Jack Snyder Empire: a blunt tool for democratization · democracy would have been adopted by ... almost continuously democratic since independence, such as India and some ... while

58 Dædalus Spring 2005

On its face, using military occupationas a tool to promote democratization isabout as intuitive as forcing people totake a self-improvement class to learnhow to be more spontaneous. And yetthe two most recent U.S. administra-tions, though on opposite ends of thepolitical spectrum, have used America’smight to try to advance the cause of de-mocracy in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, atleast nominally, Afghanistan. The Bushadministration’s major statement of itsstrategic policy, known mainly for itsjusti½cation of preventive war, dwells on the need to “shift the balance of pow-er in favor of freedom.”1

Scholars and public intellectuals haveplayed a prominent role as drummers on

this bandwagon. Historian Niall Fergu-son, in a colorful collection of storiesthat ends with a paean to empire, con-tends that “without the influence ofBritish imperial rule, it is hard to believethat the institutions of parliamentarydemocracy would have been adopted bythe majority of states in the world, asthey are today.”2 Indeed, most of thepostcolonial states that have remainedalmost continuously democratic sinceindependence, such as India and someWest Indian island states, are formerBritish possessions. Still, as Fergusonacknowledges, many former British col-onies have failed to achieve democraticstability: Pakistan and Nigeria oscillatebetween chaotic elected regimes andmilitary dictatorships; Sri Lanka hasheld elections that stoked the ½res ofethnic conflict; Malaysia has avertedethnic conflict only by limiting democ-racy; Singapore is stuck in a pattern ofstable but noncompetitive electoral poli-tics; Kenya is emerging from a long in-terlude of one-party rule; and Iraq in thelate 1940s flirted with electoral politicsthat played into the hands of violent rad-

Jack Snyder

Empire: a blunt tool for democratization

Jack Snyder is the Robert and Renée Belfer Profes-sor of International Relations in the political sci-ence department and the Institute of War andPeace Studies at Columbia University. His booksinclude “The Ideology of the Offensive: Mili-tary Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914”(1984), “Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics andInternational Ambition” (1991), and “From Vot-ing to Violence: Democratization and NationalistConflict” (2000). He has been a Fellow of theAmerican Academy since 1999.

© 2005 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

1 Of½ce of the President, “National SecurityStrategy of the United States,” September 2002,<www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html>.

2 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made theModern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 358.

icals. The list continues with even moreparlous cases, from Burma to Zimbabwe.

Despite this mixed track record, it isworth looking back on imperial Brit-ain’s strategies, successes, and failures in attempting to prepare its far-flungpossessions for democratic self-govern-ment. From the 1920s onward, the Brit-ish undertook systematic efforts to writetransitional democratic constitutions forcountries they expected would soon beself-governing. At the same time, theydevised political, economic, administra-tive, and cultural strategies to facilitatethis transition.

In other words, they attempted rough-ly what the United States and the UnitedNations have been trying to accomplishon a shorter timetable in Iraq, Bosnia,Kosovo, and East Timor. What problemsand trade-offs they faced in this enter-prise help illuminate, at least in a generalway, the kind of troubles that the democ-racy-promoting empire still confrontstoday.

To illustrate these processes, I draw onseveral examples, particularly those ofIraq in the late 1940s, India in the 1930sthrough the 1940s, Sri Lanka in the 1930sthrough the 1950s, and Malaysia in the1940s through the 1960s.

Democratization by imperial ½atsounds paradoxical, and it is. The impe-rial power insists not only that the so-ciety it rules should become democratic,but also that the outcome of democrati-zation should be one that it approves:namely, that the new democracy shouldcontinue to abide by the rules laid downby the departing imperial power, shouldbe stable and peaceful, and should main-tain good relations with the former over-lord. This is dif½cult enough when theempire has actually succeeded in install-ing the full set of tools the postcolonialstate will need to make democracy func-

tion: a competent civil service; impartialcourts and police that can implementthe rule of law; independent, profession-alized news media; and the rest. Evenwhen these institutions are well estab-lished, outcomes may not conform tothe empire’s wishes, because the self-determining people may have their ownideas and interests that diverge from theempire’s.

When democratic institutions are on-ly partially formed, as is commonly thecase at the moment of decolonization,the problem is much worse. Transition-al regimes typically face a gap betweenhigh demand for mass political partici-pation and weak institutions to integratesociety’s conflicting needs.3 The imperi-al power may have put in place some ofthe institutional window dressing of de-mocracy, but daily political maneuver-ing, energized by the devolution of pow-er, is shaped more by ties of patronageand ethnicity, and by unregulated oppor-tunism, than by democratic processes.This situation is ripe for the turbulentpolitics of ethnic particularism, coups,and rebellions.

The imperial ruler sometimes imag-ines that politics will take a holidaywhile the democratic system is being es-tablished–that groups contending forpower will not exploit the weakness oftransitional arrangements. In Malayashortly after World War II, for example,the British hoped that a battery of socialand economic reforms inspired by Fabi-an socialism would depoliticize class andethnic conflicts during democratization.When it turned out that reform inten-si½ed the expression of competing de-mands, the British temporarily revertedto their earlier reliance on indirect rulethrough undemocratic traditional elites

Empire: a blunttool fordemocra-tization

3 Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order inChanging Societies (New Haven, Conn.: YaleUniversity Press, 1968).

Dædalus Spring 2005 59


Jack Snyder onimperialism

of the Malay ethnic group. “Colonialpolicy,” says historian T. N. Harper,“lurched between authoritarianism anda missionary adherence to the rule oflaw.”4

Imperial strategists of the democratictransition often thought of this simply asa problem of the speed of reform. A 1960Foreign Of½ce memorandum, for exam-ple, stated that the task in East Africawas “to regulate the pace of political de-velopment so that it was fast enough tosatisfy the African desire for self-govern-ment but not so fast as to jeopardize eco-nomic progress or the security situa-tion.”5 Actually, the problem is far morecomplex than this. Temporarily puttingon the brake, as in the Malayan example,often involved ruling undemocraticallythrough traditional elites or minorityethnic groups in the classic strategy ofdivide and rule. This was not simply amatter of “freezing colonial societies.”6

Rather, this process actively created newdivisions, altered the political meaningof traditional identities, and distributedpower in ways that would complicatesubsequent efforts to install a sense ofnational unity.

Both in public and private, of½cials ofthe Colonial Of½ce sounded well mean-ing: “the present time [1947] is one ofunprecedented vigour and imagination”

in British colonial policy, “one cheerfulthing in a depressing world.”7 “The fun-damental objectives [for 1948] in Africaare to foster the emergence of large-scalesocieties, integrated for self-governmentby effective and democratic political andeconomic institutions both national and local, inspired by a common faith in progress and Western values andequipped with ef½cient techniques ofproduction and betterment.”8 The problem, at least at this stage of impe-rial stewardship, was not primarily badintentions. Rather, it was the paradox ofpromoting democracy by ½at, whichoften required the adoption of politicallyexpedient methods of rule that undercutthe achievement of the ultimate objec-tive of democratic consolidation.

Attempted democratic transitions arelikely to turn violent and to stall short ofdemocratic consolidation when they areundertaken in a society that lacks theinstitutions needed to make democracywork. Such societies face a gap betweenrising demands for broad participationin politics and inadequate institutions tomanage those popular demands. All ofthis happens at a time when new institu-tions of democratic accountability havenot yet been constructed to replace theold, divested institutions of imperialauthority or traditional rule.

In the absence of routine institutionalauthority, political leaders ½nd they needto rule through ideological or charismat-ic appeals. Rallying popular support byinvoking threats from rival nations orethnic groups is an attractive expedient

4 T. N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Mak-ing of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1999), 378; for other points, see 58,75, 82–83.

5 Ronald Hyam, “Bureaucracy and ‘Trustee-ship’ in Colonial Empire,” in Judith M. Brownand Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Oxford Historyof the British Empire: The Twentieth Century, vol.4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 278,quoting a Foreign Of½ce memorandum by Wil-liam Gorell Barnes.

6 John W. Cell, “Colonial Rule,” in Brown andLouis, eds., The Oxford History of the British Em-pire: The Twentieth Century.

7 Speech by A. Hilton Poynton at the UnitedNations, October 3, 1947, quoted in Hyam,“Bureaucracy and ‘Trusteeship’ in ColonialEmpire,” 277.

8 Colonial Of½ce paper, quoted in Hyam,“Bureaucracy and ‘Trusteeship’ in ColonialEmpire,” 277.

for hard-pressed leaders who desperatelyneed to shore up their legitimacy.9 Theinstitutional weaknesses of early democ-ratization create both the motive to usethis strategy of rule and the opportunityto dodge accountability for its costs.

A common side effect of state weak-ness during early democratization is apoorly de½ned sense of the nation. De-mocracy requires national self-determi-nation, but people in weak states whoare just emerging into political con-sciousness often lack a clear, agreedanswer to the question, who are we?

Notwithstanding the typical viewamong nationalists that the identity ofnations is ½xed by immutable nature orculture, it is normally the common ex-perience of a people sharing a fate in astrong state that solidi½es and demar-cates a sense of nationality. Even inFrance, a country with a long and ven-erable history, it was only the late-nine-teenth-century experience of commonmilitary service, national railways, stan-dardized education, and mass democra-cy that completed the process of forginga culturally diverse peasantry into self-conscious Frenchmen.10 In the absenceof strong state institutions to knit to-gether the nation, leaders must strugglefor legitimacy in an ill-de½ned, contest-ed political arena.

In weakly institutionalized, newlydemocratizing states, this contestationover national self-determination takesplace amid the shifting fortunes of elitesand mass groups. Elites left over fromthe old regime look desperately for strat-

egies that will prevent their fall, whilerising elites try to muscle in. Both sets of elites scramble for allies among thenewly aroused masses.

Nationalism–the doctrine that a dis-tinctive people deserve to rule them-selves in a state that protects and ad-vances their distinctive cultural or politi-cal interests–often emerges as an appar-ently attractive solution to these politicaldilemmas. It helps rally mass support onthe basis of sentiment in lieu of institu-tional accountability, and helps de½nethe people who are exercising self-deter-mination. It thus clari½es the lines be-tween the people and their external foes,who become available as scapegoats in aself-ful½lling strategy that rallies supportin protection against external threats.

Civil or international war may some-times result from this potent politicalbrew as a direct result of nationalist po-litical objectives, such as the aim of re-gaining a lost piece of national territory.However, war may also be an indirectresult of the complex politics of transi-tional states. Political leaders may be-come trapped in reckless policies whenuncompromising nationalism becomesthe indispensable common denominatorthat keeps their heterogeneous politicalcoalitions together.

These problems are likely to face anysociety that tries to democratize beforebuilding the requisite institutions. Thisis no less the case when a democracy-promoting empire is overseeing theprocess. If the empire understands thisproblem, it may try to maintain its posi-tion of domination longer to buy timeto put the needed institutions in place.When considerations of rising cost andwaning legitimacy ½nally compel decol-onization, the empire may attempt anawkward compromise between authori-tarian order keeping and democraticlegitimacy, leaving in place a hybrid

9 Edward D. Mans½eld and Jack Snyder, Elect-ing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War(Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2005); Snyder,From Voting to Violence: Democratization andNationalist Conflict (New York: Norton, 2000).

10 Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,1976).





political system based on both tradition-al and elected authority. This expedientacknowledges the problem but does notnecessarily solve it.

The chaotic democratic processes thatfollowed Britain’s imperial departurefrom Iraq provide a telling example ofsuch dilemmas.

Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s was a coun-try undergoing the strains of socioeco-nomic modernization and decoloniza-tion with no coherent identity, tradition,or political institutions.11 Under a Brit-ish mandate, Iraq’s 1924 constitutiondivided powers between the king and anindirectly elected parliament chosen byuniversal manhood suffrage. After gain-ing independence in 1932, Iraq suffered aseries of tribal rebellions and leadershipstruggles. These culminated in a coup bynationalist military of½cers, which trig-gered British reoccupation of the coun-try from 1941 to 1945.12

Following World War II, the Britishencouraged the regent Abd al-Ilah, whowas ruling on behalf of the young KingFaysal II, to liberalize the regime toenhance its popular legitimacy in theeyes of the alienated urban middle class.Press restrictions were removed, opposi-tion parties were licensed, and electoraldistricts were redrawn to reflect popula-tion shifts to urban areas. However, theplan for political liberalization provokedresistance from established elites.13 The

Iraqi prime minister told a British diplo-mat that his government had “decidedto allow political parties in order that itshould become clear how harmful theyare and their abolition be demanded.”14

Reflecting traditions of patronage poli-tics in a still largely rural society, localnotables dominated the parliament cho-sen in the election of 1946.15

Middle-class nationalists, thoughthinly represented in parliament, re-mained loud voices in public debate.Important in government service, in themilitary, in the economy, and potentiallyin the streets, these educated urbanitescould not be ignored. To appease suchcritics, Iraqi diplomats took the mostradical stance on the Palestine issue atthe June 1946 meeting of the ArabLeague, gratuitously calling for a boy-cott of British and American trade thatthey knew the Saudis and Egyptianswould have to veto.16

Such public relations tactics becameincreasingly entrenched in 1947, as thenew Iraqi prime minister Salih Jabrgroped to ½nd a rhetorical stance thatwould reconcile Iraq’s diverse con-stituencies to his weakly institutional-ized regime. Jabr faced a general eco-nomic crisis, severe food shortages, anda shortfall of money for salaries of civilservants, a prime constituency for Arabnationalist groups.17 The regent and the traditional ruling elites hoped that

11 Reeva Simon, Iraq Between the Two WorldWars: The Creation and Implementation of a Na-tionalist Ideology (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1986), 3–4.

12 Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985), 55–93.

13 Ibid., 96–100; Matthew Elliot, “IndependentIraq”: The Monarchy and British Influence, 1941 –1958 (London: Tauris Academic Studies,1996), 25.

14 Elliot, “Independent Iraq,” 26.

15 Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, 101; Mi-chael Eppel, The Palestine Conflict in the Historyof Modern Iraq (London: Frank Cass, 1994), 139.

16 Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, The Crystallizationof the Arab State System, 1945–1954 (Syracuse,N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 36.

17 Eppel, The Palestine Conflict in the History ofModern Iraq, 167; Marr, The Modern History ofIraq, 103.

British economic and military aid wouldhelp them weather the crisis and fend offburgeoning urban radicalism. In pursuitof that strategy, Jabr hoped to renegoti-ate Iraq’s treaty with Britain in order toeliminate the embarrassing presence ofBritish air bases on Iraqi soil and to cre-ate a ½rmer basis for economic and polit-ical cooperation.18

For the nationalists, however, even animproved agreement with the formercolonial overlord was anathema. Thus,to immunize himself from nationalistobjections, Jabr relied on demagogy onthe Palestine issue. In August of 1947, hebroke precedent in calling for the use ofthe regular armies of Arab states, notjust volunteers, to ½ght against the Jewsin Palestine. Nonetheless, amid a wors-ening of the economy and a shortfall ofexpected British aid, the strategy of na-tionalist demagogy on this issue failed toreconcile Iraqi nationalists to the renew-al of the treaty with Britain. The signingof the treaty in January of 1948 provokeda wave of student strikes, demonstra-tions, and denunciations from politicalparties, leading to Jabr’s replacement bya politician who was untainted by asso-ciation with the treaty.19

While Jabr’s rhetoric on Palestinefailed to achieve its intended conse-quences, its unintended consequenceswere profound. A British diplomat re-ported that “the Iraqi Government isnow to some extent the victim of theirown brave words, which the opposition

is not slow to challenge them to makegood.”20 In a vicious cycle of outbid-ding, the regent, the parliamentary no-tables, and the socialist parties now allcompeted with the nationalist opposi-tion to adopt the most militant positionon Palestine. Since Iraq was not a front-line state, the costs of undermining thechances of compromise in Palestinewere low compared to the domestic po-litical costs of being outbid on the Arabnationalism issue. This rhetoric rever-berated not just within Iraq, but alsothroughout the Arab world. Jabr’s mili-tant stance on Palestine at the Octoberand November 1947 meetings of the Ar-ab League helped to set off a spiral ofincreasingly vehement anti-Israeli rhet-oric in other Arab states. In the echochamber of popular Arab politics, Iraq’sincompletely democratized regime ledthe way in adopting a demagogic strate-gy that increasingly tied the hands of lessdemocratic Arab states that otherwisemight have been able to resist such pop-ular pressures.21

It would be an exaggeration to say that Britain’s inadequate effort to installpartially democratic institutions in Iraqwas the sole cause of these outcomes;politics in modernizing Iraq might havebeen fraught with turmoil under any sce-nario. Nonetheless, this serves as a cau-tionary tale, demonstrating how a de-mocracy-promoting empire can unleashilliberal forces in societies with weak po-litical institutions.

18 Eppel, The Palestine Conflict in the History ofModern Iraq, 159, 162–163; Marr, The ModernHistory of Iraq, 101–102.

19 Maddy-Weitzman, The Crystallization of theArab State System, 49; Eppel, The Palestine Con-flict in the History of Modern Iraq, 143, 164–166,174–175; Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, 101–105.

20 Eppel, The Palestine Conflict in the History ofModern Iraq, 169.

21 Ibid., 141–142, 158, 181, 193; Marr, The Mod-ern History of Iraq, 102; Maddy-Weitzman, TheCrystallization of the Arab State System, 49. For a related argument, see Michael Barnett, Dia-logues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in RegionalOrder (New York: Columbia University Press,1998), 87–91.





One of the most common charges laidagainst the British Empire is that it un-scrupulously played the game of divideand rule. In order to maintain its author-ity over millions of colonial subjectswith a minimum of expense and Britishmanpower, the British built up elites oflocal ethnic groups or tribes who servedas Britain’s agents of indirect rule. TheBritish also armed local ethnic minori-ties who kept order effectively at rock-bottom prices. Scholars have argued thatthese tactics contributed to the politici-zation of ethnicity, which loaded thedice in favor of bloody ethnic conflictsonce the empire retreated. Even whenthe British were trying to prepare a col-ony for peaceful, democratic self-gov-ernment, such tactics as institutional-ized power sharing or minority repre-sentation among ethnic groups tendedto politicize earlier ethnic divisions.These latent ½ssures tended to crackopen with the move to independenceand true universal-suffrage democracy.

India is often invoked as an example of the divisive legacy of British tactics of divide and rule, but it is by no meansunique. In Ceylon (later Sri Lanka), forexample, the British relied dispropor-tionately on English-speaking civil ser-vants from Tamil and other minoritygroups. In Malaya, the British encour-aged immigration of Chinese and Indianworkers to man the rubber plantationsand other enterprises needed to sustainthe broader imperial economy and mili-tary machine. These measures laid thegroundwork in both of these colonies for the envy of the rural ethnic majoritygroups, the Sinhalese and Malays, thatsought af½rmative action and language-use privileges to correct perceived injus-tices.

The British dealt with these problemsby oscillating between power-sharingschemes that protected minorities and

universal-suffrage democracy that em-powered the majority. The generation of British-trained politicians that tookpower immediately after independencekept up this balancing game for a time,but in the long run the system’s opposedprinciples turned out to be incompati-ble. In Malaysia, the problem was solvedwhen the state curtailed the democraticprocess and civil rights in 1969; in SriLanka, democracy spiraled into ever-worsening ethnic warfare. These exam-ples illustrate a widespread pattern inimperial attempts to democratize multi-ethnic societies.

Democratic transitions are most suc-cessful and peaceful when undertaken ina context of bureaucratic ef½ciency, ruleof law, mature political parties, and es-tablished free press. One of the reasonsthat India has remained a fairly stabledemocracy is that all these elementswere put in place, largely as a result ofBritish efforts, before its independencein 1947. However, to buy the time to ac-complish this (both for Britain’s ownstrategic reasons and arguably to prepareIndia better for the transition), the em-pire needed to shore up local allies whosupported the continuation of the colo-nial regime. In India in the 1920s and1930s, these included traditional Muslimelites who welcomed British rule as aprotection against the feared tyranny ofthe Hindu majority. (A consequence ofthis policy, many have argued, was thebloody partition of the British Raj intoIndia and Pakistan in 1947, in which ithas been estimated that nearly a millionpeople died.22) To strengthen these al-lies while gradually introducing demo-cratic reforms in preparation for eventu-

22 Radha Kumar, “The Troubled History ofPartition,” Foreign Affairs 76 (1) (January/Feb-ruary 1997): 26.

al independence, the British establisheda system of separate electorates andguaranteed numbers of seats in provin-cial parliaments for Muslims and Hin-dus. As the political system began to de-mocratize, this system of ethnic repre-sentation helped to channel mass loyal-ties along ethnic lines.23

British policy promoted the politiciza-tion of Muslim identity still further dur-ing World War II. When Britain commit-ted India to the war effort against Ger-many without consultation, CongressParty members in the Indian govern-ment resigned en masse. Congress lead-ers were jailed. The Muslim League,however, continued to see Britain astheir protector against the Hindu major-ity, and so supported the British war ef-fort. Enjoying a clear ½eld for politicalorganizing with no opposition from theCongress, the League emerged from thewar with a strengthened hold over theMuslim electorate.

In the postwar 1946 elections, theLeague gained 76 percent of the Mus-lim vote through its irresistible call forthe creation of the state of Pakistan.24

When in 1947 the League euphemistical-ly called for “direct action” in the streetsto press the Congress for concessions onMuslim autonomy, the new electorate,its loyalties channeled by the system ofrepresentation separated by ethnicity,responded by rioting in Calcutta and inother major cities. Looking to extricatethemselves through a policy that criticshave labeled ‘divide and quit,’ the Britishabandoned India to a chaotic, bloody

partition of the extensively intermingledreligious communities.

On the one hand, the British legacy of liberal institutions facilitated India’stransition to a fairly stable democracy.On the other hand, the legacy of insti-tutionalized ethnicity, an expedient tosustain British rule while awaiting thetransfer of power to the local majority,increased the likelihood that culturalcleavages would become the basis fordivisive politics in the transitional state.

In Sri Lanka, the British fostered thedevelopment of a small, English-educat-ed, cosmopolitan political and bureau-cratic elite who tended to favor theinclusive civic identity of ‘Ceylonese,’based on loyalty to the governmentalsystem that Britain had established inthe colony of Ceylon, rather than theexclusive ethnic identities of Sinhaleseor Tamil.25 Because of the success ofChristian missionary activities in theTamil-populated Jaffna region, Tamilsconstituted a disproportionate share of that elite. Fewer Sinhalese learnedEnglish because the powerful Buddhistpriesthood blocked British inroads in-to the traditional monopoly of templeschools over the education of lay chil-dren.26

High-level British-trained native of½-cials never sunk deep roots into localcommunities and thus failed to attract a popular following. During the 1920s,Ceylon’s main representative body, theState Council, was elected under a pow-er-sharing system that restricted suf-

23 Anita Inder Singh, The Origins of the Partitionof India, 1936–1947 (Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1987), 237; Peter Hardy, The Muslims ofBritish India (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1972), chap. 8; H. V. Hodson, The GreatDivide (London: Hutchison, 1969), 14–15, 48.

24 Singh, The Origins of the Partition of India,243.

25 K. N. O. Dharmadasa, Language, Religion, and Ethnic Assertiveness: The Growth of SinhaleseNationalism in Sri Lanka (Ann Arbor: Universityof Michigan Press, 1992), 225–226, 254.

26 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Sri Lanka: EthnicFratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986),65–66, 79, 155.





frage and reserved a proportion of theseats for Tamils. This system bufferedindigenous of½cials from full accounta-bility to mass constituencies. In 1931,however, the British DonoughmoreCommission, in an attempt to prepareCeylon for independence and full de-mocracy, stripped away this buffer byeliminating separate minority represen-tation and introducing universal suf-frage.27

Despite growing populist ferment, theold cosmopolitan elite managed to pre-vail in elections to form the ½rst twopostindependence governments in 1947and 1952. Soon, however, the Sinhaleserebellion against pro½ciency in the Eng-lish language as a requirement for gov-ernment employment began to gatherforce. Sinhalese teachers and Buddhistmonks also wanted to exclude Tamil asan of½cial language, arguing that lan-guage parity would somehow allow thelarge Tamil population of South India toswamp Sinhalese culture. Radical monksin the less wealthy temples resented theinfluence of Western culture and admin-istrative practices, which deprived themof their traditional role as the link be-tween the state and the villages.28 Thesemonks experimented with socialist rhet-oric in the late 1940s, but by the mid-1950s they found that nationalist pop-ulist themes were a more effective vehi-cle for expressing their demands.

Given the competitive incentives ofuniversal-suffrage elections, even a secu-

lar, cosmopolitan, Oxford-educated pol-itician such as Solomon Bandaranaikefound it expedient to tap into this popu-lar movement. Perceiving an opportuni-ty to gain power in the 1956 elections,the Buddhist political organization of-fered to support Bandaranaike’s chal-lenge to the ruling United National Par-ty, on the condition that he campaign on the platform of making Sinhala theof½cial state language. This marriage of convenience consolidated the ideo-logical shift of Ceylon’s Buddhist move-ment from socialism to ethnonational-ism. Through word of mouth, by playinga central role at local political meetings,and by distributing election leaflets, lo-cal monks delivered ‘vote banks’ on be-half of Bandaranaike and the ethnicallydivisive language policy.29

Although Bandaranaike owed his elec-toral victory to the support of militantBuddhists, once in power he negotiateda pact with Tamil leaders to establishTamil as the language of administra-tion in Tamil-majority provinces in thenortheast of the country and to allowlocal authorities to block Sinhalese im-migration into their regions. These con-cessions triggered anti-Tamil rioting inthe capital city of Colombo. Bandara-naike gave up his plan to gain legislativeapproval of the pact, declared an emer-gency, and implemented the main fea-tures of the agreement by decree. Bud-dhists, claiming the pact would “lead tothe total annihilation of the Sinhaleserace,” only intensi½ed their resistance.30

27 Urmila Phadnis, Religion and Politics in SriLanka (New Delhi: Manohar, 1976), 159; Chel-vadurai Manogaran, Ethnic Conflict and Reconcil-iation in Sri Lanka (Honolulu: University of Ha-waii Press, 1987), 8; James Manor, “The Failureof Political Integration in Sri Lanka (Ceylon),”Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Poli-tics 17 (1) (March 1979): 23.

28 Tambiah, Sri Lanka, 8, 20; Phadnis, Religionand Politics in Sri Lanka, 74.

29 Phadnis, Religion and Politics in Sri Lanka,73–74, 160, 164–165, 183–187; Manor, “TheFailure of Political Integration in Sri Lanka(Ceylon),” 21–22; Dharmadasa, Language, Reli-gion, and Ethnic Assertiveness, 296–297, 300, 314.

30 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Buddhism Be-trayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in SriLanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1992), 50.

A monk assassinated Bandaranaike in1959.

From this point on, the pattern of elec-toral outbidding among Sinhalese par-ties was ½rmly established. Even JuniusJayawardene’s hitherto moderate Sin-halese United National Party attackedBandaranaike’s power-sharing agree-ment with the Tamils. On several subse-quent occasions, the Sinhalese party inpower sought an agreement with theTamil minority to achieve a majoritycoalition in parliament, and the Sin-halese opposition party responded withdemagogic attacks to wreck the agree-ment. Revamping the electoral system in1977 to reward candidates who appealedacross ethnic lines also failed to breakthe spiral of conflict.31 By that time,groups had developed the habit of riot-ing in the streets against policies theydisliked, so conflict was fueled regard-less of electoral incentives.

The legacy of British imperialismexacerbated the problems of the demo-cratic transition in Sri Lanka’s multieth-nic society. In Sri Lanka as elsewhere,this legacy included the contradictoryelements of a divide-and-rule preferencefor ethnic minorities and the subsequentmove to universal-suffrage democracy.In this setting, even the DonoughmoreCommission’s well-intentioned planturned out to be fraught with unintend-ed consequences.

Malaysia achieved independencefrom Britain in 1957, a decade after Sri

Lanka. In many respects, the two startedout on similar trajectories. In a processthat closely resembled Sri Lanka’s tran-sition to independence, the British inMalaysia brokered an agreement for ademocratic constitution, which was un-derpinned by a power-sharing accordbetween cosmopolitan, English-speak-ing elites from the Malayan and Chinesecommunities. Having brought Chineseand Indian immigrants to Malaya to sus-tain the imperial economy, the Britishhoped that democratic power sharingcould overcome the political divisionsthis had brought about. But that expec-tation was too optimistic. As in Sri Lan-ka over the course of the ½rst decadeafter independence, the logic of masselectoral competition began to under-mine the power-sharing accord, as na-tionalist parties in both major ethnicgroups began to draw votes away fromthe centrist, cross-ethnic alliance. Inter-ethnic harmony was restored only afterdemocracy was truncated through a sus-pension of the liberal constitution fol-lowing the 1969 postelectoral riots.32

During the early years of the ColdWar, an armed rebellion mounted by theChinese-dominated Malaysian Commu-nist Party had left all Chinese politicallysuspect. As a result, the Chinese businesselite faced dif½culties in organizing po-litically on its own. Moreover, wealthyChinese found that their interests oftencoincided more closely with those ofMalayan bureaucratic elites than withthose of working-class Chinese. As aresult, the main Chinese party, the Ma-laysian Chinese Association, combinedwith the Malayan elite party, the United

31 Donald Horowitz, “Making ModerationPay,” in Joseph Montville, ed., Conflict andPeacemaking in Multiethnic Societies (New York:Lexington Books, 1991), 463. On the more re-cent period, see Amita Shatri, “GovernmentPolicy and the Ethnic Crisis in Sri Lanka,” inMichael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly, eds.,Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asiaand the Paci½c (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press,1997), 129–164.

32 Gordon P. Means, Malaysian Politics: The Sec-ond Generation (Singapore: Oxford UniversityPress, 1991), chap. 1; Muthiah Alagappa, “Con-testation and Crisis,” in Alagappa, ed., PoliticalLegitimacy in Southeast Asia (Stanford, Calif.:Stanford University Press, 1995), 63–64.





Malays National Organization, to form acoalition, known as the Alliance, for thepurpose of contesting the Kuala Lumpurcity elections in 1952. The British rein-forced this arrangement and made eth-nic cooperation a precondition of even-tual independence.33

The cross-ethnic coalition agreementheld ½rm for the ½rst two postindepen-dence elections: In 1959, the Alliancewon 52 percent of the vote in free andfair elections and, because of the magni-fying effects of single-member districts,74 out of 104 seats in parliament. In 1964,the Alliance bene½ted from the rallyingeffect induced by military threats fromIndonesia and increased its margin ofvictory.34

By 1969, however, the Alliance’s pow-er-sharing formula was coming underintense challenge by a second generationof political elites that was more ethnical-ly oriented and less cosmopolitan thanthe founders of the independent Malay-sian state. The Alliance continued tocampaign on what in retrospect soundslike an extraordinarily reasonable plat-form: Alliance politicians offered pro-grams to rectify the economic disadvan-tages of impoverished, poorly educatedMalayans, and they justi½ed these pro-grams in terms of the need to developagriculture, not of ethnic favoritism.Malay was to become the sole of½ciallanguage, but other languages could beused for of½cial business as needed. TheChinese would continue to bene½t froma liberal policy on citizenship. The Al-liance’s ideology was one of Malaysian

civic-territorial nationalism, not Ma-layan ethnic nationalism.35

This reasonable-seeming formula be-gan to wear thin, however, in the trou-bled economic context of 1969. Both theMalays and the Chinese had grounds forcomplaint against the elitist Alliance,whose supporters came disproportion-ately from the upper-income groups ofboth ethnicities. By 1969, Malays’ percapita income remained less than halfthat of non-Malays. Opposition partiescatering to Malay constituencies be-lieved the solution should be a massiveprogram of employing Malays in new,state-sector industries. Yet they saw thatthe Malay political power needed to ac-complish this was receding, because theAlliance’s liberal citizenship policieswere swelling the ranks of Chinese na-tionalist voters. “Racial harmony is onlyskin deep,” the manifesto of the Malayopposition party concluded. “Ninetypercent of the nation’s wealth is still inthe hands of non-Malays.”36

At the same time, Chinese economicgrievances were rising. A devaluation ofthe British pound sterling harmed Chi-nese business interests. Because the Alli-ance was hard-pressed by the Malay op-position in the hard-fought 1969 parlia-mentary election campaign, it refused tocompensate those who suffered ½nanciallosses as a result of the devaluation. Thisgave added ammunition to the Chineseopposition parties. In a perverse form of interethnic elite collusion, the Malaynationalist and Chinese nationalist par-ties had agreed not to divide the opposi-tion vote and so refrained from runningopposing candidates in districts whereone of the two parties held the majority.The Alliance had gained only 49 percent

33 Stanley S. Bedlington, Malaysia and Singa-pore: The Building of New States (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1978), 85–87.

34 Karl von Vorys, Democracy Without Consen-sus: Communalism and Political Stability in Ma-laysia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPress, 1975), 249, 297.

35 Ibid., 268.

36 Ibid., 271.

of the popular vote, though it retained amajority of the seats in parliament. De-spite this ‘victory,’ the Alliance govern-ment eventually succumbed to tactics ofethnic polarization and suffered ultimateelectoral defeat at the hands of the eth-nic opposition parties. When riots brokeout in Kuala Lumpur between Chineseand Malays in the ethnically polarizedatmosphere after this tense election, thegovernment declared an emergency andsuspended the constitution.

The government then began to pursuea two-pronged strategy of truncatingdemocracy while implementing a tech-nocratic policy designed to maximizeeconomic growth and increase educa-tional and employment opportunitiesfor ethnic Malays. Heavy governmentinvestments would modernize rural ar-eas where Malays were the majority. Ac-cording to this formula, which was codi-½ed in the Second Malaysia Plan of 1971,Chinese businesses could continue toenrich themselves, but national symbol-ism and government-backed af½rmativeaction would strongly favor Malays. In-flammatory ethnic appeals were madeillegal. Political coalitions were arrangedthrough backroom bargaining and pa-tronage deals rather than through opencontestation.37 In the jargon of socialscience, the Alliance instituted an “eth-nic control regime” based on a combina-tion of repression and side payments tosome of the losers.38

This strategy was so successful that by1973 even the nationalist opposition par-

ties had been co-opted into the rulingAlliance, which now controlled 80 per-cent of the seats in parliament. Underthis system of sharp limitations on freespeech and truncated democratic rights,Malaysia enjoyed three decades of extra-ordinary economic growth without seri-ous ethnic violence, with the Allianceunassailably in power.39

A key factor in this success was thepower of Malaysian state administra-tors over society. British Malaya had be-queathed an effective central bureaucra-cy, a powerful tool that Alliance politi-cians could use to coerce or buy off op-ponents under the Second MalaysiaPlan.40 The powers held by the state un-der the revised 1971 constitution includ-ed the ability to distribute patronage tocooperative opposition politicians, todistribute central tax revenues to coop-erative localities, and to parcel out eco-nomic development projects. The loyaltyand ef½ciency of the Malay-dominatedmilitary and police immediately made itpossible to repress rioting. Sarawak ran-ger units, composed of Iban tribesmenbrought in from the Malaysian part ofBorneo, proved equally ruthless in re-pressing unruly gangs.41

Finally, the state had strong powers tobar ethnonationalist messages from the

37 Ibid., 394–412; Means, Malaysian Politics,439; Bedlington, Malaysia and Singapore, 116.

38 D. Rumley, “Political Geography of Controlof Minorities,” Tijdschrift voor Economische inSociale Geographie 84 (1) (1993); Ian Lustick,“Stability in Deeply Divided Societies: Consoci-ationalism Versus Control,” World Politics 31 (3)(April 1979): 325–344.

39 Bedlington, Malaysia and Singapore, 152; Wil-liam Case, “Malaysia: Aspects and Audiences ofLegitimacy,” in Alagappa, ed., Political Legitima-cy in Southeast Asia, 75–76, 79–80, 106; SumitGanguly, “Ethnic Politics and Political Quies-cence in Malaysia and Singapore,” in Brownand Ganguly, eds., Government Policies and EthnicRelations in Asia and the Paci½c, 233–272.

40 Milton Esman, Administration and Develop-ment in Malaysia: Institution Building and Reformin a Plural Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1972).

41 Bedlington, Malaysia and Singapore, 166–167; von Vorys, Democracy Without Consensus,348.





media. A 1971 constitutional amendmentmade it a crime even for legislators todiscuss ethnically sensitive questionsabout Malay language dominance, citi-zenship, or the constitutionally mandat-ed special rights of Malays as the coun-try’s indigenous group. Ownership andstaff of the mass media were ‘Malaysian-ized’ in the 1970s. This assertion of stateauthority over the press was legitimizedin part by a policy begun under the Brit-ish, who had required newspapers to ap-ply for annual licenses and had threat-ened seditious newspapers with closure.Even as recently as 1987, the main Chi-nese newspaper was closed down for ayear after it protested the policy of hav-ing Malay principals administer Chineseschools.42

The paired cases of Sri Lanka and Ma-laysia show that democratization risksthe exacerbation of ethnic tensions, es-pecially when imperial policies have fos-tered envy and promoted politicizationalong ethnic lines. Ironically, some ofthe measures that became ethnicallydivisive were originally adopted as expe-dients to sustain imperial rule while try-ing to prepare the ground for democracy.Whereas British-style institutions of rep-resentative democracy were a dubiousblessing in both cases, the most valuablelegacy of empire in Malaysia turned outto be an effective administrative appa-ratus capable of managing ethnic divi-sions while overseeing coherent eco-nomic policies that bene½ted all groups.

In countries with weak political institu-tions the transition to democracy carries

a higher risk of civil or international war.Nonetheless, when a democratic powermilitarily occupies a country, it is likelyto promote democracy there as part ofits strategy of withdrawal. This prefer-ence reflects the democratic power’sself-image and values, its expectationthat democratization will create a coop-erative partner after the withdrawal, andits desire to legitimate the military inter-vention as consistent with the targetstate’s presumed right to national self-determination.

Normally, the imperial state seeks toorganize the basic institutional precon-ditions for democracy before handingpower back to the occupied nation.However, while this effort is being un-dertaken, the empire usually must gov-ern through local elites whose legitima-cy or political support is typically basedon traditional authority or ethnic sectar-ianism.

Unfortunately, such short-run expedi-ents may hinder the long-run transitionto democracy by increasing ethnic polar-ization. Even if the empire does not takeactive steps to politicize ethnicity, themere act of unleashing premature de-mands for mass political participationbefore democratic institutions are readywill increase the risk of a polarized, vio-lent, unsuccessful transition. Britishimperialists fell prey to these dilemmasbetween the 1920s and 1960s, notwith-standing their frequently benign inten-tions. The United States risks falling intothe same trap as it tries to promote de-mocracy in the wake of military inter-ventions.

Elections under the U.S. occupation ofIraq in January of 2005 reflected the typ-ical pattern of ethnic and religious polar-ization in culturally divided societiesthat attempt democracy before coherentstate institutions have been constructed.The United States was not consciously

42 Means, Malaysian Politics, 137–140; Bedling-ton, Malaysia and Singapore, 150; Jon VandenHeuvel, The Unfolding Lotus: East Asia’s ChangingMedia (New York: Columbia University, Free-dom Forum Media Studies Center, 1993), 146–162; von Vorys, Democracy Without Consensus,429.

playing the game of divide and rule, butthe elections it sponsored inadvertentlycomplicated efforts to overcome divi-sions among Kurds, Shia Arabs, andSunni Arabs. With the Sunni refrainingfrom voting out of fear or protest, andthe Kurds and Shia voting strictly alonggroup lines, the assembly elected towrite the country’s constitution turnedout to be less comprehensive in its repre-sentation and more culturally polarizedthan a nondemocratic process wouldhave devised. After the elections, Sunniinsurgents increasingly directed theirattacks against Shia civilian targets rath-er than only against U.S. and Iraqi gov-ernment targets. If the United Statescontinues to try to impose democracy on ill-prepared societies, it can expectmore uphill struggles such as this one.



Documents

Jack Snyder Empire: a blunt tool for democratization · democracy would have been adopted by ... almost continuously democratic since independence, such as India and some ... while