TRASHFUTURE - UNLOCKED Riley's Commie Book Club: The End of the Transition Paradigm

Episode Date: January 20, 2019

Riley's commie book club unlocked for you this weekend! Listen to Riley talk about his experiences with International Relations as an academic discipline via a paper by Thomas Carothers, The End of the Transition Paradigm.

Hello and welcome back again to Riley doing a solo thing because that's right. It's time for one of Riley's book clubs, but we're doing it a bit different this week because it's Riley's festive book club and rather than talk about a piece of writing that I like that it deals with sort of leftist thought or theory or sort of describes many of the problems that we might be seeing existing in our society in which we live blah blah blah blah fucking hell. I'm Milo's in the studio with me Milo's in the studio with me doing something else. He's be god damn it. This is going to be very hard and the worst thing is that I'm doing a subject that's very easily parody parodiable because I'm not like I said

I'm not talking about one of these books that I might recommend. I'm actually talking about an academic paper called the end of the transition paradigm which is you might say what the hell is that? Well, it's it's a piece of international relations theory because I wanted to talk about the absolute sort of decrepit nonsense that is international relations theory in this one paper by this guy Thomas Carothers that and he's like a Carnegie endowment goon like he was like literally involved in quote unquote democracy promotion in Latin America in the 1980s like he is one of the worst people but he's written this article that actually like is a rare moment of honesty for the discipline of international relations so we're going to go we're going to get into it.

So international relations is the subject that produces just the most incredible titles for articles and journals like foreign policy or foreign affairs or whatever so it can be titled something like you know norms in retreat changing paradigms of global governance and the WTO and beyond or obstinate or obsolete the fate of the nation-state in the case of western Europe or something like the honor of dignity a statesman reflects on diplomacy after populism one of those is a real title and I invite you to guess which one because IR is this very pompous fake academic subject it's riven with insecurity about whether or not it's a real science and it's a kind of microcosm about what kinds of scholarship are taken seriously with the discipline is traditionally cast

between liberals who believe that economic integration makes war unprofitable and the more sort of hard-line hawkish thinkers who think that military might is the only thing that matters and it's a deeply it's a deeply sort of European or Atlanticist discipline so Euro-American because the first IR department was started in the University of Aberystwyth in Wales and I think 1919 and the whole point of early sort of IR scholarship was to try and understand precisely what happened in sort of the first world war how it came about potentially how it might be stopped in future but also to like train the sort of this the sort of coterie of diplomats and so on who'd be running the League of Nations which as we all know went very very well now IR is

distinct from what you might call international history international history is I think defined very well by sort of a favorite figure of mine from the 18th century Friedrich Schiller who articulated that sort of statement of purpose which that the international historian must select from the stream of events those that exercise an essential unmistakable and easily comprehensible influence on the present shape of the world and the situation of the contemporary generation this is I think a basically worthwhile pursuit international relations sort of as a parody of this discipline it's it's the dubious science of taking these efforts to explain why events happen and treating them like well a hard science with sort of very set down and universalizable

theories I'll go through some of the basics I'm going to get to the paper in a few minutes I just want to talk about the discipline a little bit in general so realist quote unquote realist theories and I say this with a capital R I'm not saying they're more realistic than others it's just this is what they call themselves because they all have brain worms realist theories suggest that states basically interact in such a way where they're paranoid about one another because the entire international sphere is about survival of the fittest because so the core contention of international relations that sort of makes it different from international history other than just its sort of reliance on theory is that it conceives of this sphere called the

international that is distinct from others you know national individual and so on and the international system is particularly distinct because unlike any other realm of human existence it's anarchic that doesn't mean it's chaotic but it means that a group of basically like objects so states are interacting with one another largely making up the rules as they go along based on their power to do so there's no cop you can't call 911 on the United States because you know who you're gonna call so to speak you know in global politics there is no there's no police force there's no recourse you're basically there helping yourself and if you can't help yourself then someone else is going to help themselves to what you have so you know how do you punish the usa if it commits

a crime against cuba how do you call it a crime moreover if there are no rules so that's actually that's the one bit of international relations that I think is interesting which is it is this it is the only study of modern if you like modern officially recognized bodies that are interacting with no legitimate no fully legitimate system outside them as a fully legitimate not to mean like you know the laws of the united states are legitimate but they're widely believed to be legitimate and and international relations it's all kind of contested it's the it's the murkiest place in politics that's actually kind of interesting but with their commitment to keeping their discipline sort of having the trappings of science and having the trappings of objectivity

it's basically got the same disease that's rendered modern analytic philosophy a more or less useless discipline increasingly concerned as it is with naval gazing and debating how many angels can dance in the head of a pin so let's go through a couple of this sort of meta theories so there are realist type theories I don't mean they're more realistic than others but they've been called realist because they are all about conflict and how cooperation fails because they're about states being paranoid about one another I think the fact that they're called realist actually gives a sense of like just how little these people really think that any kind of better world is possible they're very very cynical very very game theory oriented like it all comes out of the

rand corporation and the work of of Nash on game theory they say they see the world in terms of betrayals and even the fact that like the other schools of international relations except the the title that this one school is the realists you know it's it's sort of it betrays that that's this feeling that well even the liberals just sort of think that their failures this is not very different from sort of how most liberals act anyway so realist theories are all about looking at the way states interact in terms of absolute versus relative gains if I'm going to strike a deal with you and I gain and you gain a little bit more I won't strike that deal because you're going to might use that little bit more to kill me and states that are mistrustful

of others don't get killed because they're more cautious it's basically Darwin and some one of them sort of more popular I feel like applied thinkers so like there are theorists there are guys like Kenneth waltz or john mirshimer who international relations scholars who are listening to this or people who've done useless math like degrees like I have well like I know who those people are of course there are there are you know I are 101 but most people have never heard of them because they're not really relevant except of course the people who make the policies that kill the almost everyone these guys are the the eggheads in the ivory tower they just sort of write and they might advise an occasional president but they mainly just do the thinking

and a more interesting example of a realist as a guy called george kennan now kennan was a figure in the state department throughout the middle of the 20th century and he was you know a fucking absolute ghoul who's like a little junior kissinger and he defined the or he helped define the Truman doctrine of containing the soviet union and he sent this famous missive called the long telegram called the sources of soviet conduct where he basically sort of was hand wringing that the soviets were well actually have a selection from it so he says the main element of any united states policy toward the soviet union must be a long term patient but firm and vigilant containment of russian expansive tendencies soviet pressure

against the free institutions of the western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of soviet policy but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence so there are a few sort of there's a lot going on in that one sort of relatively prominent passage from the long telegram number one is that the it having a sort of this realist theory of international relations sort of defined by all of these egg heads you know and cares about george kennan had a language where he could say that well the russians are naturally expansive

and so we must regrettably be expansive it's the language of the u.s being unfortunately dragged into wars it doesn't really want to fight the idea that all the u.s has gotten bogged down in vietnam oh no we've we've been forced to sort of you know build missiles and point them at cuba we've been forced to you know arm the mujahideen in afghanistan oh no we didn't want to do all this but we had to and you can just see it's this firm vigilant containment of russian expansive tendencies so well they're not they're violent we must be equally violent it's it it it prevents even the possibility of talking about the taunt because it removes the possibility of trust but also you can we talk about this sort of the vigilant application of counterforce

well this is just setting up the whole idea of we need to occupy or engage in regime change more or less everywhere you know this one statement is responsible for untold millions of deaths throughout the 20th century this one sentence based on this one theory of international relations or rather you could say it's based on the u.s national interest that sort of theorists of international relations then spend a lot of time dressing up as a kind of scientific theory well like oh actually u.s interest well it's just science guys i'm just doing i'm just i've run the numbers and apparently we have to invade vietnam and bomb cambodia so liberal theories in the other hand and again much like realist theories are sort of a title

liberal theories are also a title because they're not necessarily they're not necessarily like liberal as we might understand them because ir theory is all about relative gains enjoyed by states so liberal theories just suggest the opposite of realist theories which is that states only care about absolute gains which means that i'm going to if you know we're in a deal and i gain five and you gain six well that's fine because i'm still better off than i was before it doesn't matter that you're a little bit better off than i am because they say that and and the way they can do that is they can create institutions to constrain one other's behavior so like the world trade organization creates sets of frameworks in which they can interact where

you know their behavior will be known there's the shadow of the future so it's like the shadow of the future refers the fact that yeah if i betray you now then everyone's going to know i'm untrustworthy where sort of states can become interdependent on one another and then not attack each other over time now once again you know this has been you know kind of right sort of not in any meaningful sense because it it really only describes states that are already pretty much aligned you couldn't possibly use this theory to to tell you anything about the relationship between say you know america and you know north korea but that's again that's because these these theories are kind of very rooted in late 20th century europe which is why they're so fundamentally bellicose i think

so one of the one of the one of the most prominent theories of this sort of school and one that i think many of the listeners to this podcast will probably heard of is called the democratic peace theory which suggests that democracies just don't go to war with our democracies right or like you know because we have these institutions in common because we're able to trust one another because we can interact with each other etc etc etc again it's it's utterly absurd i mean it's complete nonsense you know what do we call american democracy promotion in chile or when they installed pinoché or in iran and they installed the shah in fact you know it's democracies don't go to war when the united states already likes them

basically uh and and and it's it's just sort of a cape for power and it's again it's something that when we go into the article um we'll sort of see more more nakedly as a grift but these are these are people like and mary slaughter uh and samatha power they're the kinds of people who believe these things the sort of obama era un's un officials who are sort of very concerned about about democracy promotion and finally there are constructivist theories which suggest that state behavior will define how other states act the most famous expression from the most famous paper in the constructivist sort of universe is anarchy is what states make of it so it means that anarchy isn't inherently combative like the realist think an anarchy isn't

inherently sort of the inherently sort of lead to cooperation over time amongst like minded states like the liberals think it's just sort of it can go either way and so really what we have is we have a whole discipline whose paradigms when taken together basically explain nothing because they say well it can be a variety of ways depending on a bunch of circumstances that are always different it has no explanatory power it's hilarious that that defils and phd's and this are still getting funded but that's the problem international relations is less of a science and more of a social club um because they're all of these meta theories have spawned millions of interpretations of people who are sort of friends with one another who sort of end up advising

various presidents the realists advise the republicans and the liberals advise the democrats and they all just sort of reinforce that the world use they already have and making them seem scientific um and they all come from the same sort of very small set of elite schools and they all publish the same kinds of articles in a very small set of elite journals so i'm talking about like uh the kennedy school uh london school of economics is a good ir department columbia it doesn't matter that's it's the usual ones though the usual suspects and they all sort of jack off into a coffin and a bunch of them are in skull and bones and all this that and the other and they're incredibly elitist but this gives them this ridiculously

blinkered view of global politics because their their status as the establishment of sort of vaunted ir theory is basically really just comes down to um be just comes down to using scientific language to justify your party's policies and being sort of a generally good dinner party conversationalist or being able to win any pub quiz round when it comes to the the politics section you know and further just prepares you for a job in the diplomatic core where you kind of have a sort of priesthood language to talk to your counterparts in other countries you know you can reference the same the same articles that you all read in foreign policy and it of course it should be of no surprise to anyone that marxism is completely

sidelined in this whole this whole this whole field of study and i think i think that's for two reasons the one usual one is that sort of marxism is often sort of quite sidelined in a lot of prestigious politics departments just i think they're still afraid of the cold war they're worried that mccarthy might sort of burst out of his grave and you know do mccarthyism again like brendan o'neill keeps talking about um but the other issue is that like ir tends to conceive of the international as this unique sphere that's distinct from the domestic sphere entirely and it's it's wouldn't it would be weird for a marxist to take that point of view because a marxist would see these things as sort of put together a marxist would see would not really be interested in

sort of separating out the international as a unique sphere with its own sui generous tendencies that don't arise or aren't connected to say the domestic relations of production let's not to say there are no i marxist ir theorists there are plenty of them it's just they i wouldn't i wouldn't say they've really had a lot of mainstream impact apart from like the sort of realists and the liberals and even the constructivists have had an example of a couple as immanuel wallerstein who wrote a book on what he calls world systems theory which argues basically just like there is a core and periphery of nations whose relationship is one another similar to that of like a bourgeoisie and working class and then a state so you know the

the core nations you know western europe america canada japan australia whatever whatever whatever the usual basically have an exploitative relationship with everywhere else and that the international order kind of arises like the superstructure arises out of an economic base that's created by capitalism at home so that's that's an example of a marxist ir theory that is distinctly ir because it applies the marxist principles to the international sphere but like i said it's not that common again there are some brilliant marxist ir scholars and we can talk about it all day but i would say it's been pretty ghettoized and has not really been taken seriously enough in the halls of power and people certainly aren't granted defils and phd's in it like they

are for producing works that are called like you know the the dignity of power hard choices and genocide prevention and you know whatever so now we get to the paper this paper like i said is called the end of the transition paradigm it's from the early 2000s and it's about why democracy is not necessarily a durable condition this is a very odd choice for kami book club i know but that's because it's festive book club um and and thomas carrother is the author of this book you know like i said he's a karangida endowment gul with a history of democracy promotion in eighties latin america it's basically the opposite of the kind of thing i would ordinarily talk about but looking back on sort of talking about what ir is it's very uncommon i think for a paper

especially one that is sort of quite short and powerful as this one is it's like 12 pages long to really just sort of explode some of the pretensions of this discipline so i guess you could say this if you wanted to seat this somewhere i'd say this is it's not really realist it's not really liberal i'd say it's more think of it as a response to liberal assumptions about democracies and the broader sort of democratic peace study because the democratic peace study is like well it's basically the democratic peace is like fuki ama you know the world is democratizing the world is becoming more liberal history is going that way there's nothing you can do about it and by the way it's over um this is i think you know people have been

saying in 2016 oh history history started again you know it's well carothers have been saying it since about you know 2003 you know this is someone who has been actually relatively on it again even though he's evil so let's let's let's let's start the article he opens the article by saying in the last quarter of the 20th century trends in seven different regions converge to change the political landscape of the world here are the trends one the fall of right-wing authoritarian regimes in southern europe in the mid 1970s so this would be like portugal salazar the replacement of military dictatorships by elected civilian governments across latin america from the late 1970s through the late 1980s again wonder who put those military dictatorships there

three the decline of authoritarian rule in parts of east and south asia starting the mid 1980s the collapse of communist regimes in eastern europe at the end of the 1980s the breakup of the soviet union and the establishment of the post soviet republics in 91 and the decline of one party regimes in many parts of sub-saharan africa in the first half of the 1990s and a weak but liberalizing trend in some middle eastern countries in the 1990s and we know where that went this was referred to as the third wave of democratization by samuel huntington a theorist to you may be familiar with for creating the clash of civilizations thesis which basically said that islam couldn't permit the west to exist because it was a they hate our freedom basically

so the guy who gave george who sort of you know the og they hate our freedom guy also was that was this sort of oh there's this wave of democratization by the way yeah samuel huntington another ghoul harvard guy anyway and so the the sort of the u.s government and the u.s foreign policy community sort of looked at those seven trends and they said the third wave of democracy is here we need a an analytical framework to conceptualize and respond to like this what's going on what is what's generalizable about this even like going back to schiller right what events can we extract from the stream of history to put together and understand why all of a sudden everything seems much more democratic so carothers goes on because it was derived

principally from their own interpretations of the patterns of democratic change taking place but also to a lesser extent from the early works of the emergent academic field of and i shit you not this is the title transit ology the study of transitions to democracy a again i i really do hope some of you are shaking your heads right now because it's such an obvious nonsense field right so democracy promoters extended this model of transition as a universal paradigm for understanding democratization and it became very ubiquitous in u.s policy circles as a way of talking about thinking about and designing sort of u.s democracy promoting interventions in the process of political change around the world now we when we think of u.s democracy

promoting interventions we i think often immediately tend to think of you know the then painting democracy on a series of bombs and then dropping them a bunch of schools which is quite often when the u.s says we're promoting democracy that is what they're doing but there are other demo i you might say pro democracy interventions that these would be undertaken not by the military but by like us aid to a lesser extent the state department where it would just be like they would like look at a country and say okay we're going to fund your elections we're going to we're going to try to set up civil society groups i mean inevitably it was still a tool of us foreign policy it was still an imperialist endeavor but i think this is what carothers is

talking about mainly is soft imperialism like he is the quite admirably he does recognize the u the united states his role in sort of creating well anti democracies at least in in south america he notably doesn't mention iran but never mind so these are the kinds of things we're talking about these these interventions so many countries he goes on that policy makers and aid practitioners consist in calling persist in calling transitional are not in transition to democracy and other democratic transitions that are underway most of them aren't following the model so what is the model what are the assumptions that define the transition paradigm the first which is the umbrella for all the others is that any country moving away from dictatorial rule can

be considered a country in transition toward democracy so already like that it's the at base it's teleological which means it is a process that is based around going to a defined end point so teleology is something that like you get talked about a lot in in in ancient Greece even so like Aristotle was a very teleological thinker he would think that okay um an an acorn contains within it an oak tree its destiny is to become an oak tree the the teleology of the acorn is to become an oak tree it can go no other it can't become a you know mulberry bush it can't become a guy it must become an oak tree and so they had this very almost Aristotelian view of dictatorship as inevitably producing democracy and it doing it in the same way

and that's sort of the second assumption is that democratization tends to unfold in a set sequence of stages which he referred to as opening breakthrough and consolidation so what we mean when we talk about opening is this is you know a period of sort of political liberalization where cracks sort of might appear in the ruling regime they might sort of give accession to sort of civil society groups to demonstrate in public or whatever the breakthrough is the collapse of the regime in the emergence of like no democratic system where they a new government might actually come to power there might be a national election and then the consolidation is the then building of like the organs of state that create what we might think of as a

functioning democracy right where you know they write a constitution and etc etc etc basically it's they're becoming more like the united states look at that isn't that lovely and and related to this core sequence of democratization because they think it always goes the same way there's a dictator the dictator is inevitably opposed by the people that people that opposition leads to eventually to a successful breakthrough and then that leads to a consolidation of a democratic society and the third assumption and this is I think one of the really important ones that makes the sort of whole school of transitology a complete sort of a pants on head stupid

a birdbrained point of view which is that they believe that they have this core belief that in the determinative power of elections and democracy promoters basically like they just are like it's just elections or democracy and if we can do elections then democracy just sort of happens you know it's why in afghanistan you know you'll we sort of they're like okay well we need to make elections in afghanistan but then we find that people just sort of don't trust the system that they're voting in don't trust the candidates they're voting for that a lot of the candidates that are being voted for are just local warlords that we've empowered a lot of people can't vote freely because they're threatened and that a lot of

the people that they vote for just you know work in their own work they just self deal they just work in their own interest because you know we've turned it into a nrk hellscape right so it's it's the the determinative power of elections is well you could say as a sort of if it's your instrumental variable it's dog shit because there are so so many countries that have elect either have elections that are sham so you know like no hasni mubarak getting you know 100 of the vote every time wild or elections that yeah might even be functional but that are are just sort of window dressing on as sort of societies that are fundamentally non-democratic the fourth assumption and this sort of is related to the third assumption

is that the underlying conditions he writes in transitional countries their economic level political history institutional legacies ethnic makeup sociocultural traditions and other structural features will not be major factors near the onset or the outcome of the transition process so they this is i think a key liberal international relations theory characteristic which is that i think that these processes in fact it's a key international relations character theory characteristic because if you're going to think about the international etc that they that there is just this process that happens at this third level that this international level of democratization and that it sort of pulls it yanks states up from one state one sort of

state of being as a dictatorship to a democracy right it's like you're a democracy now and that it just sort and it happens like a science and it happens almost like a law of physics it's like well countries become democracies and they do them this way and it's much akin to if i was holding a ball and i dropped the ball well of course the ball always falls the same way because well this is the ball and that's the earth and gravity pulls the ball towards the earth it's always going to pull it in the same way because well it's just pulls it down and and the tendency of and i'm aware this is sort of in between international politics and international relations but in in in reality the line is always very blurred that the tendency of of international

political studies to sort of really just grasp on to this identity as a science essentially just means that we we we see a very complex and historically determined unsure sort of product of the contestation of power which is the transition of a country from one system of government to another as a sort of fundamentally set down thing that we can just sort of set and forget we just have to help them have elections and we can just fund it and and then we the dynamism and he says a remarkable scope of the third wave buried old deterministic and culturally noxious assumptions about democracy such as that only countries in the american style middle class or a heritage of protestant individualism could become democratic this was the way of thinking sort of you might

say in the middle of the 20th century and earlier which was a well they're not ready for democracy is sort of this almost goes back to like john stewart mill who is writing about how well we can be free in the west but the savages aren't ready to be free so we have to colonize them this same point of view just never really got challenged even when international relations was supposedly becoming much more scientific in the middle of the 20th century they just had this view that basically to be a democracy you needed to be western and co-rothers here sort of does sort of gives the this sort of school of transitology credit for saying okay well he didn't actually assume all of this stuff and for policymakers and aid practitioners this was

a new outlook and it was a break from this long-standing cold war mindset that most countries in the developing world just weren't ready for democracy which again and again co-rothers the reason i want to read this paper is that co-rothers is so honest about this sort of just of saying talking about the the u.s.'s relationship with the idea of democracy promotion around the world he says this mindset dovetailed with us policies of propping up anti-communist dictators around the world so for both the scholarly and policy communities this new no precondition so you don't need to not be ready for democracy to get ready for democracy outlook was gratifyingly optimistic and sort of liberated them from their old frankly you know racist imperialist assumptions even

though it gave way to new forms of racism and imperialism as we all know but that's it so we went for a view that democracy was specifically anti-communist to a view of democracy that was vague poorly defined and based in blanket assumptions about the importance of voting and so that's sort of the fourth assumption which is i think the most interesting one and finally the is the assumption that i think is related to the fourth which is that the transition paradigm rests on the assumption that the democratic institutions that are making up this third wave are being built in coherent functioning states and so that basically just i'll go back to the subject the example of afghanistan afghanistan has historically been a very difficult

state to govern if you're at all interested in it i my favorite book on the country is by a guy called thomas barfield and it's just called afghanistan but you know afghanistan is without going into too much detail it's it's it it has been governed more in the style of sort of persian satrapies where a central a central a central leader usually from one of two pashto tribes pashtun tribes would consult would consolidate power through sort of delegation and negotiation with the regions it was a functioning society but it wasn't a west phalion state as we might know it west phalion state is the state as defined by the treaty of west phalia which is the area in which one ruler has sort of sovereignty and can conduct the conduct the conduct of others

so they can create laws and so on so that's it was a treaty in europe that sort of gave us our modern idea of what a state is so our idea of what a state is then is european and our idea of what democracy is is sort of european our international relations assumptions were sort of quite european and we just assumed that there'd be functioning states elsewhere is that afghanistan was never a functioning state in the west phalion sense it was a functioning society but it was much more sort of negotiated but it has taken sort of so many different forms of having a functioning society that were nothing like a west phalion state so for example the afghan empire under akhmad shah dorani in the 18th century

was sort of much more about sort of receiving fealty and extracting tribute whereas abdo rachman's rule in the 19th century was much more like a sort of series of military despotism where he basically killed everyone and displaced the entire hasara population so like it's afghanistan has been both of those things within the space of a hundred years of one another based on different styles of ruling that were not necessarily these west phalion ones and so the assumption of the transition paradigm that the societies it was going to be sort of converting to democracy naturally just had these west phalion states they were natural sort of failed to take into account that the sort of export export of

the west phalion state around the world was a relatively recent invention and it's not to say that these other societies aren't capable of having a west phalion state i mean you know i think a west phalion state might have slotted on to abdo rachman's government quite well you know and west phalion states have sort of in different modes slid on to on to certain sort of post-colonial countries sort of more effectively or less effectively or what have you i think it's the assumption that this is the natural mode of sort of human society is one that just has completely bitten you might call western democracy promoters in the ass sort of repeatedly and it just made them look really really stupid in public a lot so for others sort of says okay those are

the assumptions so taken together he says the political trajectories of most third wave countries calling to serious doubt the transition paradigm that this is apparent if we revisit the major assumptions underlying the paradigm in light of the fact that well quite simply countries have either devolved into what he called feckless pluralism which was yes there are free and open elections but they're largely elite affairs that you know aren't really connected to anyone's day-to-day experiences it's oh yeah we have a million different parties but you it's it's not really it's it's still a very despotic almost mode of of politics even if there is this sort of facade of democracy over it and then you also have what he calls dominant power politics where

it's there is one political grouping whether it's a movement a party an extended family or a single leader sort of dominates the system in such a way that there appears to be little alteration of power in the foreseeable future but realistically like whether we're talking about sort of what he calls feckless pluralism or dominant power politics in both cases the state is not an effective deliverer of people's sort of day-to-day needs you know he says that that so for example the problem in is is often bureaucracy decaying under the stagnancy of a de facto one party rule in a dominant power society whereas in sort of a feckless pluralist society you actually have a disorganized unstable state so someone that might have like constant turnover

of ministers you know and so it's it in both in both cases sort of you might have democracy but you have very little governance and you know he goes through sort of where these different where these different modes obtain I mean I don't think it's as interesting to go through them just because well most of the countries that he might be citing they've changed sort of multiple times over and over again but so we might look at something like the Philippines with Duterte you know it was it has it has become what you might say is a very much a dominant power politics system whereas in somewhere like you know like Lebanon you might say we've got feckless pluralism but that's also not to say that sort of western more developed country not more developed western

countries sort of aren't sort of prone to this as well I mean what it how would we characterize the United States I mean you know the state certainly isn't delivering what people need but one thing I think Carothers didn't expect because the notable thing about the about the the countries that he cites or that they're all sort of post-colonial they're all transition they're all sort of former Soviet whatever whatever whatever whatever but he sort of leaves out the west well of course he does because he thinks that the west is what the model is and that all these countries will sort of well that the theory says all these countries will naturally emulate the model and he says well no they won't but what he didn't

expect was that the model would break down so I mean you can sort of think about thinking about sort of dominant power politics or feckless pluralism you can apply that to the United States after the recent midterms where in state houses and state legislatures across across the country you know ousted republicans are now you know are now radically curtailing the powers of the of the newly elected democrats sort of before they you know leave office in January and yeah maybe it'll get challenged by the courts but like or but the fact is you know laws and norms of sort of traditional participatory democracy are just becoming less and less valid or less and less powerful in the United States so you know it's it's not just the transition

paradigm that we can that we we have to discard when we read Carothers but it's we can say oh well this is this is happening to us too the the idea that sort of democracy is just a place you get to it's like well we have democracy or at the end of the game we're done playing now as opposed to a process as opposed to something that you look to extend and deepen as opposed to something that you sort of do and fight for because you know it's if your democracy is important and I mean look we we tend to sort of talk about democracy and economic terms on this podcast because well of course fucking marxist and so and we sort of had no intuitively that sort of these things need to be pushed for but I think it's important to remember that sort of these political rights

whatever they are you know they are being eroded from the right and that we cannot imagine that our own democracy is safe or stable in the face of all of these all of these erosions right so back to Carothers he says the various assumed component processes of consolidations such as political party development civil society strengthening traditional reform and media development almost never conformed to the technocratic ideal of rational sequences on which the indicator frameworks and strategic objectives of democracy promoters are built instead they are chaotic processes of change that go backwards and sideways as much as forward and not do so in any regular manner and I mean I feel like this comes to the heart of why sort of international relations

or the desire to do politics as a science is a sort of a doomed a doomed ambition now I don't mean that you can't be say a scientific socialist I don't mean that you can't say sort of well we are going to we are going to understand sort of like where wealth goes we're going to understand sort of what the effects of inequality are we're going to sort of hold these things as true but rather to sort of take these contingent sort of complex power related processes I say power related like I'm going to say us interest related processes and dress them up in the language of science at least sort of having these theories of democracy promotion or whatever that it's just it it has no explanatory value because you know they are chaotic processes

of change that sort of go backwards and sideways just as much as forward and not in any regular manner and so what's the point of trying to create a theory where it says well here are the steps and here are the and here are the indicators and you know when you pass 60 on the on the freedom house scale you have freedom you have a democracy that doesn't make any kind of sense and so you know it it's sort of it sort of rips back the cloak a little bit on saying that well really what we're doing here is we're trying to say that the world is the United States and to a lesser extent Britain well I mean to as great an extent but well Britain matters less the way these countries see the world is natural and the way that other countries are

is naturally underdeveloped and so the whole thing just exists as this cover for imperialism anyway let's go on so he says you know in many of these transitional countries regular genuine elections are held but political participation beyond voting remains shallow and governmental accountability is weak now what this reminds me of completely is I think a lot of the ways in which liberals think we have to defend our democracies here in the and the this sort of atlanticist world you know it's um they say well get out there and vote vote vote you know we're gonna I'm gonna queue up at that starbucks and I'm gonna make you write go vote on my cup and I'm gonna ask you if you voted I'm gonna yell at you if you didn't and I'm gonna

march on parliament I'm gonna ask them to please do the thing that I've asked for because I voted for you and they think they do that there is this liberal idea that that democracy equals elections voting equals democracy it's the most you can do is vote and if you sort of try to advance any kind of interest beyond that if you try to make the state work for you then well you're not doing democracy you're getting in the way of democracy we need to leave it to the technocrats we need to leave it to the experts but I think as thomas carothers is showing those experts are just sort of constantly and embarrassingly wrong all the time about more or less everything anyway so let's go on so he says the wide gulf between political elites and citizens

in many of these countries turns it to be rooted in structural conditions such as concentration of wealth or certain sociocultural additions traditions that elections themselves do not overcome I credit the the latter part less I mean you know america has got a sociocultural America in the uk have some pretty fucking anti-democratic sociocultural traditions and yet he still seems fine calling us a robust democracy but I really want to point to that first one he says the wide gulf between political elites and citizens in many of these countries turns it to be rooted in structural conditions such as the concentration of wealth interesting as robust democracy requires robust economic equality he's actually kind of recognizing

he's forced to recognize when reckoning with the failure of his colleagues ability to sort of do politics as a science i would sort of do politics as a science without power just looking at it in the abstract of like oh well it power doesn't matter because country is naturally transitioned from dictatorship to democracy blah blah blah like no it's you need to have these things like um like sort of robust economic equality or as we might call it economic democratization or else the states probably not going to work for people i mean the states working for fewer and fewer people as inequality has gotten worse and worse in the us and uk i mean i think these things are not at all unconnected so let's carry on ever since the preconditions for democracy were

enthusiastically banished in the heady days of the earth of the third wave a contrary reality the fact that various structural conditions clearly weigh heavily in shaping political outcomes has been working its way back in looking at the more successful recent cases of democratization for example which tend to be found in central europe the southern cone this is what they call set latin america i don't know why or east asia it is clear that relative economic wealth as well as past experience of the political pluralism contributes for the to the chances for democratic success now again i i think that what he's sort of forgetting is um is sort of is american promotion of its own interests you know i mean they were still not they're still not even keen now

on um amlo in mexico you know there's the the economist already has written oh will he go too far maybe there should be a coup etc etc etc but you know there will i'd say also we have to say the us is willing to sort of promote and strengthen democracies where it's in its interest to do so but yeah and the relative economic wealth i think is a cover for a significant import export partner with the us you know um it make this country if we go back to immanuel wallerstein we can say you know it's well yeah they have relative wealth and they can sort of have sort of more political pluralism because you know they are they've gone from peripheral nations to core nations you know japan was a peripheral nation until it had its

economic miracle in the 1980s um you know it's uh the the asian tigers you know all this stuff is japan south korea singapore hong kong anyway um and he's but he he goes on that we know within regions whether it's in the former communist world of sub-zohar in africa it is evident that the specific institutional legacies from predecessor regimes strongly affect the outcomes of attempted transitions in which you know again thomas carothers accidentally does dialectics you know of course the the nature of the previous situation will define sort of certain elements of the subsequent situation it's interesting that as a lot of these um sort of really relatively pompous ir types sort of begin to question their own um sort of so-called scientific so scientific style

theories they sort of begin to get little tiny bits of marxism just sort of drifting in so looking at sort of all democrat democracy all it turns out you need you need to actually have economic democratization and apparently there's a thesis and antithesis thing going on with the formation of new social structures oh my goodness did we just invent historical materialism i'm sure liberals would actually think that anyway so he's saying like where state building from scratch had to be carried out the core impulses and interests of the power holders and this is a bit of a long read but i think it's worth it so just locking in access to power and resources as quickly as possible ran directly contrary to what democracy building would have

required in countries with existing but extremely weak states the democracy building efforts funded by donors usually neglected the issue of state building with their frequent emphasis on diffusing power and weakening the relative power of the executive branch by strengthening the legislative and judi judicial branches of government and secondly um also by privatizing a bunch of shit and sort of thinking of democracy as operate as sort of running on the free market you know you end up with sort of just fire sales of state assets you know any sort i'll go back to it and encouraging decentralization so that's decentralization he's just getting carothers doesn't mention it in building civil society they were more about the redistribution of state power

than about state building the programs that democracy promoters have directed at governance have tended to be minor technocratic efforts such as training ministerial staff for aiding cabinet offices rather than major efforts at bolstering state capacity now when we think of bolstering state capacity i mean i believe we've tried to do that quite a bit i mean personally i think the best way to bolster state capacity is a mass redistribution of resources again carothers probably doesn't credit that idea um in fact this is sort of where carothers paper which i think has been brutally honest about um what democracy promotion is and what you how it has dovetailed with us foreign policy interests and why it's impossible to view with some kind of natural

process um it sort of tapers out here where he doesn't he doesn't really know what it means i think to sort of radically bolster state capacity because if you're a carnegie guy working in democracy promotion in south america in the 1980s are you really you really want to bolster state capacity that much you know if you're looking at a country that's got that's do i engage in an experiment of sort of a radical economic democratization like venezuela are you really trying to bolster that state's capacity are you really trying to bolster cuba's capacity like you never stop being an american foreign policy spook um you know even if you are working for one of the ghoul um addendum institutions like carnegie so you know i i don't really sort of

credit him much there but i'm not that interested in what thomas carothers thinks of as sort of bolstering state capacity in a real way i'm much more interested in what carothers has done here as a kind of active truth telling that is so very very very very rare in in international relations or international policy or foreign policy literature it's usually very sort of blinkered lee pro western it sort of has pretensions to science that just make it seem ridiculous and it it tends to be written sort of by and for practitioners who just love smelling their own farts this is a rare example of a paper that isn't that and i think it's a for me anyway it's a really interesting look into the ways in which america

sees its role in the world and and the ways in which sort of this discipline sort of has shaped um many people's lived experiences because it allows the dumbass theories of you know dipshit rich kids who went to harvard um to actually then go and shape policy and us policy towards countries that might be in sort of moments of you know um political turmoil anyway so that's a very that's a new kind of commie of commie book club it's why it's the festive book club because this wasn't certainly not a commie book it was neither commie or a book but i do hope you enjoyed this introduction to sort of what this discipline is and does and and this sort of one moment of accidental honesty that sort of came out of its it's

reckoning with itself in the aftermath of 9 11 and the aftermath of sort of that sort of moment of unipolarity in the 1990s you know if you have any questions but usually i don't encourage people to be kept you have any questions if you do have any questions i actually like talking about this stuff so do let me know my dms are open um otherwise you know thank you as as ever for listening if you're listening to this on the day's release thank you for being a patreon subscriber if you're listening to this when it gets unlocked next month consider becoming a patreon subscriber i wonder how brexit will have gone um dear future riley i hope brexit's gone very well anyway our theme song as ever is here we go

by jin saying you can find it on spotify and as ever you can commodify your descent with a t-shirt from little com rap perhaps you'd like to get one of the five core assumptions of the transition paradigm on on a t-shirt from ed you could really confuse the shit out of her and wouldn't that be fun for all of us anyway this has been another riley solo episode finished and signing off good night