Another line of argument stresses not the character of a regime (democratic or autocratic) but its stability. A recent survey analysed the experience of over a hundred countries from the 1950s or 1960s until 1982 and concluded that political instability is more harmful to growth than the absence of democracy.82 This too accords with historical evidence of the inter-war period, when many new democracies suffered from myriad forms of instability (large-scale strikes, street violence, assassinations and attempted coups).
None of this, of course, should be construed as in any sense an argument against democracy. As Churchill said, ‘democracy is the worst form of Government – except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’.83 This is true. It is simply that democracy is not guaranteed to be economically superior to those alternative forms of government.
THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY
In his famous essay on ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, Max Weber suggested that the rise of modern capitalism had its roots in the cultural changes wrought in north-western Europe and exported to America by the Reformation. In particular, Calvinism encouraged a pattern of behaviour which had – as a benign side-effect – a qualitative and quantitative improvement in wealth-creating activity. The key was its ethos of asceticism, which exalted hard work and deferred consumption as outward proofs of godliness. The capitalist ‘calling’ was, in other words, religious in origin: ‘To attain … self-confidence [in one’s membership of the Elect] intense worldly activity [was] recommended … Christian asceticism … strode into the market-place of life.’84 This link from theology to behaviour, Weber suggested, was the best explanation for the fact that ‘sober, bourgeois capitalism with its rational organization of free labour’ had been much slower to take hold in Catholic, Orthodox or, for that matter, non-Christian parts of the world.85
Though frequently criticized since its first publication in 1904 – and certainly ambiguous in tracing the origins of a rational process of accumulation back to a fundamentally irrational ethos of self-denial86 – Weber’s cultural model has never been wholly discredited. What has tended to happen is that the distinction he made between Protestantism and other forms of Christianity has been blurred, in order to emphasize the difference between European and non-European cultures. Thus the divergence of European patterns of family formation from those of Asia – the ‘origins of individualism’ – has been sought as far back as the seventh century, when the Church sought to undermine the extended kinship group by prohibiting marriage between close relatives.87 Stretching the thesis even further, Judaism has been identified as having a related pro-capitalist ethos. Landes retains a strongly Weberian element in his account of world economic history, seeking explanations for Europe’s economic ‘triumph’ over China, Turkey and India in the realm of religion and culture; but his ‘spirit of capitalism’ is rooted in a combined Judaeo-Christian ethic.88
There is a link between the Weberian thesis about the rise of capitalism and Tocqueville’s interpretation of the rise of democracy. For Tocqueville, it was the strength of the Protestant religious sects that made the United States an ideal environment for a democratic system which was also friendly to liberty. By contrast, the disrepute of the Church in eighteenth-century France, and the consequent hostility of the Revolution towards religion, helped to explain the illiberal turn French democracy had taken. (Writing nearly a century before, Gibbon had advanced the complementary argument that it had been the rise of Christianity which had fatally undermined the Roman Empire.)
The idea persists that Christian culture is at once more friendly to capitalism and more hostile to despotism than the religious cultures of Asia. According to the Freedom House Survey, for example, Christian societies are more likely to be democratic and free. Of the 88 countries that qualify as ‘free’ in the 1998 edition, no fewer than 79 are ‘majority Christian (by tradition or belief)’; whereas only 11 of the 67 most illiberal countries are. By contrast, only one country with a Muslim majority – Mali – is free; 14 are partly free and 28 are not free. Evidence of this sort has encouraged Samuel Huntington to posit an impending ‘clash of civilizations’ by way of a substitute for the late and in some quarters lamented clash of ideologies between the United States and the Soviet Union.89
This simple correlation between Christianity and liberty hardly stands up to close scrutiny, any more than the assumption (central to Huntington’s thesis) that there is a correlation between Islam and violence, or between Islam and weak nation-states. After all, many Catholic countries were illiberal and undemocratic when the Freedom House Survey began. Moreover, two of the three most murderous regimes of the twentieth century arose in originally Christian societies, even if the ideologies of all three were anticlerical: Hitler’s National Socialism evinced pagan leanings, while ‘Socialism in One Country’ was as aggressively atheistic in Stalin’s Soviet Union as in Mao’s China. However, a more sophisticated approach, which groups countries according to which of nine major religious groups predominates and relates this to their level of democratization, produces a different picture. Table 22 gives the average of the democracy score (in this case, the maximum is 1.00) for the period 1975 to 1994. This kind of evidence persuades some political scientists (notably Lipset) that the chances of democratization are enhanced if a country is Protestant rather than Catholic, and Christian rather than Islamic.90
Table 22. Average democracy score (maximum 1.00, minimum 0.00) for 136 countries, 1975–1994
* * *
Dominant religion
No. of countries
Average of democracy indicator
* * *
Jewish
1
0.85
Protestant
24
0.78
Hindu
5
0.66
Catholic
4
9 0.60
Buddhist
4
0.56
Shinto, etc.
3
0.45
Other
17
0.28
Muslim
32
0.26
Atheist
1
0.10
* * *
Source: Barro, ‘Determinants of Economic Growth’, p. 48.
Yet there is a danger here that correlation may be mistaken for causation. A more careful statistical analysis casts doubt on the explanatory significance of religion: in the case of Protestant countries, the higher standard of living appears to have been the key to the relative success of democracy, rather than their Protestantism per se. This merely brings us back to the Weber thesis: was it Protestantism that lay behind the higher standard of living? The difficulty is to decide what the dependent variable is. To take another example: former British colonies have had more success with democracy than the erstwhile possessions of France, Portugal, Holland or Belgium.91 But is this a legacy of settlement by Protestant emigrants and the work of British missionaries? Or was it the secular aspects of British rule that laid the foundations for later developments?
One strong possibility raised by the example of former British colonies is that both growth and democracy benefit, independently of one other, from the development of the rule of law – to be precise, the kind of law that attaches paramount importance to individual property rights. This is the argument advanced by the Peruvian development economist Hernando de Soto, who sees defective legal institutions rather than poverty per se as the principal cause of under-development.92 It is a line of argument with obvious appeal to economists like Douglass North, who have long argued that the English (and even more the American) legal systems provided the best available setting for capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.93
There is, however, a paradox about this gratifying Anglo-American success story. In both cases, the institutions that proved so favourable to the growth of both capitalism and democracy emerged out of civil wars fought wit
hin religiously mixed and multi-ethnic societies.94 It is to the vexed question of ethnicity that we must now turn.
13
Fractured Unities
After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Bukovina became part of Romania. While in Austrian times its linguistically and sartorially kaleidoscopic mixture of people had given an attractive touch of colour to the placid and mannered everyday life of a flourishing crown land, the opposite now occurred: a thin foil of civilization appeared to have been superimposed on an untidily assorted ethnic conglomerate from which it could be peeled off all too readily…. Those who remained in Romania split into groups determined by nationality. The Romanians holding important government posts established themselves as the new masters … The so-called Bukovina Swabians … segregated themselves in a flag-waving Great Germany clannishness … The Ruthenians refused to have anything to do with the former Austrians, who they felt had always treated them as second-degree citizens, or the Romanians, who cold-shouldered them in return. Poles, Russians and Armenians … now more than ever kept to themselves. All of these despised the Jews, notwithstanding that the Jews … played an economically decisive role …
GREGOR VON REZZORI, The Snows of Yesteryear1
When the news of the outbreak of the First World War reached Gregor von Rezzori’s mother in the Bukovina, her immediate reaction was to flee the advancing Russians to Trieste. On their way there – through a pass in the Carpathian mountains and on via Bistrice, Budapest and Vienna – they were entirely dependent on the linguistic skills of the boy’s wet-nurse Cassandra, who spoke ‘snatches of Romanian, Ruthenian, Polish and Hungarian, as well as Turkish and Yiddish, assisted by a grotesque, grimacing mimicry and a primitive, graphic body language’. It was the beginning of an era of ethnic chaos that would shatter the Habsburg unity she personified.
By the time the family returned to Tschernowitz at the end of the war, the town was on the verge of being handed over to Romania under the Treaty of Trianon: as Rezzori recalled, ‘sinister species in rags had begun to fill the streets’. For twenty years thereafter, the different nationalities co-existed fractiously in what was now Cernati: youths from the Romanian Youth Movement crossing swords with ethnic German student fraternities, both despising the Hasidic Jews with their clothes stalls and synagogues.2 Then in 1940, under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the Red Army occupied the town and the German population was unceremoniously expelled. A year later, in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans returned – in the form of Sonderkommando 10b, part of Einsatzgruppe D, one of the mobile task forces entrusted with the task of massacring the Jews of Eastern Europe. They found that the Romanians had already begun their work for them. Between them, the Germans and Romanians killed two thousand Jews and set about deporting the others to the killing fields of Transnistria.3 In the summer of 1944 the Soviets returned. Today the town is called Chernovsty, a backwater of Ukraine, only slowly emerging from the monotonous uniformity imposed by the Communists – who, like the Nazis before them, claimed they had found the ‘solution’ to the nationalities question.
The history of Tschernowitz–Cernati–Chernovtsy is a microcosm of the mayhem unleashed by ethnic politics in the twentieth century. But as more recent events in places as far afield as Kosovo, Rwanda and Indonesia remind us, ethnic politics – and ethnic conflict – show no sign of abating. Indeed, the politics of ethnicity may have fewer ideological rivals at the dawn of the twenty-first century than a hundred years ago.
A BALKAN WORLD?
The previous chapter considered the relationship between democracy and economics, and concluded that they were both dependent variables of other institutional factors such as religion and the law. Another and more controversial characteristic of states which is sometimes said to influence both their economic and their political development is ethnic composition. Ninety years ago, when Werner Sombart wrote his distasteful rejoinder to Weber, The Jews and Economic Life (1911), the question was whether some religious or ethnic groups were more adept at capitalism than others, for better or for worse.4 Nowadays, a more commonly asked question is how far ethnic homogeneity is a prerequisite for democratization. The two questions are not unrelated.
The Freedom House Survey, to take a recent example, suggests that countries without a predominant ethnic majority are less successful in establishing open and democratic societies than ethnically homogeneous countries (defined as countries in which over two-thirds of the population belong to a single ethnic group). Of the 114 countries in the world that possess a dominant ethnic group, 66 – more than half – are free. By contrast, among multi-ethnic countries only 22 of 77 are free – less than a third.
This need not be read simply as an argument for the creation of homogeneous states, however. Rather, what it may imply is that most multi-ethnic states can be held together only by illiberal regimes. One theory is that there is a trade-off between the economies of scale which favour the creation of large nation-states (public goods can be provided more cheaply per capita for big political units), and the alienation experienced by geographically peripheral groups when the centre of government is very remote. As democracy spreads, this alienation tends to find expression in the demands of peripheral groups for compensation for their political exclusion, and the complaints of core groups about ‘parasites’ on the fringe. Democratization may therefore lead to secessions by groups on the periphery.
That was arguably the inter-war experience, when there was a relatively close (though not exact) correlation between the presence of large ethnic minorities in countries like Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia and the failure of democracy. Nearly 30 per cent of the population of Poland were not considered Poles: the rest were Belorussians (5 per cent), Ukrainians (14 per cent), Jews (8 per cent) and Germans (2 per cent). Nearly a fifth of the people of Romania, as the case of Tschernowitz illustrates, were not Romanians: 8 per cent were Hungarian, 4 per cent Germans, 4 per cent Jews and 3 per cent Ukrainians.5 Minorities also accounted for roughly 20 per cent of the populations of Spain and Albania. In Turkey around two-fifths of the population belonged to minorities.6 Without the grip of authoritarianism, the argument runs, the forces of self-determination will always cause such multi-ethnic states to break up into homogeneous ‘statelets’. Events in Yugoslavia and, on a much larger scale, the Soviet Union in the decade after 1989 would seem to bear this out. To date Yugoslavia has fragmented into nine separate entities; and the process may not yet be complete. As a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the world has been blessed with fourteen new independent states – fifteen, if the Russians should ever tire of retaining Chechnya by force. This fissiparity of post-Communist Europe has prompted the ‘historian of the present’ Timothy Garton Ash to suggest that ‘a contemporary European state with a less than 80 per cent ethnic majority is inherently unstable’.7
There are reasons to be sceptical of such ethnic determinism, it is true. In the inter-war period there were obvious exceptions to the supposed rule that ethnic heterogeneity means either authoritarianism or fragmentation. In fascist Italy ethnic minorities accounted for around 2 per cent of the population, while in Nazi Germany the figure was just 1.6 per cent. Yet democracy survived until the Third Reich snuffed it out in heterogeneous Czechoslovakia, where minorities were a third of the population, as well as in multi-ethnic Belgium and Switzerland. And it should not be forgotten that the two most successful capitalist democracies – Britain and the United States – are themselves multi-ethnic states, the former with its Celtic and more recently ex-colonial minorities, the latter largely populated by immigrants from Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America and their often proudly ‘hyphenated’ descendants.
None the less, it is impossible to ignore what appears to be a long-run historical trend towards ever more ethnically homogeneous states; and it may well be that at least some of the above counter-examples will one day also fragment: Czechoslovakia already has, while in Belgium and the British Isles
the centrifugal forces of ethnic politics have seldom been stronger, as the ‘invented traditions’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries slowly fade.8
MEN AND MAPS
This was not at all what the early nationalists anticipated. When trying to imagine an ideal map of Europe in 1857, the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini imagined eleven nation states.9 At that time the map of Europe was dominated by four multinational empires – the British, Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman – seven medium-sized monarchies – France, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden – a republican confederation – Switzerland – and a plethora of smaller states in Germany, Italy and the Balkans. Nationalism looked like the great simplifier, rationalizing the borders of Europe. William Penn’s Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693) had envisaged a European ‘league’, but this would have included, in addition to the major powers, ‘Venice, the Seven [Dutch] Provinces, the Thirteen [Swiss] Cantons, the dukedoms of Holstein and Courland’. Likewise, in his tract Perpetual Peace (1712) Charles de Saint-Pierre’s ideal ‘European Union’ consisted of twenty-four states, including Savoy, Venice, Genoa, Florence and the Papacy; as well as Bavaria, Lorraine, Courland, Saxony, Hanover, the Palatinate and the ecclesiastical electorates of the Holy Roman Empire.10 When Rousseau sought to refine de Saint-Pierre’s scheme he still had to reserve places for the Elector of Bavaria, the Elector Palatine, the ecclesiastical electors, the Republic of Venice, the King of Naples and the King of Sardinia.11 How much simpler, in Mazzini’s view, to have less than a dozen big nation-states, united on the basis of language and ethnicity.
The Cash Nexus: Money and Politics in Modern History, 1700-2000 Page 44