Going Deeper
Democracy and development
DESPITE the fact that the capitalist system enveloped by democratic governance has been unable to provide the essential goods to the maximum number of people in whose name democracy is preached, the world is yet to devise a system that would remove the lacuna that exists between the rich and the poor.
Because of the fact that in the last half a century only Botswana has graduated from the category of least developed country to a developing country, and only Singapore and South Korea are considered as developed from among developing countries, one has to think of the instruments responsible for the graduation of economic development of these countries to higher levels. In the case of South Korea, the command economy under the military dictatorship of Park Chung-Hee whose distribution of national wealth at low cost or no cost at all (given at interest rate that was lower than the inflation rate and a facility not given to the general public) resulted in the growth of chaebols or big business houses that employed large numbers of people in export oriented industries that ultimately led to a sort of trickle down distribution of wealth that by any standard was not equitable and resulted in huge disparity of income between the super rich and the rest of the society.
Park Chung-Hee and Chun Doo-Hwan's administrations are being criticised now for allocation of national wealth, foreign currency and loans in projects that did not make optimum use of the resources, which were often arbitrarily used and bred corruption. When Park Chung-Hee decided to build the highway connecting Seoul with the port city of Insein he was thought to have embarked on a mad project that was not only too costly but was also too wide for the traffic that at that time used to ply between the two points.
Today, the Seoul-Insein highway is clogged with cars, trucks, and buses, and is a lifeline for the exports of South Korea. Such criticism notwithstanding, Park Chung-Hee's regime maintained hawk-eyed monitoring of the private sector that was beneficiary of the munificence of the military dictator. Though such a policy would be impossible to follow in this age of transparency and democracy, it did succeed in the economic development of South Korea that left Stalinist Communist North Korea far behind in all respects.
One must, however, recognise that the export led growth of South Korea was possible because the US opened its vast market to Korean products, and Korean export earnings increased in geometric proportion. One should also recognise the hard labour put in by the Korean people to produce huge quantities of exportable goods.
This "bureaucratic-authoritarian-industrialising" regime increased the per capita income of South Korea from $103 in 1963 to $7435 in 1993. Park formed a "developmentalist" coalition through cooption of big business, subsidy to the agricultural sector, and control of labour to give the economy the boost it needed. The policies followed confirmed the belief that post-1945 developmental policies did very little to improve the condition of the 40% poor who inhabited the earth.
But then, following Park Chung-Hee's policies was possible because of the Cold War dynamics and because de-colonisation had not yet been completed totally, with the result that impoverished colonised Third World countries blamed the colonisers for the metropolitan-periphery relationship that arrested their growth while the Cold War dictates allowed the big powers to continue with their stranglehold over the dictators who ruled the impoverished population of these Third World countries. The fractious world that one sees today is partly due to the "democracy deficit" that the superpowers (before the collapse of the Soviet Empire) tolerated. The US gave aid -- both military and financial -- to contain communism in line with the suggestions made by George Keenan and the Cold War warriors (from Dulles brothers till Ronald Reagan, who called the Soviet Union an "evil empire") in conjunction with the leaders of the Western world.
The second wave of democratisation, in the estimate of Samuel Huntington, that came with decolonisation brought with it the unquenchable thirst for freedom and democracy. Whether institutions to sustain democratic setups were there in these countries with new names and new flags giving them international identity as members of the United Nations was often ignored.
Consequently, many of these countries that had clad themselves with democratic systems of governance failed to measure up to the accepted standard of freedom and respect for human rights that are essential components of democracy. The deviants that wrought the carnage of 9/11 and comprised the core of al-Qaeda took full advantage of the failures of governments, in the Islamic world in particular, in providing greater economic growth and failing to institute Western political models of governance for recruiting followers who would be willing to jump into fire at the behest of their commanders.
This aberration of Islam would not have been possible had the Pan-Arabism succeeded in bringing about cohesion in the Islamic world, and its projection of oil as an effective instrument of power and Islam as a peaceful creed and not a contestant of Christianity as historian Bernard Lewis and many other Western intellectuals of impeccable credentials have tried to portray.
The roots of muslim rage, as Lewis would have us believe, is not because Islam from its inception has regarded Christianity as an "inferior" religion nor due to its resistance to modernity defined as, echoing Jorgen Habermas, a replacement of divine providence with autonomous rational human mind effectively ending veneration of tradition, or the conviction of some Muslims that overwhelming influence of "debasing Western culture" would destroy the purity of the Islamic faith, but because of the injustice inflicted upon the Muslim world by the West from the time the West established "a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony" with the Orient.
The way forward for a country like Bangladesh, being a Muslim nation, and an underdeveloped one is cooperation (presuming there are irreconcilable differences) with the West, neither being able to ignore the other because, for the foreseeable future, certainly in the twenty-first century however much it is touted as an Asian Century and China becoming the world's largest economy, the Western powers, notably the US, shall remain the preeminent global power dictating the socio-economic and political direction the world will take.
A sort of multi-polarity may exist in the world system but the uni-polarity in the sense of US having the last word will remain the order of the day.
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