Two perspectives on Zimbabwe's National Democratic Revolution: Thabo Mbeki and Wilfred Mhanda

The concept of the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ (NDR) is often used by left-leaning scholars and political actors in attempts to explain or justify the lack of socialism in third-world societies governed by rulers who consider themselves ‘scientific socialists’. It has been invoked in analyses of Zimbabwe by both the former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, in 2001 as he was embarking on his ‘quiet diplomacy’, and Wilfred Mhanda, a Zimbabwean guerrilla leader imprisoned by the Mozambican government in the late-1970s for posing problems to the leadership aspirations of Robert Mugabe, who later became president of the country posing problems for Thabo Mbeki among others. Analysis of both these political intellectuals’ writing sheds light on the concept of the NDR (evoked often in contemporary South African politics and Zimbabwean discourse about the current crisis) as well as the theoretical and practical aspects of the authors’ careers.     

The Right Turn in India: Authoritarianism,Populism and Neoliberalisation

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the growth of authoritarian forms of politics in India should be seen in the context of a long-term crisis of the state as successive governments have been unable to establish legitimacy for the policies of neoliberalisation that have been pursued since the 1990s. These policies contributed to the fracturing of dominant modes of political incorporation. The previous Congress Party-led government’s mode of crisis management – which it dubbed, inclusive growth – failed to create new forms of political incorporation by addressing long-term structural problems in India’s political economy, such as jobless growth, and gave rise to new problems, such as large-scale corruption scandals. Subsequently, it increasingly developed what Nicos Poulantzas called, “authoritarian statist” tendencies to marginalise dissent within a framework of constitutional democracy. The current Bharatiya Janata Party-led government’s mode of crisis management builds on these authoritarian statist tendencies but has sought to build legitimacy for these tendencies and neoliberalisation through an appeal to authoritarian populism. This seeks to harness popular discontent against elite corruption with majoritarianism to create an antagonism between the “Hindu people” and a “corrupt elite” that panders to minorities.     

Fiscal Federalism and International Capital: The Effects of Fiscal Federalism on Foreign Direct Investment and Sovereign Dept Ratings

Although the study of federalism has become one of the most intensely studied areas in economics and political science, no consensus has emerged on the impact of fiscal federalism on macroeconomic performance. I focus on one specific element of the debate‐ the role of fiscally federal institutions in allowing a country access to international capital markets. In an empirical analysis of 60 countries from 1975‐1995 I find fiscal federalism has no clear impact on inflows of foreign direct investment. In an examination of the impact of federalism on sovereign debt ratings for 40 countries from 1980‐1998, I find that fiscal federalism is associated with lower levels of sovereign debt risk.     

Democracy and market economy

In the following article, Professor Seizaburo Sato, former Research Director of the Institute for International Policy Studies, addresses the relation between democracy and market economy and the problems that might develop as economic globalization continues to deepen. Liberal democracy and market economy face a number of problems, he says, but they are at this stage the best political and economic systems to follow, and we should take steps to improve them where we can. Although recognizing the positive value of diversity, he emphasizes the importance of international cooperation and a minimum set of common rules. At the same time, he urges constant technological innovation and the fostering of capable political leaders who have a comprehensive vision for the future and a strong sense of public responsibility.     

The Nakba in Palestinian Memory in Israel

Changes in the international, regional and domestic arenas in the late 1990s resulted in discursive change with regard to interpretation of the Al Nakba in the political and civil societies of the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel. Apart from fuelling a discursive challenge to the Israeli dominant discourse about the 1948 events, this reinterpretation allowed the Palestinian Arab citizens to discuss the historical roots of the problems they experienced within the Israeli political and civil societal spheres. This article analyses the nature and significance of discursive change of the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel on the Nakba by referring to its impact on their identity politics as well as their political and civil societal activities.     

Indonesia and the “conflictual consensus”: a discursive perspective on Indonesian democracy

In this essay we propose an alternative approach to assessing the state of democracy in Indonesia. We focus not on institutional indicators (as is usually the case) but on manifestations of political discourses in the public sphere. In applying post-Marxist political theory through the work of Slavoj ?i?ek and Chantal Mouffe, we argue that democracy’s main defining feature is that it allows antagonistic discourses about alternative policies to coexist, yet still manages to coalesce around a minimal consensus on how these discursive conflicts are to be dealt with in a fair way. Applying this approach to democracy analysis to Indonesia, we suggest that the major obstacles to democratic practice do not emerge from institutional problems, but from an overbearing political discourse that imposes broad consensus and harmony on most political issues. Political discourse in Indonesia is generally structured around “Islam” and “the people.” These themes provide a basis for a political consensus that conceals economic and social contradictions and reveals considerable depoliticization in Indonesian democratic practice.     

美国“重返亚洲”后的马美、马中关系探析

2009年美国"重返亚洲"后,马美两国政治关系有所加强;中马两国政治关系非常密切,合作不断扩大,相互投资和互认学位等问题得到解决,金融合作走在东盟国家前列。马美关系发展对中马关系发展暂时影响不大,中马关系发展乐观,但面对的问题也不少,应给予关注并及早制定对策。     

Political economy of the tumen river basin development: Problems and prospects

Northeast Asia is a cluster of countries with wide differences in political systems, stages of economic development, levels of technology, and natural resource endowments. In addition, infrastructures of national economies are mutually complementary. Yet many sociopolitical elements have so far barred active economic cooperation from becoming a reality, such as North Korean nuclear issues, different ideologies, unstable political systems, and anti-Japanese sentiments. The Tumen river Delta area development projects can be a litmus test for future economic cooperation in the region. Market forces in Japan and South Korea increasingly tend to jump national boundaries and to escape political control, whereas sociopolitical factors have a tendency to restrict and channel the economic activities. Thus, problems of the Tumen river basin development lie in how and where those positive and negative factors are reconciled.     

Clientelism or Something Else? Squatter Politics in Montevideo

Through the in‐depth ethnographic study of one squatter neighborhood in Montevideo and its leader's political networks, this article illustrates a successful strategy through which some squatter neighborhoods have fought for their right to the city. This consists of opportunistic, face‐to‐face relationships between squatter leaders and politicians of various factions and parties as intermediaries to get state goods, such as water, building materials, electricity, roads, and ultimately land tenure. Through this mechanism, squatters have seized political opportunities at the national and municipal levels. These opportunities were particularly high between 1989 and 2004, years of great competition for the votes of the urban poor on the periphery of the city, when the national and municipal governments belonged to opposing parties. In terms of theory, the article discusses current literature on clientelism, posing problems that make it difficult to characterize the political networks observed among squatters.     

金融危机以来的印尼社会问题

印尼的社会问题由来已久。随着金融危机的加深 ,印尼的社会问题不断恶化。它既阻碍了经济的发展 ,又影响了政局的稳定。如何解决社会问题 ,是印尼所面临的重大课题。本文就金融危机以来的印尼主要社会问题的表现、成因、对策作了分析 ,并从中得出几点启示。     

Repression as a Double‐edged Sword: Resilient Monarchs,Repression and Revolution in the Arab World

The Arab world shows a puzzling variation of political violence. The region's monarchies often remain quiet, while other autocracies witness major upheaval. Institutional explanations of this variation suggest that monarchical rule solves the ruler's credible commitment problems and prevents elite splits. This article argues that institutional explanations neglect the role of repression: increasing the scope of repression raises the costs of rebellion and deters rebels. However, the deterrence effect disappears if repression is used indiscriminately. If remaining peaceful offers no benefits, repression creates new rebels instead of deterring them. A time‐series‐cross‐section analysis of repression and political violence in the Middle East and North Africa corroborates our argument and shows the u‐curve relation between repression and violence. Once we control for repression, monarchies have no special effect anymore. Thus, our article addresses the discussion about monarchical exceptionalism, and offers an explanation why repression deters as well as incites political violence.     

Environmental “Voluntary” Agreements: Conditions for Making Them Work

In the 1990s, Environmental Voluntary Agreements (EVAs) have received increased attention as an alternative or supplement to traditional policy instruments, such as taxes and legal regulation. Today, there is a tendency in industry and among some countries to consider EVAs as generally viable policy instruments across different sectors and problems. This article points to the risk of viewing EVAs as generally effective by exploring the conditions under which they are likely to affect the behavior of target groups. Three factors are identified: the type of problem to be solved, the political context in which the problem is approached and the type of agreement applied. The argument is that EVAs are most likely to work when problems are "easy" and can be coped with through "no‐regret" measures, when the political context is consensual and when the agreements themselves are advanced. These conditions are then confronted with the comprehensive voluntary program developed in the Netherlands and recent EU initiatives in this field.     

Presupuesto público sin participación ciudadana. La necesidad de un cambio institucional en México para la consolidación democrática

Over the last thirty years, Mexico has undergone an important consolidation of its institutional framework, focused primarily on the electoral and political system. This process of political change was accompanied by a significant transformation and liberalization of the financial and economic system. Mexico’s current situation proves that both processes do not yield satisfactory results when social problems are left unattended. In fact, the transition from a noncompetitive political system to a more democratic one, has not guaranteed better living conditions for most of the population, in part because there is practically no participation in public life on behalf of most of the citizenry. This article reflects on the fundamental importance of citizens’ participation in democracy. Particular attention is paid to public participative budgets as factors which may contribute to democracy’s consolidation and quality, but which have had negligible impacts thus far as is illustrated by public participative budgets initiatives that have been held in Mexico City.     

Political manipulation in a majoritarian democracy: central government targeting of public funds to English subnational government, in space and across time

This article argues that it is rational for the executive to target resources in space and through time if it seeks to maximise its chances of electoral success. In majoritarian democracies such as the United Kingdom, there are particularly strong incentives to target resources to marginal legislative constituencies, although similar opportunies exist in other political systems. The benefits of such a practice could be growing, because the costs of forms of temporal targeting predicted by theories of the political business cycle have increased, owing to the effect of the global economy. In the United Kingdom one channel through which resources can be targeted is central grants to local authorities. This model is tested with pooled cross-section data on the central finance of English local government between 1981/1982–1995/1996. The article confirms that central government spatially targeted marginals after 1988/1989 while it continued to allocate greater funds near national elections, conditional on its opinion-poll ratings. Hypotheses from the literature on distributional politics are also tested, finding evidence for the temporal allocation of resources to win local elections.     

Ethnic diversity and development in Kenya: limitations of ethnicity as a category of analysis

This paper challenges the relevance of ethnic diversity in explaining the development impasse in Africa, using Kenya as a case study and arguing that the neopatrimonial and ethnic diversity theses are contradictory as explanatory variables of Africa's development crisis. The former speaks to homogeneity while the latter implies heterogeneity in the public policy process. This paper singles out the ethnic diversity thesis as the weaker of the two, arguing that ethnic groups lack a collective ethnic agenda that can be flagged as consequential for the political economy of the polity. Ethnic group intervention in the political arena is not determined by innate ethnic characteristics: it is due to the tendency for certain actors in the body politic to exploit institutional failure. With proper institutions, the assumed burden of ethnicity in African development would naturally evaporate. Focusing on supposedly ethnic problems is the wrong target.     

La rémunération des députés aux États généraux de France et son incidence institutionnelle

SUMMARY

In 1814, after the defeat of the Napoleonic Empire, the Allied states decided to unite the former Dutch Republic and the former Habsburg Netherlands (the later Belgium), as part of their attempt to elaborate a balanced system of European states. As the age of nationalism was arriving, the chances of this unification succeeding depended upon the gradual integration of the two parts into one Netherlandish nation. Stefaan Marteel argues that the eventual failure of this project, which abruptly came to an end with the Belgian Revolution of 1830, can to a large extent be ascribed to the differences in the political and intellectual history of the two countries, differences that found expression in the development of irreconcilable political languages during the constitutional debates of 1815 and thereafter. In the Northern Netherlands, despite the experiments with radical constitutionalism since the Patriot Revolution, the republican past proved a major obstacle to the construction of a functional constitutional monarchy. The paradoxical result was the enforcement of monarchical authority within a political model that was clearly designed to be constitutionalist. In the Southern Netherlands, on the contrary, the rupture that occurred in its political history owing to the annexation of France allowed, in 1814, for certain innovations in political thought. These innovations were further inspired by the idea that the new political order lacked historical legitimization. Consequently, when social issues arose, such as problems concerning education, religion and public freedom, the government and the political opposition in the Belgian provinces would persistently draw on different interpretations of the constitution. This, in turn, reinforced the impression of a fundamental national division, and created the conditions, should a popular revolt occur, for a rapid radicalization in a nationalist direction.     

Transnational Migrants,Globalization Processes,and Regimes of Power and Knowledge

This article situates the Bush administration's new strategy in the historical context of the international capitalist order established by the United States at the end of the 1940s and argues that this order, though extraordinarily successful for some decades, is now in crisis. The unique capitalist international community that the United States established under its primacy revived international capitalism while preventing geopolitical rivalries between the main capitalist centers. The leading sectors of U.S. business have become dependent on the preservation of the unipolar primacy order for its own economic security and expansion while the American domestic political economy has failed to revive as an industrial economy meeting the rules of international economics, exhibiting growing problems with current account deficits and rising levels of debt. To manage the resulting tensions between the orientation of American transnational sectors and problems in the domestic American political economy, the United States has developed an international monetary and financial regime that is destabilizing and dependent upon the preservation of American political primacy over the capitalist world. But the Soviet collapse has destabilized the primacy system, while the dominant sections of American capitalism are committed to rebuilding it. The Bush administration is seeking to rebuild U.S. primacy, using U.S. military dominance. But this carries very high risks.     

China’s political system in the 1990s

Analysts differ greatly in their assessments of the long-term stability of the Chinese political system. This article argues that China’s probable future is one of continued political muddling through, but some developments—especially the political succession—could radically change this. The article also examines two questions that are not adequately addressed by the focus on political stability: the types of relationships that will develop between the rapidly growing coastal areas and the more slowly advancing interior; and the efficacy of the polity in dealing with looming environmental and demographic crises. To address these problems, this article assesses respectively the political system’s overall strengths, deficiencies, and challenges in the coming years.     

Party Politics and Economic Policy in the New Germany

Germany experienced economic malaise in the 1990s, raising the question of whether or not the political system is capable of reform. The reactions of the political parties to economic problems demonstrate an enduring set of norms about economic policy which include a generous social welfare system and an emphasis on co-operation between business and labour. However, there is a general agreement about the need for policy reform, and recent moves by the Red-Green coalition indicate a willingness to undertake significant steps towards a slightly more pluralist and liberal set of policies. The dynamic of party politics over the last decade indicate a mature, stable political system capable of reform.     

Examining the Micro-level Foundations of Japan’s Two-party System Following Government Alternation

A consensus exists among political scientists and the media that a two party system has become firmly established in Japan, and power alternation following the 2009 House of Representatives election seemed to confirm this trend. In contrast, in this study I draw on both election and public opinion data to illustrate that Japan's two-party system rests on fragile micro foundations, particularly since the change of government, and may therefore not constitute a stable equilibrium. Specifically, the two-party system is sustained by the logic of competition in single member districts, but lacks strong backing among a large proportion of the public. Evidence in support of this argument include 1) decreasing vote shares for both the Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Japan in the 2010 House of Councillors election, and 2) a weakening relationship between support for these two parties in monthly polls, in contrast to previous years when LDP and DPJ ratings mirrored one another. I discuss some potential implications of these developments, such as the growing prominence of regional parties and prospects for electoral rule changes.