly, on March 10 the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) announced a $10 billion fund for housing and infrastructure. Bahrain intends to use the money to build 50,000 new homes at a cost of $5.3 billion over the next five years.

The goal is, of course, political. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, there are currently 46,000 people on the waiting list for government-subsidized housing. One grievance is that newly-naturalized Sunnis from places like Syria and Pakistan are alleged to get priority; true or not, the government hopes that speeding up the pace of modern housing construction will ease the political conflict. (The government is almost certainly wrong, of course.)

In addition to the housing program, the government is planning a 1% levy on salaries to fund an unemployment insurance scheme, plus a tax on employers for each expat they employ, to finance training for locals. In 2009, the government gave expats the freedom to change jobs, with the aim of raising the cost of employing them versus native Bahrainis.

Unsurprisingly, the political effect of the change was the reverse, adding to Shia grievances. For what it is worth, the markets have perceived a big increase in the risk of Bahraini sovereign debt, but they have perceived that for most of the Middle East and North Africa, including Egypt and Morocco. The interior minister, Rashid bin Abdullah bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, has said that his ministry will “speed up plans” to hire 20,000 new employees, and the King has ordered various ministries to increase employment.

For what it is worth, I do not think that the initiatives are going to work. Bahrain needs to address Shia political grievances. My colleague, Victor Menaldo, has a paper showing that Arab monarchies have been surprisingly resilient to political shocks: very worth reading. It’s implication is that Bahrain will make it through, but it isn’t clear that Bahrain fits the model.

So what about Egypt? Well, here I am going to turn the floor over to Victor (and his colleague, Mike Albertus) once more, from their op-ed in USA Today: “Research that we’ve conducted on the relationship between revolutions and democracy demonstrates that less than a majority of revolutions end in democracy. Surprisingly, however, we also find that the democracies that tend to survive the test of time are those born in revolution.”

Finally, Yemen. All I have to say here are that the reports are terrifying. Abandoned ammunition dumps is not a good sign.

People who talk about Bahrain are frustrating me

 It isn’t just Matt Yglesias, but he went ahead again and stated that the United States needs to do more about Bahrain:

If the point of intervening in Libya is to establish a precedent that dictators can’t massacre people to remain in power then the Obama administration needs to toughen its line on Bahrain and Yemen in order to make that work. If the point of intervening in Libya is to have a “demonstration effect” that bolsters the forces of liberalization in the Arab world, then the Obama administration needs to toughen its line on Bahrain and Yemen. ...

The fact that we’re [intervening in Libya] only serves to strengthen the case that we need to be taking the modest easy steps available to us to advance the same goals elsewhere in the region.

What “modest easy steps”?? Cutting military assistance? Sanctioning Bahraini banks? Those are neither modest nor easy, and worse yet, I am at a loss as to why they would work. (Further complicating the Western position is the fact that the GCC is backing the U.N. on Libya.) I am also at a loss as to why we should consider Bahrain’s oppression as being something on the same scale as the Stalinesque massacre that was bearing down on the Libyan rebels. The U.S., right now, is very explicit about our anger at the Bahrainis and Saudis. 

I would like to have somebody lay out the “modest easy steps” that the U.S. government should be taking with regards to the situation in Bahrain. Seriously, I want somebody to convince me that such options exist! But just calling for some sort of magical pixie dust, or demanding even harsher U.S. rhetoric with no thought as to the consequences, that is just dumb.

How to imply a lie without lying: Bahrain edition

 It is a skill. A Stratfor analyst managed to pull it off. Nothing in the below is false, but it does disagree completely with the internal assessments of the United States chief diplomatic arm:

After Egypt, Bahrain has become the most significant place where street agitation is taking place in the Middle East. ... The country being a proxy battleground for Saudi Arabia and Iran makes it even more significant.

Pro-democracy street agitation is not a stranger to Bahrain ... what is happening is not entirely new. What makes this significant — this latest round of unrest — is that it comes in the context of the overall regional unrest that started in Tunisia and moved to Egypt ...

It’s not just the sectarian dynamic that makes the protests significant in Bahrain. There is also a wider geopolitical contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran that has been going on for several decades and, more recently, since the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

Since then, Saudi Arabia has been very worried about Iranian attempts to project power across the Persian Gulf into the Arabian Peninsula. And with Bahrain having a heavy Shiite population, this is a cause for concern in Saudi Arabia, as Saudi Arabia is neighbors with Bahrain and has its own 20 percent Shiite population.

From the point of view of the United States, Bahrain is also significant because it is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. The 5th Fleet is one of the key levers that serve as a counter to Iran, or any movement on the part of Iran. It is not clear at this point to what degree Iran is involved in the uprising. There are linkages, but to what degree Iran is playing those linkages is not clear at this point. Nonetheless, it is one of those flashpoints between Shiite Iran and the largely Sunni Arab world, and Bahrain is going to be very interesting in terms of how both sides battle it out in the form of a proxy contest.

Should Bahrain succumb to unrest and the monarchy has to concede to the demands of the protesters at some point in the future, this becomes a huge concern for the security of countries like Saudi Arabia, particularly where there is a 20 percent Shiite population that has been keeping quiet for the most part, but could be emboldened, based on what they have seen in Egypt and now what they are looking at in Bahrain.

Riiight. The above analysis implies that Iran is behind the protests. It also implies that the transformation of Bahrain into a constitutional monarchy would be a de facto expansion of Iranian power. The fact that there is no evidence that Iran is behind the protests does not come into play. Nor does the fact that Bahrain receives a lot of hydrocarbon rents, and a democratic Bahrain would have as much desire to share those rents with Iran as Alberta wants to share its rents with the rest of Canada. (In 2011, the Kingdom of Bahrain expects to earn $5.1 billion from hydrocarbon production, taxes, and royalties.)

There is little doubt that if the United States washed its hands of the Gulf tomorrow, Iran would invade Bahrain the next day. As recently as 2007, Iran floated trial balloons about reactivating its historical claim to the island. And ... well ... $5.1 billion is a lot of money, maybe not for the United States, but for Iran, which has a (nominal) GDP around $335 billion and a government budget around $66 billion.

And it is true that the Saudi government has its own reasons to fear a demo-cratic Shia-dominated Bahrain. The last paragraph of the analysis is spot on.

But jumping from Iranian desires and Saudi fears to some sort of blather about a great game, with intimations that Bahraini democracy would be bad for the United States, is just silly. Moreover, it runs against the perceptions of the United States government. A democratic Bahrain under a constitutional monarchy would be just as much of a threat to the Iranian regime as it would be to Saudi Arabia. (“Look! A Shia democracy! Without an American invasion, and without the occasional car bomb!”)

Given the reality of the situation, I really don’t think there is anything more for the United States to do or say than it already is doing and saying. In short, viewing the situation through the lens of Cold War 1½ would, I think, be a mistake. Analyses like Stratfor’s are misleading without being incorrect, and in a potentially dangerous way.

Thoughts?

A depressing thought for a sunny Tuesday

 Below the fold, Brad DeLong argues that what he calls the “Barrington Moore problematic” is no longer a useful way of ordering the social sciences.

What is the Barrington Moore problematic, you ask? (Yes, I had to google the name.) In short, it is the search for the answer to why 20th-century states gave rise to regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In an advanced industrial society and a backwards industrializing one, regimes arose which killed millions of people. And even without those horrible ideologies, the First World War showed modern states using nationalism to mobilize for slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Understanding why drove research agendas for a long time; it certainly provided a useful way to organize undergraduate education.

DeLong argues, with good reason, that this no longer dominates. Modern Western societies mobilize rapidly against even relatively mild forms of racism or authoritarianism. Other societies sometimes (but ever less) give rise to tinpot dictators or self-proclaimed socialists, but they are simply not the same.

Al-Qaeda is not about to seize control of any state. Hugo Chávez may be leading an increasingly authoritarian regime, but he is no Joseph Stalin: he isn’t even a Fidel Castro. (Heck, these days even Fidel Castro isn’t much of a Fidel Castro.) And for all the attention to the threat of chaos, embodied by nihilistic terrorists or drug cartels, neither has really been able to do much damage inside functioning modern democratic states.

We need, therefore, to find a new overarching question to bind together the social sciences.

Except ... well ... in one field, economics, a lot of people believed that we had achieved a Great Moderation. Depressions were a thing of the past. Well, not so much. In political science, many believed that we had a pretty good handle on what politics looked like under first-past-the-post. Again, not so much.

Do we really understand why the world hasn’t been turning up many Stalins lately? Are we sure that Communism and facism and future things like them are dead? Is it in fact time to abandon the study of dictatorship and democracy because things look like okay, right now?

Well, probably yes. That said, I worry that in a few years or decades the below essay (under the fold) just might (perhaps) look a little bit like the literature on the Great Moderation, or the Westminster system, or worse yet the positivism that preceeded the First World War. Maybe, just maybe, after the resurgence of problems that so many thought were dead, we just might not yet want to abandon the search for the roots of totalitarianism.

And it sure wouldn’t hurt to keep undergraduate education focused on it.

An Andrew Jackson moment

  “The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.”
                                                                        —President Andrew Jackson

 

The common misquote of the above is much sexier:  “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”  Which is not a bad summary of Manuel Zelaya’s throwdown when his country’s Supreme Court told him that he could not go ahead with his planned referendum on repealing term limits.  Zelaya’s “No one will stop Sunday’s vote!” is on a par with Jackson’s aphorism.

In fact, it is worth considering what was in Zelaya’s televised speech on Sunday, after the Honduran Supremes slapped him down.  “The Court of Justice, which makes justice only for the powerful, the bankers and the rich of this country, has declared illegal the people’s participation in a legitimate and constitutional poll ... What a shame for all Hondurans, this Court of Justice!  We’re in the presence of a technical coup d’état.  It’s a swipe at Honduran democracy.  I want to appeal to the commanders of the Armed Forces, the officers and the soldiers.  They are part of the people, they should not play this game of the media elite and economic oligarchy, of a deviant bourgeoisie.”

Why is this significant?  Because Honduras could have avoided this crisis with a better constitution.  The Honduran constitution had two major flaws.  First, it took re-election off the table forever.  I mean that quite literally.  Read: 

Article 5:  Voting in advisory plebiscites is mandatory.  Projects intended to reform Article 374 of this constitution will not be objects of referenda or plebiscites.

Article 373:  The National Congress can alter this Constitution in ordinary session with two-thirds of the votes of all members. 

Article 374:  In no case can be reformed the previous article, this article, the constitutional articles that refer to the form of government, the national territory, the presidential term, the prohibition that no citizen can again be president who has carried out the role under whatever title, and the one referring to those who cannot become president of the republic for the subsequent period.

It is a bad bad idea to declare any procedural part of a constitution to be forever inviolable.  The U.S. constitution does this in respect to the apportionment of the Senate, and that is a bad idea that may yet come back to haunt us. 

The Honduran constitution then added insult to injury with its second flaw:  a complete lack of procedures by which the courts, legislature, or popular opinion could remove a sitting president for breaking the law.  The closest is Articles 321-327, which lay out the responsibility of public servants and organisms that break the law and cause civil damages to individuals, or Article 233, which lays a pretty draconian anticorruption law.  But neither really apply in this situation. 

In short:  Zelaya broke a stupid constitutional clause.  Twice, in fact, first by firing an officer who refused to administer an unconstitutional referendum and second by proceeding with the referendum anyway.  Congress could not do anything.  At that point the increasingly-angry military, acting in concert with the Supreme Court, decided to extraconstitutionally remove the president from office. 

I do not like it.  But I am also not sure that this is an abrogation of democracy either.  Judging by their statements, the Obama Administration is equally torn:  they would like Zelaya back, but they aren’t going to wade into another country’s Andrew Jackson moment. 

What do you think?

P.S.  I am not a fan of Andrew Jackson.

Observatorio Argentino 11: The new broadcasting law

  OK, I've been making a lot of fun of the idea that Argentina is run by a dictator and an enemy of the United States.  Obviously, neither is true.  

But a new law proposed by President Cristina Fernández raises some interesting issues.  She proposes to limit the the number of broadcast licenses that a single firm can hold, and allow telecoms companies to operate cable television networks.  The law would also reserve a third of broadcast frequencies for nonprofit groups such as universities, and set minimum quotas for Argentine films, music and programs.  (Her meeting with the movie-makers is pictured.)

I don't have any ideological problem with limits on the number of media outlets that any one person or entity can control ... but I might be wrong on that.  Are there dangers that I don't see?  This proposal seems pretty openly aimed at Grupo Clarín, which is a big critic of the president.  In addition, about a year ago she proposed to establish a government watchdog that would call out media bias, although nothing appears to have come of it. 

What do you think?

Does this post count as a violation of Godwin’s Law?

  She's a dictator, see! A dictator!  And Argentina is an antagonist! So we should all be very afraid when Buenos Aires submits maps like the one to the right to the United Nations. 

The nefariousness of it all is clear. She intends to re-attack the Falklands, and then take over Antarctica.  And look at this:  at home she's accused of “electoral engineering.” That sounds sounds all dictatorial and everything. I mean look at what she's accused of:  “abandoning duties to campaign” and “watching polls.” That’s just unconscionable, a perversion of democracy. 

Since we all know that free trade and democracy are inseparable, accusations that her government is engaging in closet protectionism are clearly a sign that the jackboots will be out on the street at any moment.  I mean, nobody could possibly support protectionism. Nobody. This is at least semi-dictatorial, right?

I mean, wow.  In December, Buenos Aires announced the “Production and Work Defense Program.” Under it, the government promised to impose temporary limits on the quantity of imports in such strategic sectors as shoes, clothes, and tires. Democratic countries would never do anything like that.  It just violates every known principle of everything.  And it sounds scary. “Production and Work”?  

Add to that the fact that the government has taken over control of the grain export trade. How dare they try to keep track of the taxes farmers pay the federal government! There are no democratic governments where the state controls the export of agricultural products. None. 

I mean, the above picture, it's just terrifying. Look how those Chilean soldiers have broken discipline, turning their heads out of formation, in what clearly must be fear. Yes, the Argentine dictator must be stopped. 

La jefa

  I don't know, I guess this could be a picture of a military dictator of some sort.  I mean, she's wearing a jacket that's almost olive drab, and a beret.  Yeah, must be a dictator.

I mean, no American president would ever dress up in military garb like that, just to impress people. 

Oh no he di’n’t

  Well.  One of the leaders of the Republican party, a former Speaker of the House, and a plausible presidential candidate, goes to the Bronx and calls Cristina Fernández a “semi-dictator.”   

No, seriously.  Chávez, though, got to be a full dictator, while poor Danny Ortega got lumped in with Cristina among the “semis.” 

Now that is funny.  Ortega, who unlike the other two has in fact engaged in election fraud, becomes the same as Fernández.  Now, it is true that about a year ago she tried and failed to make an end-run around Congress in order to impose an agricultural export tax.  But our last president tried and succeeded to make an end-run around Congress in order to detain suspects indefinitely and monitor all communications crossing the country's border ... and while George Bush the Younger was many things, a “semi-dictator” was not one of them. 

Meanwhile, I really do need to repeat that Venezuela is not a dictatorship.  Most of the anti-Chavista opposition recognizes that.  And even should Chávez turn it into one, Venezuela poses no threat to the United States.  Let him slosh money around!  He gets nothing for it.   

Still, I can understand how he makes a useful foil for American conservatives.  I've heard lefties say stupider things about President Uribe ... although never anyone as prominent as Newt Gingrich.  But making Argentina into an enemy of the United States?  Huh?  Argentina??

So I've really got to wonder.  Can somebody explain what's going on with the GOP and the crazy pills?  I'm at a loss.

I guess I must reluctantly come around to the position that it is time to eliminate the filibuster. 

When lawyers declare war!

  You know, the more I learn, the more I think that President Correa of Ecuador is really playing with fire in defaulting on his debts.  Brazil is mad at him, and you don't want to get the new imperial rulers of South America mad at you.  But more importantly, he's got his American creditors mad at you ... and it seems as though those creditors may have a rather powerful legal recourse.  It'll all depend on the definition of a “central bank.”

But let's start at the beginning. What happens when lawyers declare war on a country? Well, remember this post, on the U.S. sanctions against Manuel “La Piña” Noriega ?  Turns out that the sanctions weren't really Elliot Abrams' idea. Rather, the credit goes to a lawyer, William Rogers, acting on behalf of his client, former President Eric Delvalle of Panama. 

La Piña, you see, had an anger-management problem. He decapitated Hugo Spadafora, one of his political opponents.  When the President of Panama, Nicolás Barletta, made the mistake of thinking that he, you know, ran the country, and decided to investigate the head-chopping, Noriega locked him in his office and threatened his family.  At 3am, President Barletta appeared on national television and offered his resignation, which the National Assemby accepted in a late-night emergency session.  Eric Delvalle, the education minister, then became President. A little while later, Delvalle decided to pass on to La Piña an American offer to let him peacefully resign with all his ill-gotten gains. In response, Pineapple-face ejected Delvalle from the presidency.  Delvalle got word that he was going to be arrested the next day, and managed to make it to an American military base. His ambassador-at-large hired Rogers, and then ...

... Rogers' firm filed suits to freeze Panamanian assets in the United States, beginning with the banks.  On March 3, the courts froze the U.S. accounts of the Banco Nacional de Panama (BNP).  The freeze deliberately cut off the BNP’s liquidity — it could no longer access any of the deposit accounts it held in American banks.  Nor could it clear checks through American institutions. The BNP had to close its doors.  In Rogers' words: 

“It was a conscious plan to tighten the financial noose around the neck of the Noriega regime. The consequences were seen with precision: Starve the banking system of cash, force the banks to close, and thus cause —not to put too fine a point on it — considerable financial, economic distress in Panama. The economy doesn’t function now.” 

Since the BNP was also the Panamanian clearinghouse for cashing domestic checks, the subsequent payday, March 14, became a bit problematic. How could Panamanian firms make payroll? Over 145,000 people, twenty percent of Panama’s labor force, had no access to the $30 million in wages they were owed. A general strike quickly ensued, beginning with the dock workers. By the end of March, Panama’s economy was in disarray, and the country defaulted on its foreign debts.   

Rogers was quietly pleased with himself:

“I don’t know of anyone else who — I mean on the assumption that it works, and Noriega is out — I don’t know of any effort to overturn another government by litigation which really was based on, and derived from, litigation in the United States. Or that worked as fast as this, or that had the consequences this one has.”

Well, it didn't work. But think about it for a moment. Could lawyers declare war on Ecuador for defaulting on its debts the same way that they declared war on Panama for ousting a president? After all Ecuador uses the dollar. And sanctions that didn't work on a dictator might be very effective in swinging public opinion against an elected president. Maybe Felix Salmon was on to something. 

It all depends on whether American courts consider the Banco Central de Ecuador (BCE) to be a real central bank. If it is, then its assets are not attachable, and U.S. courts cannot interfere with its functioning. But if it isn't, well, then some enterprising lawyer could go give it the full Rogers. And wouldn't that be interesting to watch? 

From a big distance, that is. Correa may be worried about this possibility. The BCE is buying a lot of gold ... which is weird, to say the least. But is Ecuador vulnerable?

Lawyers read this blog. So help a brother out with his research. Could somebody do to the BCE what Rogers did to the BNP, or is Ecuador safe? 

North of south, or the economic consequences of Elliott Abrams

  Okay, here's the set-up. In 1903, the U.S. sponsored the independence of a mercantile breakaway region of Colombia in a strategically very intriguing location. The constitution of this new country permanently linked its new currency, the balboa, one to one with the dollar. In 1914, the Panama Canal was opened. Canal Zone policy did not allow sales to ships on credit. Banks in Panama filled the gap.

Jump-cut bone to space station here. Seventy years after, in a region whose major products were coffee, bananas, and death squads, Panama managed to seize this tiny bit of comparative advantage and leverage it into a national economy centered around financial services. Swiss-style bank accounts, generous corporate tax policies, and a major re-exporting hub, combined with the use of the U.S. dollar and the low inflation caused by the Balassa-Samuelson effect: all these things made Panama an attractive site for many types of business activity.

Small problem: Manuel Noriega. A scary guy, and I'm not talking about the acne. He was the chief of secret police for the charismatic leftist populist Chicago-influenced leader of Panama, General Omar Torrijos, and the guy who (in theory) was going to disable the Panama Canal if the 1977 treaty didn't go through; and after Torrijos's plane mysteriously crashed in 1981, Noriega quickly moved to consolidate power behind the scenes. Money laundering, drug smuggling, dogs and cats living together, mass kleptocracy. One of the cuter scams was that Noriega's associates ran the company responsible for security in the re-export zone. Guess how that worked.

Now, somehow Noriega had got on the bad side of Uncle Sugar. It's rather difficult to pin down the proximate cause, since the fellow had been messing with drugs and money since the 1970s, when he was heavy petting with the CIA, but whatever. Suffice it to say that by the late 1980s, Noriega had turned from “our bastard” to “liability” in the eyes of the Powers That Be. The change might even have been made in good faith. Manuel Noriega was indicted in a Miami court on February 4, 1988. On March 3, 1988, all the U.S. accounts of the Banco Nacional de Panama were frozen. The Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Elliott Abrams, gloated to the press about this neat idea, quipping like only an apparatchik can: “Noriega is hanging on by his fingertips. He'll be out of power in a week. Now we'll see who stole the strawberries.” But it was a neat idea, if not very well thought through.

Here's the thing: because Panama has no independent currency, it relies on dollar flows from the U.S. to maintain financial liquidity. Panama has no central bank. Balboa notes have only been issued once, in a bizarre episode in the early 1940s, and they were all cancelled. So the mechanism to maintain Panama's financial liquidity was deliberately cut off. When this happens on a widespread scale, it's called a depression. After all, as the history of the twentieth century tells us, nothing causes dictators to lose power more quickly than a depression. The BNP had to close its doors, and other Panamanian banks followed. It gets better. The BNP, while not a central bank, is the Panamanian clearinghouse for cashing checks. Since Panama had a modern, service-based economy, this made the next payday (March 14) problematic. A general strike quickly ensued. Noriega had an ingenious scheme: pay the workers in commemorative coins! This was nixed by the money mavens on hand. So, all in all, a lot of calamity, a lot of hardship.

Why didn't it work? It took Operation Just 'Cause (originally named Operation Blue Spoon, which I think is much cooler) to oust Noriega. The sanctions did manage to reduce the Panamanian economy by a third, maybe a half, for over a year, precipitating a decade-long jump in unemployment. But that doesn't mean much to a dictator. It's almost the definition: a dictator is a leader who is unresponsive to the popular will. But a major reason it didn't work was that the Panamanian financial system was remarkably resilient.

The Panamanian bankers weren't unsophisticated rubes fresh off the coffee finca. Some of them went to the University of Chicago. They had long practice finding loopholes and workarounds against Uncle Sugar's more anti-Panamanian rulings; they had a decades-long institutional history of doing this. So the government issued fractional pay checks which could circulate like bills of exchange, increasing the effective money supply. Noriega himself set up Eurodollar accounts using laundered drug money -- sweet of him, and part of the reason he's getting a French vacation -- so that the BNP could finally clear checks and credit card bills. Some banks issued CDs based on savings accounts, which were used for big ticket items.

In short, just as the Great Depression sparked a wave of industrial innovation in the U.S., the U.S.-engineered depression sparked a wave of financial innovation in Panama. The other reason is, private companies sent Panama a lot of dollars so their Panamanian enterprises could stay afloat. Texaco, United Fruit Brands, Eastern Airlines. Not a whole lot in absolute figures, but it helped at the margin. After all, politics is politics, but business is forever. (PS: Doug, I know the exact word that's tickling the back of your head -- Komarr.)