Introduction

Culture and Geography as Background to Political Processes

Paper presented at the Fourth Annual Kent State University Symposium on Democracy

Katherine Meyer

Culture and geography are viewed in basically three different ways in scholarly work on the processes of democratization and globalization. Sometimes, scholars debate whether they are constraints. For example, publications by Abdelwahab El-Affendi; John L. Esposito and John O. Voll; Helen Rizzo, Yousef Ali, and me; and Manus I. Midlarsky discuss the question, “Is Islam an impediment to the spread of democracy?”¹ Sometimes, culture and geography are introduced as variables that create complexities within democratic and global processes. They create variants, such as the Asian model of democracy that is described by Samuel P. Huntington, Mancur Olsen, and others.² That variability is often studied through comparative, historical analysis and richly textured case studies. At times, culture and geography are presented as conceptual backgrounds for discussing issues related to democratization and globalization. The four papers presented in this section fall into the latter body of work. They focus on the complexities and conflict in political processes that require scholars to select appropriate theoretical frameworks, adjust analytical lenses, and portray models that display foreground issues against textured backgrounds.

Chen-Pao Chou’s paper aims to create a theoretical framework for analyzing regime transformation that is fully identified in the statistical sense, that is, the model incorporates all important variables. Another topic is implicit. How should regime transformation be measured empirically?

Chou critiques existing, analytic frameworks that offer oversimplified explanations of political development. In particular, he rejects those that concentrate on the effects of socioeconomic development or the interaction among political actors to the exclusion of other predictors. Although such models can account for the rise of democratic regimes, they are inadequate for explaining their demise or stagnation. Chou argues the importance of institutions, that is, the arrangements of statuses, roles, and their accompanying expectations and proscriptions that serve as carriers of culture. He proposes a multidimensional model of regime transformation that includes institutional arrangements within the societies and politics of different countries in addition to domestic and external contextual variables and the interaction of political actors.

Chou thinks that an elaborated model of regime transformation would explain the variability that can be found in case studies, such as those of India and South Korea. His concern with that variability echoes the work of numerous other scholars who are interested in regime outcomes that are influenced by the interaction of global pressures toward democracy and local contextual variables. Georg Sorenson summarizes much of this work by using such concepts as “restricted democracies,” “frozen democracies,” and “frail, unconsolidated democracies,” which aptly describe the varied outcomes.³

Chou also tackles the conceptualizations of democracy that find their way into empirical research. His paper underscores the importance of the analytical lenses that researchers employ to measure popular sovereignty. Chou’s discourse suggests the kind of empirical measures that I think are found in the Freedom House index.⁴ Freedom House employs measures of liberalization (substantive benefits and entitlements, and formal rights and liberties that are accorded to citizens) and measures of participation (involvement in public institutions and governmental processes, and social institutions and economic processes). Although the Freedom House index is criticized for a variety of reasons, it is increasingly used as a measure for classifying the democratization of countries. It has been included in the 2002 United Nations Human Development Report as a subjective indicator of democratic governance and has also been incorporated into the 2002 Arab Human Development Report along with additional objective and subjective measures.⁵ The Freedom House measures may well correspond to the conceptualization of democracy that Chou advances.

Formal and informal social and political institutions, domestic and external contextual factors, and the interaction of political actors are key predictors in Chou’s model of regime transformation. Chou briefly introduces other variables that merit consideration in creating a theoretical framework: the nature of prior regimes, cultural and social norms, a nation’s place in world politics, and the global economy, and so forth. Certainly, geographic variables also would be part of a fully identified model, as well as political alliances and the timing of a nation’s entry into the global market.⁶

Empirical analysis is needed to test Chou’s explanatory model. In such analysis, some variables would emerge as predictors that merit attention in the foreground of theory, while others would operate as useful control variables and provide a textured context for explaining regime transformation. Chou’s paper raises the question of the relative importance of institutional variables in a multidimensional model.

The culture and geography of Africa serve as the implicit backgrounds for papers by Polycarp Ikuenobe and Apollos Nwauwa. Scholars, such as Ali Mazrui, present the triple heritage of Africa at two time-periods.⁷ The older period encompasses indigenous, Semitic and Greco-Roman influences on the cultural personality of the African continent. Elements of it are found in North Africa and Ethiopia today. The modern triple heritage includes indigenous, Islamic and Western cultures, such as found in Nigeria and Sudan. In his paper, Ikuenobe establishes a narrower cultural framework than Mazrui in order to contrast an African communal ethos with a Western liberal democratic one.

Ikuenobe does not incorporate the Arab and Islamic cultural heritage. Rather, he focuses his analytic lens on Africa’s indigenous heritage and examines European and American intrusions along a time line from past to present. Also, Ikuenobe excludes African cultural influences that have mutated over time. Instead, he discusses ethnicity, colonialism, and democracy as agents of globalization. Because culturally imported forms of government, such as liberal democracy, do not match the cultural heritage of African peoples, their success is untenable. In particular, an ethos that assumes the principles of neutrality, abstract individualism and subjectivity of values is inconsistent with a traditional African communal ethos. Consequently, it cannot be the basis of national integration in Africa.

Ikuenobe contrasts the underlying principles and assumptions of individual autonomy and self-governance with those that emphasize communal obligations and view culture and ethnicity as a basis for individual identity and rational choices. The former supports governing concepts such as tolerance, state neutrality, private spheres, a majority culture, individual rights and freedoms, and cultural homogeneity. The latter supports governing concepts, such as communal obligation, social responsibility, moral reasoning, social harmony, mutual socialization, and autonomy within community. Ikuenobe points out that traditional African social structures were altered by the colonial experience. He draws on a typology from 1975 that was developed by Peter Ekeh to identify three social structures that emerged from colonialism—transformed, migrated, and emergent ones.

Nwauwa’s paper on the “Concepts of Democracy and Democratization in Africa Revisited” also discusses African social structures. There are implicit geographical boundaries and temporal parameters in Nwauwa’s consideration of African indigenous governments. Nwauwa presents political systems and organizations starting with African governments, such as the systems of the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria, the Gikuyu of modern Kenya, the Oyo Empire of southwestern Nigeria, and the Buganda Kingdom of Uganda. He examines the period of European colonial governance and administration, the decades of the cold war and the current thrust toward economic globalization. Nwauwa’s temporal framework excludes the ancient cultures and political structures of Ethiopia and Egypt and the more recent structural origins of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Nwauwa uses a narrow geographical lens that is focused on Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda rather than incorporating progressively wider social groups of black Africa, of the African continent bounded by the Red Sea, or of the Arabian peninsula.

While Ikuenobe’s paper is more detailed regarding culture, Nwauwa’s more elaborately presents social structure. Both papers confront the historical and cultural legacy of the European colonial invasion. Succinctly summarized by Basil Davidson, the central consequence of colonial rule was “merely to undertake or to complete the ruin and dismantlement of the societies and structures which the conquerors found in place.”⁸ Even if, like Davidson, we allow for a number of “lesser consequences, side-effects, or by-products that were not negative,” such as overcoming the isolation of the past and opening doors to the outside world, the colonial period left behind an “impoverishment of the old society, a chaos of ideas and social relationships.”⁹

Both Ikuenobe and Nwauwa discuss the devastation of colonial rule and its aftermath within a conceptual framework that makes use of dichotomy. Ikuenobe focuses on a cultural dichotomy, contrasting an African communal ethos with a liberal democratic one. Nwauwa stresses a dichotomy of political structure, comparing indigenous African direct or representative democracies with Westernized models of democracy that are confounded by economic globalization. Conceptual tools like dichotomies confront historical and geographical contexts that, like Africa, are complicated. Dichotomies work best when the cultural, geographical, temporal, and historical boundaries surrounding their analytic lenses are made clear. Both Ikuenobe and Nwauwa’s papers demonstrate the utility of a narrow framework and a lens sharply focused on specific political structures.

The papers by Professors Ikuenobe and Nwauwa conclude with similar observations. Ikuenobe argues for the importance of rational engagement, recognition, respect, and acceptance as a basis for national integration in Africa. Nwauwa favors political structures that are rooted in African traditions. He quotes Basil Davidson’s phrase “firmly from the African past, yet fully accepting the challenges of the African present.”¹⁰

Ikuenobe and Nwauwa join other scholars in articulating the importance of these principles. In her 2001 book Gender and Social Movements, Bahati Kuumba, who is on the faculty at Spelman College, examines the South African National Liberation movement and its resultant new South African constitution.¹¹ She notes that in it the liberal democratic notion of equality has been redefined in the differentiated needs of African women. Kuumba’s work bolsters the arguments by Ikuenobe and Nwauwa about the importance of finding harmonizing principles in governance that give evidence of the cultures and traditions of the people governed.

Like Ikuenobe and Nwauwa, Bei Cai employs the concept of dichotomy. In her paper, however, dichotomy is a tool employed by journalists for the New York Times and Washington Post to simplify the complexities involved in the development of democracy in Hong Kong before its transfer from Britain to China in 1997. Cai contends that journalists for these newspapers were faced with the task of reporting contentious issues between the British and Chinese, and the Americans and Chinese, to the American public. Journalists employed a binary form of representation that made conceptualization of Hong Kong’s democratic development seem straightforward. At the same time, this binary form both enhanced and limited the public’s grasp of the complexities involved. It also promoted America’s post–cold war agenda.

Cai thoroughly presents the historical context surrounding the British proposal to introduce democratic development into pretransfer Hong Kong. She elaborates how the framing of issues by the media operates. Cai points out how Hong Kong’s colonial legacy was reflected in two competing visions of Hong Kong’s political future: one led by an executive system and the other led by a legislative one. Two competing goals further complicated the situation in an important way. One was democratic development, and the other, economic stability during the transition period.

Reporters for the Times and Post framed the debate over goals in moralistic and binary terms. Economic stability and profit were presented as “probusiness” while anti-Communist political activism was presented as “prodemocracy.” Human-rights activists urged the United States to advance an active policy that promoted more freedom and democracy in Hong Kong and China.

The framing of the debate into dichotomy by reporters for the Times and Post simplified the tension between prodemocracy and probusiness groups for readers. At the same time, it misrepresented the legal and technical difficulties surrounding Hong Kong’s development as a democracy. In particular, it misrepresented the Joint Declaration’s policy of “unchange for fifty years,” its ambiguity over a precise timetable for electing a legislature, and the administrative policies and practices of the British during their period of control in Hong Kong.

Cai’s explanation of binary forms of representation and the problems they created remind us of the work by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on tribal societies.¹² He pointed out that a binary tendency is endemic in human conceptualization. Structuration theory, based on Lévi-Strauss’s work regarding deep mental structures, developed as an important theoretical framework in sociology in both France and the United States. Theorists, such as Michel Foucault, Bryan Turner, Peter Blau, and Anthony Giddens, amplified its basic notions. It is interesting to note how the journalistic work studied by Cai capitalized on the predispositions of the reading public to think in binary modes.

Cai concludes her paper with considerations about how the reporting of pretransfer Hong Kong issues consciously or unconsciously advanced a cold war agenda and reflected the cultural heritage of the reporters. As I was reading the paper, I came across an essay in the International Herald Tribune.¹³ In it, a research fellow at Rice University recounted her surprise at going home to Beijing and finding her family and family friends so positive about the recent war with Iraq, while she herself was more ambivalent. She noted that the Chinese people who experienced Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Deng’s Tiananmen Square massacre (that is, those between thirty and sixty years old) felt that Saddam Hussein represented a kind of despot that they knew, even though the Chinese government had routinely withheld all information about Saddam Hussein’s regime from them. Further, the people in this age group think that political reforms in China have taken a back seat to the market economy, and that the state has focused on building nationalist sentiment rather than reform. According to the Rice scholar, these generations maintain a desire for deeper change; their support for the Iraq war is not only against totalitarianism but also against narrow-minded, radical nationalism.

The important thing to note is that the sentiments reported by the postdoctoral fellow surfaced in a segment of the population (those between thirty and sixty), regardless of the media’s and government’s framing of information. The tenacity of these sentiments reminds us that there is often a disconnect between the public’s experience and information that is provided to them through the media, the kind of disconnect that Dorothy Smith acknowledges in her standpoint theory.¹⁴ Journalistic framing is not the only variable in an audience’s reception of information. Social and political institutions; national, historical legacies; and changing domestic and external contexts influence a population’s reception of information from the media. While framing by the media is an important variable, its effects most likely do not touch the reading public in a uniform way. Rather, the age, experience, gender, and other social characteristics of the reading public enter into the formation and development of public opinion.

At the beginning of this discussion, I noted that in these four papers culture and geography are presented as background or conceptual frameworks for discussing issues of democratization and globalization, such as how the political development should be modeled, how principles and political structures in Africa confront processes of globalization and democratization, and how discourse about democracy in Hong Kong developed. Although each paper explicitly treats social norms, values, and beliefs, that is, culture, considerations of geography are more implicit in the papers. The different continents and different countries discussed in these papers represent geographical differences and remind us that the roles of space and time, of geographical differences within and between countries, and of diversity of environmental resources figure largely in the process of globalization and democracy. Barbara Kingsolver’s epic tale of a missionary family’s life over three decades in the Congo starting in the 1960s fully captures the richly textured background that surrounds political struggles.¹⁵ In her novel, traditions, climate, religious beliefs, weather, superstitions, particularities of flora and fauna, and urban-rural differences interact and alter the global spread of democratic forms of governance. The novel stands as an excellent example of the role of culture and geography in framing political process and conflict.

Notes

1. Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “Islam and the Future of Dissent After the ‘End of History,’” Futures 31 (1999): 191–204; John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996); Katherine Meyer, Helen Rizzo, and Yousef Ali, “Islam and the Extension of Citizenship Rights to Women in Kuwait,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (Aug. 1998): 131–44; and Manus I. Midlarsky, “Democracy and Islam: Implications for Civilizational Conflict and the Democratic Peace?” International Studies Quarterly 142 (1998): 485–511.

2. Samuel P. Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,” in The Global Resurgence of Democracy, ed. Larry Diamond and Marc E. Plattner (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993); and Mancur Olsen, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1982).

3. Georg Sorensen, Democracy and Democratization: Processes and Prospects in a Changing World (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998).

4. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2001/2002: The Democracy Gap, online at www.freedomhouse.org/research/survey2002.htm.

5. UNDP (United Nations Development Program), Human Development Report 2002 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002); and UNDP, Arab Human Development Report 2002 (New York: United Nations Publications, 2002).

6. See Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge, 2000) on the importance of timing in the process of globalization.

7. Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1986).

8. Basil Davidson, Africa: History of a Continent (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 290.

9. Ibid., 293.

10. Davidson, “Questions about Nationalism,” African Affairs 76 (1977): 44.

11. M. Bahati Kuumba, Gender and Social Movements (Lanham, Md.: Alta Mira, 2001).

12. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969).

13. S. Chin, letter to the editor, International Herald Tribune, April 9, 2003.

14. Dorothy E. Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1990).

15. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).

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