been some 357 successful military coups. And for each successful
coup there are a lot of failures. For Africa, the one region for which
there is a comprehensive tally, in addition to the 82 successful coups
there were 109 attempted coups that failed and 145 coup plots that
got nipped in the bud before they could even be attempted. That is
around seven planned surgical strikes for the average country. In
many societies presidents are more likely to lose power to their army
than through any other route.
Guns, wars, and coups have been the reality of the bottom bil-
lion. They have destroyed societies that were confidently expected to
develop. The meltdown of Cote d’Ivoire, once the most celebrated
society in Africa, shows all three of these technologies in ruinous ac-
tion over the course of a decade.
Does it matter if political violence in its various manifestations
continues to be the predominant route to power? Perhaps the whole
notion of exporting our democratic values to these societies was
merely a comfortable delusion and they are better left as they were?
Of course it matters.
For one thing our democratic values are universal. Govern-
ments are not there to command their citizens: they are there to
serve them. The journey from citizen servitude to government ser-
vitude has been a long one in our own societies. It will probably be a
long one in the societies of the bottom billion. We have most surely
underestimated the degree of difficulty and promoted the wrong
features of democracy: the façade rather than the essential infra-
structure. I will argue that in situations in which it is not feasible
to build the infrastructure, creating the façade is likely to frustrate
democratic accountability rather than fast-track it.
It matters because in the divided societies of the bottom billion,
when political power is won through violence, the results are usu-
ally awful. The political strongman in a divided society is seldom a
visionary leader; he is more likely to be self-serving, or in thrall to
Introduction
9
the interests of a narrow support group. Visionary leadership is im-
portant, but its role is to turn states into nations. The fundamental
mistake of our approach to state building has been to forget that
well-functioning states are built not just on shared interests but on
shared identity. Shared identity does not grow out of the soil; it is po-
litically constructed. It is the task of political leadership to forge it.
It matters because the process of violent struggle for power
is hugely costly. Wars and coups are not tea parties: they are de-
velopment in reverse. Wars may now be small in the sense of few
“battle-related deaths,” but the increasing involvement of civilians,
and indeed the blurring of the distinction between civilians and
combatants, implies that even small wars can have highly adverse
consequences. Political violence is not just a curse for the societies in
which it occurs; it is an international public bad. Most particularly,
it damages the neighbors, something that has profound implications
for sovereignty.
The overarching problem of the bottom billion is that the typi-
cal society is at the same time both too large and too small. It is too
large in the sense that it is too diverse for cooperation to produce
public goods. It is too small in the sense that it cannot reap the scale
economies of the key public good, security. But the only point of un-
derstanding the nature of the problems is that it helps in the search
for effective solutions. If the problem is that societies are too large
to have an inherited sense of common identity, state building is not,
fundamentally, about institutions, which is the fashionable nostrum.
There is a prior essential stage of nation building that takes more
visionary leadership than has been forthcoming in most of these so-
cieties.
If the problem is that societies are too small to supply key public
goods, then it is pointless to place national sovereignty on a pedestal.
Given the structural deficiencies in their states, the citizens of the
bottom billion have little choice but to have recourse to the interna-
tional supply of essential public goods. To some extent they can do
10
WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES
this by pooling their sovereignty, something that to date they have
singularly failed to do. But that failure is itself symptomatic: much of
the supply of the international public goods that the bottom billion
need is going to have to come from the countries that already know
how to cooperate to supply such goods: the high-income countries.
Yet the indignant defense of sovereignty by the governments of the
bottom billion, combined with the pusillanimity and indifference of
leaders in high-income countries, radically constrains what interna-
tional action can realistically achieve. The core proposal of this book
is a strategy whereby a small intervention from the international
community can harness the political violence internal to the societ-
ies of the bottom billion. This powerful force that to date has been
so destructive can be turned to advantage, becoming the defender of
democracy rather than its antithesis.
To harness the political violence inherent in the societies of
the bottom billion as a force for good, we will need a very limited
use of international force. After Iraq, international peacekeeping
provided by the forces of the high-income countries is unpopular,
both with voters in the high-income world and with alarmed gov-
ernments of the bottom billion. But military intervention, properly
constrained, has an essential role, providing both the security and
the accountability of government to citizens that are essential for
development.
I am aware that I walk a tightrope. Those who regard the so-
cieties of the bottom billion as an irredeemable quagmire will be
predisposed to regard the proposals in this book as costly idealism.
Those who regard these societies as the victims of neo-imperialism
will be predisposed to regard the proposals as imperialism in dis-
guise. Above all, those who regard internal political violence in any
form as illegitimate will be predisposed to regard the proposal for
harnessing it as breaching a fundamental tenet. But the proposals in
this book are not costly idealism: they are grounded in analysis and
evidence. Nor are they a backdoor form of imperialism. Citizens of
Introduction
11
the bottom billion have the same rights as the rest of us, including
a legitimate aspiration to nationhood. Nor do they undermine the
tenets of democracy. My message is that the aspirations to national-
ity and democracy cannot be achieved by the path currently being
taken: fake democracy protected by the sanctity of sovereignty is a
cul-de-sac. Just as the high-income world should provide a vaccine
against malaria for the citizens of the bottom billion, so it should
<
br /> provide them with security and accountability of government. All
three are public goods that will otherwise be chronically undersup-
plied. Only once they are properly supplied can the societies of the
bottom billion achieve their aspirations to genuine sovereignty.
The defeat of political violence is where our illusions are most
inextricably bound up with our hopes and our strategies. And it
is where our errors, grounded in those illusions, are proving most
costly. Each of the changes I analyze is potentially hugely hopeful.
But it turns out that each is a two-edged sword. They might well
trigger processes that substantially increase violence. But it is not
simply a story of “things might go wrong.” Within the limits im-
posed by modern research methods, I think I can show what will
determine whether democracy is going to be transformative or de-
structive. More alarmingly, to date democracy in the societies of the
bottom billion has increased political violence instead of reducing it.
But my message is not meant to denigrate the efforts of brave people
who have struggled for their democratic rights: I am not an apolo-
gist for dictatorship. Only by moving on from illusion can we work
out what practical measures could harness the undoubted potential
of democracy as a force for good.
Part I
D E N Y I N G
R E A L I T Y :
D E M O C R A Z Y
C h a p t e r 1
V O T E S A N D V I O L E N C E
Our times have seen a great political sea change:
the spread of democracy to the bottom billion. But is it
democracy? The bottom billion certainly got elections.
They were heavily promoted by American and European pressure,
and, as the most visible feature of democracy, they were treated as
its defining characteristic. Yet a proper democracy does not merely
have competitive elections; it also has rules for the conduct of those
elections: cheating gets punished. A proper democracy also has
checks and balances that limit the power of a government once
elected: it cannot crush the defeated. The great political sea change
may superficially have looked like the spread of democracy, but it
was actually the spread of elections. If there are no limits on the
power of the winner, the election becomes a matter of life and death.
If this life-and-death struggle is not itself subject to rules of conduct,
the contestants are driven to extremes. The result is not democracy:
I think of it as democrazy.
The political system that preceded democrazy was personal
dictatorship. Usually it did not have even the veneer of an ideol-
ogy. Personal rule reached its apogee in President Mobutu of Zaire,
whose extraordinary system of government is depicted in Michela
Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz. Personal rule meant ethnic
16
WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES
favoritism and the erosion of the institutions of the state. Mobutu’s
power came to rest on greed and fear: his patronage might reward
loyalty with unseemly wealth, and his thugs might punish suspected
opposition with torture. Where there was an ideology it was Marx-
ist, such as the Derg regime in Ethiopia, and the MPLA in Angola;
grim and ruinous regimes that attracted a predictable swath of sup-
port among the Western left. More commonly the Marxist ideology
was a decorative veneer, a language of politeness appropriate for the
circles in which political leaders mixed, much as Christian senti-
ments must have been de rigueur in a nineteenth-century drawing
room. In Zimbabwe, where this make-believe blossomed, there was
a politburo and everyone was referred to as comrade. Such undemo-
cratic regimes looked as though they were inviting violent opposi-
tion. Mobutu and the Derg were both overthrown by rebellions, and
the MPLA faced a huge uprising from UNITA.
Across Africa, Latin America, and Asia during the 1990s, au-
tocracies fell like ninepins. Sometimes citizens took heart from the
example of Eastern Europe and massed in the streets, the most stun-
ning instance being the overthrow of President Suharto in Indonesia.
Sometimes aid donors made further funding conditional upon democ-
racy, the best-established instance being Kenya, where the diplomatic
community recognized that President Moi could be pressured. Some-
times autocrats saw which way the wind was blowing and decided
to go with the flow. Autocrats commonly surround themselves with
sycophants, and this probably helped the process of democratization
on its way. Imagine what an autocrat who is contemplating democra-
tization is going to ask his entourage. There is really only one ques-
tion: if I hold an election, would I win? And what can a sycophant
say? Quite possibly the sycophant has no clue: it has not been his job to
gauge public opinion. However, even if he suspects that people detest
the president, he has a problem. Hasn’t he been telling the president
for years how much his people love him? Those advisers who told the
president the truth tended not to last long as advisers.
Votes and Violence
17
At least three autocrats got caught this way, Suharto in East
Timor, Kaunda in Zambia, and Mugabe in Zimbabwe. All let citi-
zens vote because they were sure they would win. Suharto lost East
Timor as a result: people voted overwhelmingly for independence.
Kaunda did a little better than Suharto: he managed to get about
20 percent of the vote, so some people did indeed love him, namely
those in his home region, which he had favored with public spend-
ing. As the results came in he was naturally outraged that citizens
had been so ungrateful. Quite what might have happened at that
point we will never know. Fortunately, Jimmy Carter was in the
country leading a team of election observers. As the results started
to come in, Carter sensed what to do. Rushing to the presidential
palace, he felt Kaunda’s pain and stayed there until it was too late to
annul the election. After all, he had lived through a similar experi-
ence. With Carter there in the palace, Kaunda had little choice but
to accept the defeat. Whether he would have done so without Carter
is an open question: reputedly he then went around the capitals of
Africa advising presidents not to make his mistake.
And President Mugabe? By the mid-1990s President Mugabe
had followed the fashion, adopting a constitution in which there
were multiparty elections and term limits on the presidency. Many
dictators agreed to term limits, confident that by the time the limit
was due to bind they could change the constitution by one means
or another. And so term limits turned into time bombs. President
Putin of Russia is, of course, the most spectacular example of a suc-
cessful constitutional side step: don’t even bother to change the term
limit, make yourself prime minister and shift effective power from
the presidency to the new position. President Obasanjo of Nige-
ria tried but failed to extend his term, as
did President Chiluba of
Zambia. Presidents Deby of Chad and Museveni of Uganda were
more successful. President Mugabe decided to change the constitu-
tion, removing the term limit and drastically increasing presidential
powers. To do this he needed a referendum. It was this that he lost.
18
WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES
Unfortunately, the referendum did not coincide with a presidential
election, and so Mugabe continued as president, now knowing that
he would lose a democratic election. I will return to the problem he
faced shortly. For the present I want to stay with the spread of de-
mocracy. Country by country, governments subjected themselves to
competitive elections. Sometimes they won, sometimes they lost, but
either way, opposition was now better able to express itself.
S o h ow h as t h i s s p r e a d of democracy affected proneness to political violence? Pretty obviously violence should go down. It may
be obvious, but in general it helps to spell out the basis for what we
think we know. There seem to me to be two reasons for expecting
democracy to reduce the incidence of political violence. I will call
them accountability and legitimacy, and they are complementary
and so reinforcing. The accountability effect works as follows. In
a democracy a government has no choice but to try to deliver what
ordinary citizens want. If it is seen to perform sufficiently well, then
it gets reelected; if it is judged to be inferior to alternatives, then it
loses. Either way, government strives to perform because it is ac-
countable to voters. A dictator might choose to deliver performance
that is just as good as this, but for the dictator it is just that, a choice.
The democratic government has no option. And in practice, all too
often dictators choose to do something completely different, as with
Mobutu. So democracy tends to improve government performance
by subjecting leaders to the discipline of being accountable. Why
might this in turn reduce political violence? Well, obviously, be-
cause there is less basis for grievance. If the government performs
better for ordinary people, then they are less likely to take up arms
against it.
So much for the accountability effect, how about legitimacy?
Being elected is now widely seen as the only basis for government
Paul Collier - Wars, Guns, and Votes Page 2
