Larry Diamond will be visiting Williams to discuss his new book, Squandered Victory, which, for all you Central Asia people, reads much like The Devil and the Disappearing Sea, except that the scale (financially, geostrategically, historically, etc.) is exponentially larger, though it lacks Rob Ferguson’s wry humor.

Below are some draft questions I’m preparing for my interview with him. Please add your comments, suggestions, concerns, criticisms, etc. I’m hoping to have a good discussion about institutional vs. cultural strategies for democratization and the larger issues of US foreign policy. I’ll provide a wrap-up afterwards, so stay tuned.

• Your theory of democratic transition focuses on the development of civil society – non-governmental groups that check authority, organize people and advocate on particular issues. In Central Asia, these groups exist, but they are a creation of external donors, whom upon whom they are financially dependent. When I interviewed locals, they could not identify any such groups or describe their role in the national political process. Thus, it seems as though these groups largely do not contribute to the democratization of their country, since they do not have (or need) popular support. Do these groups qualify as civil society? If so, how can they establish popular support? What should donors’ policy be?

• The specter of Islam Karimov looms over all of Central Asia – a dictator able to maintain order at the cost of the liberties and, in several cases, lives of his own people. He represents one side of a zero-sum decision facing the governments of the republics – the stability of autocracy vs. the potential economic benefits of political liberalization. For many governments, particularly that of Tajikistan’s Emomali Rakhmonov, Uzbekistan presents a compelling example of the benefits of state control – Karimov held high-profile meetings with Putin and Hu Jintao after massacring hundreds of civilians at Andijan. How should democracy promotion programs (and their respective governments) respond to the threat of Karimov?

• In Squandered Victory, you say:

“Success in these difficult circumstances requires a substantial commitment of international human and financial resources, delivered in a timely fashion, and sustained over an extended period…Resources must reach the people of the society - ideally, with local participation and ownership.” (307)

How will you accomplish a sense of ownership in societies not founded on the rule of law? How do you prevent grant dependency? What about examples of corruption? (such as The Devil and the Disappearing Sea or, not to pick on the World Bank, the Dushanbe Water Supply Project, begun in at least 2001 - $17 million later, Dushanbe has no clean water).

• The book asserts that

“we cannot get to Jefferson and Madison without going through Thomas Hobbes. You can’t build a democratic state unless you first have a state, and the essential condition for a state is that it must have an effective monopoly over the means of violence.” (305)

How do states go from this “prisoners’ dilemma” situation to a Jeffersonian democracy?

• Who should take responsibility for democracy in a world of self-interested actors? What incentives should be provided to different actors within a country’s domestic political sphere?

• How can civic nationalism avoid the dangerous repercussions of ethnic nationalism or increased authoritarianism?

• What should the role of elections be in the overall democratic transition? How important are they?

Having been back in the United States for a little over a month, I can say that my perspective has changed quite a bit. Things that were suddenly false became true again; the best example came in my Intro. to Political Economics class, in which we were discussing the classic pin factory example from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. While the division of labor seems to be an economic Truth (right up there with the law of supply and demand). However, I now realize that, in fact, the workers are trapped within a classic prisoners’ dilemma - they can cheat on the factory - stealing equipment or produce, while the others suffer in marginal losses or remain loyal and risk suffering their own losses if their co-workers cheat on the system. Though this evaluation might seem a bit twisted, it in fact neatly sums up the political economy of Central Asia, in my perception. While in the United States we might take for granted that the workers are loyal to the company for whatever reason (i.e. they believe in job security or in fair meritocratic advancement up the corporate ladder), Central Asia seems to follow the variously Russian, French and Iraqi proverb “after me, a flood” - that is, after I am finished, there can be a flood for all I care, since I no longer have any interest in what was lost. Without some form of participation in the company, there is no incentive for work, bringing us to Central Asia’s current malaise. Although Mongolia and (in theory) Kyrgyzstan have stock markets, I doubt either functions efficiently (if at all) - I remember walking past a building in Bishkek marked ’stock market’, only to look in and find it empty (but perhaps it was a lunch break!). Anyway, what you get is a lot of cheating and a little development - everyone tries to maximize their own short-term interest at the great cost of any long-term benefit. Businessmen are trapped by the current system into cheating (that is, bribing officials, disobeying laws, nonpayment of taxes, etc.) and, having no way to imagine anything different, are content to live out life (though I’d imagine that the average Intro. to PoliEc student, not knowing about a system other than that based on Smith’s principles, would be pretty happy to live within it as well, believing (correctly or otherwise) that the benefit of staying with the company outweighed the benefit of cheating. This is, of course, to say nothing of the state or its relationship with citizens and the public in general. But that’s a subject for another day…

Sorry for the delay, BlogSome was mysteriously down for the month of August, and I’ve been caught in a whirlwind of activity since.

I’m back in the United States, having returned to the Ivory Tower. Interestingly, my Central Asia travels have given me a powerful new perspective on political theory. I have seen that things which are ipso facto true are false in Central Asia. For example, Adam Smith uses a pin factory to illustrate how the division of labor makes the pin-making process more efficient, thus lowering the cost of a pin: rather than each worker doing every step, each person simply repeats one task over and over again, maximizing his skill and allowing for greater standardization among pins. However, upon reflection, I realized that this lofty ideal would never work in Central Asia: someone would show up late, swipe a necessary piece of machinery, bribe his way out of work (this happens with the Uzbek cotton harvest, which university students are ‘required’ to participate in), or simply try to take some of the pins to sell on his own. Now, I’m not trying to be racist or anything - this scenario likely plays itself out all over the world, and probably external factors made it work in eighteenth-century England, such as the high opportunity cost (i.e. once you had a job you wanted to keep it because there was nothing else to do). Nevertheless, I never realized until now how many assumptions Smith really makes; his workers must understand a range of concepts (social contract, rule of law) entirely foreign to the people I met this summer. Does this mean that democracy promotion will inherently fail? It seems so, but I’m not sure. Stay tuned…

The Central Asia Democracy Project is issuing a call for papers on the popularity in Central Asia of Counterstrike. (Note for all retired gamers like me: it’s the Half-Life add-on, not the Command and Conquer sequel, as I had originally thought - the latter would have been really interesting from a historical perspective.) The game must tax the feeble computers at the Internet cafes, about half of which are used by kids playing it. Yet despite what must be incredibly poor ping numbers (do they still use that measurement?) they still play it. Why CounterStrike? Does it reflect some characteristic of the under-15 generation in Central Asia or is it an element of globalization that has reached even the back roads of the Tien Shan mountains? Email me with answers; if there are any logical or interesting explanations, I’ll post them here.