Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

Expanding immigrant access and rights, then, can boost the required size of the winning coalition and, in the process, improve the quality of public policy. But with so many interests aligned against immigration because of its short-term costs, it is hard to change immigration rules. Or is it?

A simple fix that lifts everyone’s longer term welfare is to grandfather in immigrants. Amnesty for illegal immigrants—a dirty word in American political circles—is a mechanism to choose selectively those who demonstrate over a fixed period their ability to help produce revenue by working, paying taxes, and raising children who contribute to the national economy, national political life, and national social fabric. Give us your poor and let’s see if they can make a better life. Give us your tired and let’s see if they can be energized by participating in making a more public-goods oriented government work better. Give us your huddled masses longing to be free and let’s see if their children don’t grow up to be the foundation of a stronger, more peaceful, and more prosperous society than they first came to. For generation after generation, the waves of immigrants to the United States have made our winning coalitions bigger and better. They have turned from poor, tired, huddled masses into modern America’s success story. This was no happenstance of time or place. This is the straightforward consequence of easy citizenship and, with it, an expanded winning coalition that makes for better governance.

Removing Misery

Beneficial change in the third world is among the most difficult challenges to overcome. Rampant poverty, frequent exposure to the resource curse, and long-entrenched autocratic regimes all stand in the way. But change can and does happen, as the stories of South Africa, Tunisia, Taiwan, and Mexico demonstrate. When change does happen, it can come from two sources: internal political upheaval or external threat, and between these two, external threat is far less likely to succeed in making many better off at the expense of the few. American presidents and European prime ministers have long advocated a democratic world and they might even claim some qualified success. The world is much more democratic today than it was fifty years ago, but it is not likely that our cries for freedom in the world—rarely backed up by effective efforts—turned many dictators into freedom lovers. As recent events in the Middle East demonstrate, effective change comes mostly from local circumstances. After nearly a decade, the US government has spent over $1.1 trillion dollars on combat and nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan.5 The resulting governments are still largely isolated from the need to improve the welfare of the people. The citizens of several Middle Eastern nations achieved more in the matter of weeks with virtually no expense. And if these changes are solidified by winning the backing of essentials and influentials, then they stand a much better chance of producing meaningful democratization.

In the winter of 2011, waves of protests swept across North Africa and the Middle East. Educated, unemployed people in places like Tunisia and Egypt set the wheels in motion. With 25 percent to 30 percent of people under twenty-five unemployed in these countries, the downside for rebels was small. The upside was great and success was quickly achieved with relatively little violence. At the same time that these countries were engulfed in regime-changing mass upheaval, uprisings in Libya and Bahrain also occurred but with very different consequences. Unemployment among the young educated classes was no better in these and other oil-rich lands of the Middle East. But unemployment is not that big a deal for their leaders because, after all, they get their money from oil, not labor. In terms of comparative deprivation it may seem odd to some that the Tunisians were the first to rebel, since, at least in relative terms, they were well looked after by their government. They had a relatively free press and the ability to assemble. Revolution, however, neither comes to those most deprived of freedom nor to those who are already free. It is most likely in the great in between.

Oppression is a tourist turnoff, so Tunisia’s former president, Ben Ali, whose economy relied significantly on tourism, was compelled to allow more freedom than he probably would have liked. All those tourists were unwitting agents for change. They placed Tunisia at risk of revolt to overthrow the government, because to get their dollars the government had to grant more freedoms to the people. These freedoms translated into education and access to information and the means to communicate through the Internet. That, in turn, meant the possibility of organizing and coordinating fellow dissenters, creating free assembly online that could and was translated into mass assembly in the streets. Egypt, another economy with a large tourist sector, was perhaps in the same boat. Hosni Mubarak ran an oppressive, often violent regime against his fellow Egyptians, but he never ruled with the iron fist of a world-class oppressor like natural gas–rich Than Shwe or the vicious Cambodian murderer Pol Pot. Mubarak couldn’t afford to. With US aid waning, Mubarak needed tourist revenue more and more and so he showed a modicum of restraint. No such restraint was seen in Libya, where oil dollars provided Qaddafi with ample funds to buy mercenary soldiers who did not hesitate to slaughter rebels seeking to overthrow the colonel’s regime.

In looking for places that may be good targets for democratization, it is probably a good idea to look to places that rely on tourists for a big chunk of their economy, like Kenya, Fiji, and an independent Palestine, which hopes to be a big tourist destination. Reliance on tourism is, of course, only one reason that an autocrat might allow just enough freedom that opponents might see how to organize and revolt. Any profound economic strain will do just fine in turning thought to liberalization provided the strain is so deep that there isn’t enough money around to buy political loyalty.

If some mass organizers see how to mount an uprising, the problem still remains of when to strike. The right moment almost always depends on their country having a new leader, a sick leader, or a bankrupt leader. Tunisia’s Ben Ali, for instance, was rumored to be seriously ill, possibly suffering from prostate cancer, and Egypt’s Mubarak, in his eighties, may also have been ailing. Those who want to protest when the time is right and those overseas who want to see democracy blossom can work on laying the groundwork ahead of time. This may be much easier to achieve than we sometimes believe.

Cell phone technology and access to the Internet can transform the lives of people, even poor people, in developing nations. Even simple information, like market prices for crops, can make an enormous difference in the income of a farmer, and of course, the more they can earn the harder they will work. Such mobile technologies are also giving poor people access to services, such as banking and insurance, which many of us in developed nations take for granted. Mobile phone accounts will be increasingly used to transfer money so that with a simple text message a farmer can pay for fertilizer or receive payment for his crops.6 The political empowerment of the people by such technology goes way beyond economic benefits. The adoption of such technologies will make it impossible for leaders to turn off an important means through which the citizens can coordinate, without also turning off the commerce and economic activities that the leadership needs to provide the tax resources with which to sustain themselves in power. When economic circumstances dictate that a despot’s flow of cash depends on allowing the people to converse, the dictator is truly between a rock and a hard place. Turn off the technology for long and there will not be enough money to buy coalition loyalty. Leave the technology on and the people can coordinate to overthrow their autocrat. Given such circumstances, a smart dictator will look ahead and work out that he is better off liberalizing now than risk being exiled, jailed, or killed later. It is not happenstance that a SIM (subscriber identity module) card for mobile phones costs over $1,000 in Burma. It is also not a coincidence that J. J. Rawlings liberalized when Ghana faced economic collapse.