The End of Power

by Naim, Moises

  New forums mean new opportunities. Across Europe, an array of left-wing, right-wing, ecologist, regionalist, single-issue, and, in some cases, downright eccentric parties like the Pirate Party International have taken advantage of new arenas to gain respectability and take votes away from the traditional players. A vote for them is no longer wasted; their small sizes or outlier stances are no longer an obstacle to relevance. These “fringe” parties can spoil, distract, retard, and even veto the decisions of the larger parties and their coalitions. The small “pirate” parties have always existed, but nowadays there are more of them and their ability to limit the choices of the megaplayers is felt in most of the world’s democracies.

  More power for local and regional authorities has also changed the prospects and public profiles of mayors and regional governors, sometimes boosting their national political careers and sometimes creating alternatives that bypass the capital altogether. The de facto foreign policy that some cities and regions now carry out goes well beyond the conventional trade promotion delegations and sister-city ceremonies.

  Some scholars argue that many cities and regions are now so successfully unmoored from central governments that a modern version of the medieval order of city-states is coming into being.32

  FROM GOVERNORS TO LAWYERS

  The pattern and the players were familiar. For more than seventy years, a civilian and military elite held sway in Thailand, first through military rule and then, after 1970, in a fragile electoral framework upended periodically by coups and military transition governments of various durations. Despite the instability, Thailand achieved fast economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s. Military-owned banks and manufacturers and civilian businessmen prospered through coups and constitutions. Billionaire and former policeman Thaksin Shinawatra became prime minister in 2001 on a populist platform, and won reelection in 2005. Soon accusations of malfeasance and corruption began to swirl. A two-year political crisis ensued. It featured botched elections, a coup, and elections again in 2007, with the eventual result that Thaksin’s sister became prime minister.

  Amid this turbulence, a new political player was asserting itself: the judiciary. Beginning in 2006, rulings by Thailand’s top courts increasingly set the direction for national politics. The courts dissolved Thaksin’s party and several others, banned various leaders from politics, and at one point disqualified a prime minister for taking payments to appear on a television cooking show. In December 2008, the Constitutional Court dissolved the ruling party for the rather more serious cause of electoral fraud, ending three months of popular unrest and opening the way for a new coalition government.

  The Thai courts had cover. The original 2006 intervention came from a tribunal originally set up by the Thai military. And not long before that, the king of Thailand—a figure with considerable moral authority—had made a speech in which he urged the courts to act wisely. Still, the emergence of the courts in political life altered long-established traditions and gave protesters and activists a new forum to make their case. In India, the Supreme Court has stepped into the vacuum created by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s unwieldy and ineffective coalition, investigating illegal mining, overturning appointments, even determining the retirement age of the army’s chief. As one Indian commentator was quoted as saying, “India has become a banana republic in which the banana is peeled by the supreme court.”33

  A functioning judiciary is one thing. Courts that solve political disputes or step in to remove governments are another thing altogether. Even in countries with respected judicial systems, the precedents are few. But those that exist are spectacular. One was the litigation in the Florida and US Supreme Courts in 2000 that resulted in George W. Bush’s winning the US presidency on a legal ruling. Another was the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) investigation by a panel of Italian judges, led by Antonio di Pietro, beginning in 1992. It revealed a system of corruption so extensive that it became known as tangentopoli, or “bribesville.” In a few months the investigation ensnared party heads, former ministers, and regional officials along with many industrialists.

  Eventually, the probe implicated so many figures in Italy’s traditionally dominant parties, including the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, that in subsequent elections these parties faded into irrelevance. In 1994 the Christian Democrats, who had supplied Italy with most of its prime ministers since World War II, disbanded altogether, splintering into other parties. The same year, the Socialist Party—whose leader, Bettino Craxi, had been prime minister in the 1980s but became a principal target of the investigation—dissolved itself as well after 102 years in existence. Mani Pulite did not rid Italy of corruption. But it completely transformed the Italian political landscape, exploding the old party system and setting the stage for new groups on the right (Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia), left (the Democrats), and regional and other parties. Judges again became important protagonists during the long reign of Silvio Berlusconi over Italian politics, as he became entangled in one scandal after another. These made him a frequent target of judicial inquiries until his final fall from power in 2011.

  Such investigations have turned celebrity judges into new players in political life. Antonio di Pietro, the judge at the center of the probe, eventually resigned from the bench and went into politics himself at the helm of a small party. Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who has led numerous high-profile investigations at home and overseas, has targeted Spanish politicians, bankers, and the Basque militant organization ETA as well as US officials, Al Qaeda, and former Argentine military rulers. His most famous case was his demand for extradition of Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet, resulting in Pinochet’s lengthy detainment in Britain in 1998–1999. (Garzon would himself be indicted and then suspended for exceeding his authority with an aggressive investigation into atrocities committed by the regime of Francisco Franco.) The formation of the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the establishment of international tribunals on war crimes have made international public figures of magistrates like South Africa’s Richard Goldstone and Canada’s Louise Arbour. Their level of prominence and power on the world stage easily outstrips that attained by some of their predecessors during the two Allied war crimes tribunals following World War II.

  In the landscape of domestic politics, the increasing power of judges varies enormously from one country to another, but in general terms it has imposed new constraints on the exercise of power by government leaders and political parties. True, with many judicial systems only dubiously independent, the increased frequency of legal rulings in politics is no guarantee of wise oversight. In Pakistan, for example, many suspect that the country’s military has used the Supreme Court to keep its civilian government in check. It is not necessarily a democratic development—the accountability of judges varies greatly—but it is nonetheless a real part of the decay of political power.

  FROM LEADERS TO LAYMEN

  Who are our leaders? There was a time when leaders were inextricably entwined with the apparatus of governments and parties. Even revolutionaries aspired to high office. Lately, however, many of our heroes have arrived at their fame via the digital world—using technology to spread messages and influence outcomes in ways that would previously have required the infrastructure of parties, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or the traditional press. The Beijing writer and activist Liu Xiaobo spearheaded the online manifesto Charter 08 calling for China to incorporate universal democratic and human rights values into its modernizations and reforms—and he was summarily arrested and imprisoned, winning the Nobel Peace Prize the following year while in jail for his “subversive” activities.

  Egypt’s Wael Ghonim, finding the local opposition parties weak and unreliable, organized a movement through Facebook to demand government accountability. In Colombia, an engineer named Oscar Morales started a Facebook group called “One Million Voices Against FARC” to protest the rebel group’s widespread attacks on civilians, leading to massive ral
lies and pressure that resulted in the release of hostages. The Twitter activists of Moldova helped spark that country’s political transition. Kenyan lawyer Ory Okolloh and a blogger called “M” launched a watchdog site in 2006 on Kenya’s corrupt political scene.34 Iranian-American Kelly Golnoush Niknejad started TehranBureau.com to gather and spread news directly from fellow Iranians during the popular uprising after the 2009 presidential elections, with foreign journalists banned from the country.35 Sami Ben Gharbia, a blogger and civil society activist, helped incite anti-regime demonstrations in Tunisia by using his group blog to spread devastating tales of corruption contained in the US diplomatic cables released through WikiLeaks.

  These new actors are enriching the scope of political discourse around the world. They operate outside the channels and beyond the control of traditional political organizations, both government- and party-related. They are ubiquitous and, when facing repression, they can also be highly elusive. But technology is simply the tool. The bigger picture is a cascading diffusion of power that has put individuals in an unprecedented position not only to bypass political institutions developed over decades but also to influence, persuade, or constrain “real” politicians more directly and more effectively than any classical political theorist could have imagined.

  HEDGE FUNDS AND HACKTIVISTS

  Left in a room together, John Paulson and Julian Assange might soon be at each other’s throats. Paulson runs Paulson & Co, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, the Web-based organization that specializes in divulging the secret information of governments and corporations. And yet they have one very significant thing in common: both symbolize a new breed of actors who are transforming national politics by limiting the power of governments.

  With their ability to move billions of dollars at the speed of light away from a country whose economic policies they distrust, hedge funds are just one of the many financial institutions whose decisions constrain the power of governments. New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman calls the constraints imposed by these players “the Golden Straitjacket”:

  To fit into the Golden Straitjacket a country must either adopt, or be seen as moving toward, the following golden rules: making the private sector the primary engine of its economic growth, maintaining a low rate of inflation and price stability, shrinking the size of its state bureaucracy, maintaining as close to a balanced budget as possible, if not a surplus, eliminating and lowering tariffs on imported goods, removing restrictions on foreign investment, getting rid of quotas and domestic monopolies, increasing exports, privatizing state-owned industries and utilities, deregulating capital markets, making its currency convertible, opening its industries, stock and bond markets to direct foreign ownership and investment, deregulating its economy to promote as much domestic competition as possible, eliminating government corruption, subsidies and kickbacks as much as possible, opening its banking and telecommunications systems to private ownership and competition and allowing its citizens to choose from an array of competing pension options and foreign-run pension and mutual funds. When you stitch all of these pieces together you have the Golden Straitjacket. . . . As your country puts on the Golden Straitjacket, two things tend to happen: your economy grows and your politics shrinks. That is, on the economic front the Golden Straitjacket usually fosters more growth and higher average incomes—through more trade, foreign investment, privatization and more efficient use of resources under the pressure of global competition. But on the political front, the Golden Straitjacket narrows the political and economic policy choices of those in power to relatively tight parameters. . . . Governments—be they led by Democrats or Republicans, Conservatives or Labourites, Gaullists or Socialists, Christian Democrats or Social Democrats—that deviate too far from the core rules will see their investors stampede away, interest rates rise and stock market valuations fall.36

  The havoc wreaked by the financial crisis in Europe is an extreme example of the power of bond markets and global financiers to impose conditions on governments and, as was the case of Greece, even to help bring them down when they resist the economic reforms demanded by financial markets.

  But as discussed in the previous section, a new class of political activists unmoored from political parties and other traditional political organizations have also become the bane of governments. Today these activists are known as hacktivists (a term coined in 1996 by Omega, a member of a group of Internet hackers who called themselves The Cult of the Dead Cow). Hacktivism, defined as “the use of legal and/or illegal digital tools in pursuit of political ends,”37 forces governments to play an endless hi-tech game of cat and mouse—a game that includes and transcends efforts to penetrate and compromise computer networks. It also includes the use of a wide variety of information and communications technologies (ICTs) that Stanford professor Larry Diamond calls “Liberation Technologies.” As Diamond points out in his book by the same name:

  Several years ago, as I was completing a work on the worldwide struggle for democracy, I became struck by the growing use of the Internet, the blogosphere, social media, and mobile phones to expose and challenge the abuses of authoritarian regimes; to provide alternative channels through which information and communication could flow outside the censorship and controls imposed by dictatorships; to monitor elections; and to mobilize people to protest. By 2007—which now seems like a generation ago in terms of the speed with which these technologies have developed—digital ICTs had already registered some stunning successes. The new technologies had enabled Philippine civil society to fill the streets to drive a corrupt president (Joseph Estrada) from power; facilitated the rapid mass mobilizations against authoritarianism mounted by the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, respectively; documented the rigging of the 2007 elections in Nigeria; exposed (via satellite photography) the staggering inequality embodied in the vast palace complexes of Bahrain’s royal family; and forced the suspension of an environmentally threatening chemical plant in Xiamen, China, through the viral spread of hundreds of thousands of impassioned mobile-phone text messages. I called the ICTs that these citizens were using “liberation technologies” because of their demonstrated potential to empower citizens to confront, contain, and hold accountable authoritarian regimes—and even to liberate societies from autocracy.38

  THE POLITICAL CENTRIFUGE

  If you are a career politician forged in the classic mindset of that craft, the combined effect of six decades of fragmentation in national political life has been devastating. The “prestige-feeling” that Max Weber identified as a politician’s deep craving is fading for the stark reason that the underlying power of political office is ebbing away.

  More nations, more governments, more political institutions and organizations reflect and shape our opinions, choices, and actions than ever before. Migration and urbanization have created new political, social, cultural, and professional networks, concentrating them in urban nodes invested with new and growing power. Global norms have achieved a new reach, and individual aspirations and expectations have been turbo-charged by social media, fiber optics, satellite dishes, and smartphones. It is as if a political centrifuge had taken the elements that constituted politics as we knew it and scattered them across a new and broader frame. Here are a few of its key effects.

  Disintermediating Parties

  For centuries, politics operated on the premise that it channels the interests of the masses (expressed through votes, or asserted by rulers) into coherent outcomes. Representative government meant the channeling of the public will up from the neighborhood or town level, through regions or provinces, and, ultimately, to the sovereign state. Political parties, or organized groups within a single party, together with unions and civic associations, promised to represent ordinary people and convey their views up these channels.

  Parties no longer perform this crucial role. Why? Because the channels are much shorter and more straightforw
ard than they used to be. As Lena Hjelm-Wallén, Sweden’s former deputy prime minister and foreign minister, told me, with a combination of exasperation and resignation in her voice: “People are mobilized more by single issues that affect them, rather than by the abstract, overarching ideologies espoused by parties.”39 New forums and platforms direct public support to political leaders or deliver back benefits and accountability without the need for a political party to serve as go-between. In a landscape of fragmented votes and parliaments, dominant political parties have lost much of their appeal. Joining, voting for, or even forming a new small party carries much less cost than before. Crucially, supporting one of these new parties carries less of an opportunity cost as well; in other words, we now forsake less by voting or supporting a small party instead of a big one, or by participating in the political process through other methods altogether. Large, well-established political parties continue to be the main vehicle for gaining the control of government in a democracy. But they are increasingly being undermined and bypassed by new forms of political organization and participation.

  Constraining Government

  At every level the decay of power has limited autonomy of action. Even in presidential systems, the increased incidence of factional politics can make it harder to move legislation through the parliament. But the constraints on government come from outside the standard political system as well. The list of players with the ability to blow the whistle, remove key support, or successfully put forward a damaging storyline that holds up government action extends from bond holders and international activists to bloggers and celebrities. As Ricardo Lagos, the former president of Chile, told me: “The more power that NGOs have to pursue uni-dimensional goals, the less power the government has to govern. In effect, many NGOs are single-issue interest groups that are more politically nimble, media savvy and internationally agile than most governments. Their proliferation ties the government machinery down and greatly limits the range of options. I experienced this myself when I was president and I see it in my travels when I talk to other heads of state and cabinet ministers. Overall, NGOs are good for society but their tunnel vision and the pressures they have to show results to their constituents and funders can make them very rigid.”40 In the past, governments could seek to reshape the political landscape—whether to satisfy public demand or, instead, to repress it—by altering election rules, passing constitutional amendments, or imposing emergency laws. They can still attempt these measures, but more and more, they must contend with scrutiny and action that comes from outside conventional politics.