POLITICAL ELITES IN THE NEW STATES

The parties and movements that took control of a hundred new states varied enor­mously in internal cohesion, depth and breadth of popular support, ideological orientation, and the personalities, values, and roles of their leaders.

First, phase 5 elites were non-Europeans. Power transfers took place across racial lines, in contrast to those of phase 2, in which the same racial category domi­nated after independence as before (Haiti excepted). Phase 5 nationalism had a racial edge to it, a principal goal being to attack assumptions of European biological and cultural superiority that underlay the colonial enterprise. Nationalists demanded more than political change. They insisted on their people’s humanity and right to dignity in the face of repeated messages that non-Europeans were not civilized— perhaps not fully human. Phase 5 decolonization entailed a frontal challenge to the way racial groups thought about and behaved toward each other. The unilateral declaration of independence by Rhodesia’s whites was the closest parallel to phase 2 in its commitment to maintain race relations patterns developed during the colonial era. But the Rhodesian settler revolution failed, in sharp contrast to its predecessors in the Americas. It took place in the wrong century, on the wrong continent, and for reasons the world’s states found morally unacceptable.

Second, phase 5 elites came to power by mobilizing support from broad seg­ments of the population. One reason they could do this is that world depression and world war had produced a huge audience ready to participate in politics and highly receptive to anticolonial messages. Another reason is that politicians knew they could not capture the public sector unless they gained popular support.

The cultural formation of phase 5 nationalists led them to reach out for popu­lar support. Virtually all of them attended Western-style educational institutions; many enrolled in prestigious metropolitan universities. Through formal schooling they became fluent in the colonizer’s language, familiar with European intellectual debates and political trends, and attracted to a high-consumption lifestyle. Many became Christians in the course of attending mission schools. The more assimilated the educated elite became, the more vulnerable they were to the colonizer’s taunt that they did not represent the masses in whose name they claimed to speak. How could a small group alienated from its own culture know the wants and needs of ordinary people who were not alienated?³³ Nationalists were stung by this taunt, many pri­vately admitting that it hit the mark. The only way to convince themselves as well as their rulers that Western-style education did not disqualify them from leadership was to go out to the uneducated masses and recruit supporters.

Effective mobilization required a link between aspiring leaders and potential followers. Where elections were allowed this link was the political party. Where evolutionary change was not permitted the typical linking structure was what might be termed the movement/army. Examples of parties with a mass support base were the inc (India), Muslim League (India, Pakistan), Neo-Destour (Tunisia), Istaqlal (Morocco), Convention People’s Party (Gold Coast/Ghana), RDA/Parti Democra- tique du Còte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Parti Democratique de Guinee (Guinea), Tanganyika African National Union (tanu) (Tanganyika/Tanzania), and People’s National Movement (Trinidad and Tobago).

In phase 2, settler nationalists mobilized varying degrees of support from within their communities but generally took care not to reach out to indigenous, slave, or mixed-blood populations.³⁴ The economic viability of most New World colonies depended on efficient exploitation of non-European labor. Political stability depended on excluding the exploited labor force from participation in public affairs. For independence to succeed, non-Europeans had to be kept, as in the colonial era, economically mobilized and politically unmobilized. A major reason so many Carib­bean basin colonies did not become independent in phase 2 was that slaveholders feared the destabilizing effects a drive for colonial freedom might have on the vast majority of the population whose freedom their owners had powerful incentives to oppose. Phase 2 settler elites did not need or want populist political parties and movement/armies.

The contrast can be made in reverse by comparing the deviant cases of phases 2 and 5: Haiti and Rhodesia. Haiti experienced the most profound social and political transformation of any colony on its way to independence, with a successfill re­volt against slavery followed by sustained guerrilla warfare against invading French troops. Because invasion was seen as a prelude to reimposition of slavery, ordinary Haitians had an enormous personal stake in the collective struggle against Napo­leon’s army. In Rhodesia a small settler minority declared independence in order to deny the vast bulk of the African population voting privileges that whites enjoyed as a matter of racial right. The two colonies stand out as dramatic exceptions to political mobilization patterns in their respective phases.

Third, phase 5 elites set ambitious goals for their countries. They wanted citizenship to be an inclusive category, based in most instances on birth or residence in a territory without regard to racial/ethnic identity. Elites wanted the meaning of citizenship broadly construed to include rights to education, health, and other social services. Independence was valued not only for its own sake but also as a means to accelerate economic growth and catch up to the world’s advanced economies. For many new states the goal was rapid growth combined with structural change: creat­ing an industrial base in economies that had specialized for too long in exporting primary products. The public sector was to play the leading role in stimulating and directing development, the nationalists themselves being in charge of the plan­ning effort.

The contrast with phase 2 in these respects is striking. Citizenship in states the earlier settler elites took over was defined, in practice if not always in law, along racially exclusionary lines. That citizens possessed rights to extensive social services provided by government was an idea whose time had not yet come. Similarly prema­ture was the idea of accelerated economic development, whether as an intrinsically desirable goal or as a way to emulate advanced countries. Settler elites would have regarded statist solutions to economic and social problems with mistrust, preferring the lead be taken by the private profit sector, in which they played a key role. In their view government should assist the private sector but not carefully regulate its ac­tivities, much less compete with or replace private initiatives.

Why new-state elite goals were more ambitious in phase 5 than phase 2 is largely explained by developments in western Europe following the initial decolo­nization wave. Most west European countries substantially broadened their concep­tions of citizenship. In T. H. Marshall’s terms, civil rights of personal liberty asserted in eighteenth-century Britain and France were complemented in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by political rights (extension of the franchise, eventually to cover all adults), then in the mid-twentieth by social rights.

What colonial elites in phases 2 and 5 had in common across the dividing lines of time, race, and culture was an educational formation that made them intensely aware of what Europeans were thinking and doing. In each phase western Europe was a role model for those struggling to wrest their territories from metropoli­tan control. But because western Europe changed, the role models changed. Pre- democratic metropoles barely beginning to industrialize did not constitute especially challenging reference points for phase 2 elites. More than a century later, democratic, industrialized welfare states set high performance standards that new-state elites wanted very much to emulate.

In 1800, by one estimate, per capita income in North America and Latin America was slightly higher than in western Europe. There was no reason for phase 2 elites to drive their countries to catch up to economies performing about as well as their own. In 1950 western Europe’s real product per capita was five times greater than that for Africa and Asia. By 1970 the gap had grown to about 8:1 for Africa and 8.5:1 for Asia. And development models were no longer confined to Europe: the gap

between North America and Africa and Asia was 13:1 in 1950, slightly higher in 1970.³⁶ Phase 5 nationalists had objective grounds for believing their countries were far behind world economic leaders—and that time was not on their side.

In the eyes of phase 5 nationalists, colonial rulers were indifferent or actively opposed to the necessity of accelerated development. Foreign rulers should step aside and let nationalists get the modernization job done. The case for independence was based on a paradox: political separation from the metropole was a necessary condi­tion for the “radical” goal of becoming more like the metropole.

Nationalists quickly discovered that they could win popular support by prom­ising the rudiments of a welfare state after they came to power. Before becoming the first prime minister of the Gold Coast (Ghana), Kwame Nkrumah urged audiences as he traveled about the country to “seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added unto you.” Nkrumah’s listeners knew that “all else” included such amenities as primary and secondary education, clean piped water, electric lighting, tarred roads, employment in new industries, and the like. A vote for Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples Party was a vote for access to a modern way of life.

When nationalists took power they came under intense pressure to make good on preindependence commitments. But delivering on their pledges was difficult and in many situations impossible. Promises of future performance are free. Actual performance takes money and professionally qualified personnel, and these were precisely what poor, technologically backward countries lacked. Borrowing from abroad to finance welfare state services and industrial development was one option. But this could only go so far before debt repayment became a burden in its own right and before repayment conditions set by lenders threatened policy-setting preroga­tives normally associated with sovereign status.

Performance pressures on phase 5 political elites were intensified by wide­spread expectations that central governments would take the lead in accelerating economic growth and structural change. Nationalists generally preferred a statist or socialist over a capitalist development path. They felt more secure working through the public sector they had just captured than through a private profit sector they had not. The private sector’s commanding heights typically remained under foreign control after independence, embarrassing if not painful evidence that it was harder to capture the economic than the political kingdom. Hence capitalism was associated with forces different from the nation and potentially hostile to its interests. Social­ism’s appeals to the masses’ shared collective interests had more in common with nationalist rhetoric than capitalism’s appeals to individual self-interest. An impor­tant pragmatic consideration was that the easiest, most direct way to reward a nationalist movement’s supporters was to expand the size and scope of government. A bureaucratic post was the ideal form of patronage.

Phase 5 elites were influenced by a climate of opinion in European political and intellectual circles much more favorably indiried toward government economic ini­tiatives than in phase 2. As of the early nineteenth century the dominant world power, Great Britain, possessed a small, functionally limited central government. Laissez-faire doctrines espoused by Adam Smith and Manchester School theorists were ascendant, critiquing what remained of the country’s mercantilist (that is, state- directed) policies. In sharp contrast, in 1945 the socialist Labour Party took over a substantially larger central government and, influenced by the ideas of John May­nard Keynes, Harold Laski, and William Beveridge, undertook a major expansion of functions. Indeed, by the start of phase 5 central governments played extensive economic roles in all major countries. The Soviet Union was the most extreme example of state-directed development. But even the self-proclaimed bastion of free enterprise, the United States, possessed a large and activist public sector as the legacy of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. U.S. aid programs funneled loans to Third World countries to support their governments’ dam construction, electrification, port de­velopment, and industrialization projects. The critical stance toward government’s economic role associated with Prime Minister Thatcher and President Ronald Rea­gan did not become politically significant until many years after the initial develop­ment agendas of most Afro-Asian countries were set.

The socioeconomic background of phase 5 nationalists may also have led them to rely on the public sector as the motor for development. Few of them were privately wealthy before entering politics. Most got their start not by skillfully managing productive assets but by skillfully utilizing Western learning. Employment in govern­ment service—or in professions closely associated with government like law, teach­ing, and journalism—was their principal source of income. Capturing the public sector was the only way to regulate and eventually capture private profit institutions from which nationalists felt they and their followers had been excluded. Government jobs, moreover, offered alluring personal enrichment opportunities to individuals who had begun life in poverty. In the words of the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, “A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body and put on dry clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors all the time. We [in our new nation] had all been in the rain together until yesterday.”⁴⁰ Government, the shelter colonialists built, was for the first time available for new occupants.

Many phase 2 leaders, by contrast, belonged to a property-owning elite before gaining political power. Having private sources of wealth, these leaders did not feel pressing economic incentives to expand the public sector’s size or functional scope. Indeed, a principal goal of government was to protect an inherited system of private property rights from which the settler community benefited. The phase 2 ideal was a complementary relationship between state and market, not the competitive relation­ship so often emphasized by phase 5 leaders. In phase 5 one must study political life to understand the origins and content of economic policies adopted by the new states. In phase 2 one must study the economic and social bases of settler life to understand who gained political power after independence and how that power was used. To understand the political economy of phase 5 it may be most useful to start with politics and conclude with economics, while for phase 2 it may be most useful to reverse the sequence.

In the short term phase 5 elites gained power and legitimacy through the popular appeal of their ambitious development agendas. But if they failed to perform as expected they faced greater political challenges from disillusioned supporters than did the far more cautious state builders of phase 2. Reliance on government to carry the development burden raised the likelihood that phase 5 political leaders would be credited when programs worked—but also blamed when they did not. The reality was that poor countries lacked the financial resources and trained personnel to finance modern welfare states and industrialize agrarian economies. And, too often, government-led development meant that the public sector grew while the economy stagnated, the cost and inefficiencies of large government bureaucracies contributing directly to poor performance. The nationalists’ goals were too expensive, and the so­cialist means chosen to attain the goals ineffective and often counterproductive. Pop­ular disillusionment with the new elites’ performance in office was bound to grow.

Phase 5 leaders confronted a dilemma. In most territories political mobiliza­tion of the masses was a necessary condition for ending European rule. And it was the leaders’ own mobilizational skills that set them on the path to power. After inde­pendence, however, many leaders feared that mass participation in politics might generate challenges to their power. Unleashed energies attached to disappointed expectations could topple the regimes that had toppled the colonialists. There was an ironic parallel here to the widespread disillusionment over unmet metropolitan promises that so strengthened nationalist movements after World Wars I and II.