In my book The Bottom Billion (2007), I argued that a number of traps had caught 1bn people in some 60 countries in extreme poverty. One trap was violent conflict, especially civil wars. Another was poor governance: in many of these countries, government was not performing the essential functions of the state. But both are about political power.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, many of these 60 countries have adopted democracy. Autocratic leaders such as Zambia's President Kaunda and, later, Daniel arap Moi in Kenya and Robert Mugabe in Zimbawe, were forced to introduce competitive elections, a move expected to defuse conflicts and so make societies more peaceful. Elections were also meant to discipline governments: accountability to voters would force them to promote economic and social wellbeing. But the results have been disappointing.
Peace, in particular, has proved elusive. In researching my book, I examined whether the coming of democracy changes the incidence of political violence. The results were surprising and disturbing. Below a threshold of around $2,700 per capita, democracies are significantly more prone to political violence than autocracies. All the bottom billion countries were far below this, so while democracy might be desirable for other reasons, it was not, for them, the royal road to peace.
Nor were elections the road to accountability. Faced with the need to win them, rulers have learned to cheat. Perhaps unsurprisingly, illicit methods—such as bribery, intimidation and ballot fraud—utterly trump conventional methods of appealing to voters. An autocrat forced to face election can roughly triple his remaining time in power by using such illegitimate methods. What's more, armed with intimidation techniques, you don't need to fuss about economic or social wellbeing.
There are economies of scale in the production of public goods—like the eradication of disease or an uncorrupted governing culture—meaning that large economies can provide them more cheaply. The tiny economies of the bottom billion condemn them to inefficient public good provision. These problems are especially acute for security and accountability. Yet both are necessary for development. If the bottom billion countries face structural impediments to providing them, then the international community must help to provide them.
Of course this is far easier said than done. It is easy enough to support a vaccine against malaria, but providing security and accountability encounters two big objections. One is the notion that there is simply nothing we can do. The other issue is national sovereignty, which many claim after colonialism (and indeed Iraq) we should never again infringe. Either of these, if correct, is incapacitating. Yet without outside help such societies are condemned to hopelessness.
Is there really nothing we can do? In fact, there is a lot the international community could do. With respect to security, peacekeeping can work and be cost-effective. Sierra Leone and Haiti are at peace thanks to modest peacekeeping forces.
Accountability is more difficult. The relatively easy aspect is financial accountability. Donors are often in a position both to assist and insist; it's just that to date they haven't had the determination and coherence to do it. More tough is delivering accountability to voters. Remember, incumbent rulers have learned to win elections by cheating and this frustrates the whole purpose of holding them. Moreover, the international community is increasingly reluctant to undertake any further military intervention. Hence, leaders who steal elections cannot credibly be threatened by international force. Nor can they credibly be bribed into good conduct by the offer of large aid programmes: rulers have learnt over the years that, despite the rhetoric, whether aid comes or doesn't come is not closely related to their own conduct.
The least intrusive threat that could induce a leader to reconsider stealing an election is a popular uprising: the great leader steals the election and the populace takes to the streets with sticks, or to the mountains with guns. But in Africa during 2008 there were three cases of gross electoral abuse: Zimbabwe, Kenya and Nigeria. Only in Kenya was there something like a popular uprising, but it was extremely ugly. The violence risked escalating into ethnic civil war.
So what remains? The only force that leaders truly fear is their own military. After all, a leader is far more likely to lose power as a result of a coup than in an election. Coups are now regarded by liberal opinion as an anachronism: soldiers should stay in barracks. While this is obviously right as an ultimate goal, it is too sweeping in the short term. Introducing elections before checks on power induces an incumbent to uproot the limited checks that might already be in place. This, essentially, was what happened in Zimbabwe, as Mugabe uprooted the tender shoots of the rule of law in order to steal elections with impunity. Ruling out any political role for the military may exclude the only force that might be effective against tyranny.
Despite being unfashionable, coups are undoubtedly treated by incumbents as a serious threat. But they have been an unguided missile, indiscriminately displacing both corrupt and decent regimes. To improve electoral accountability, we need to provide coups with a guidance system. For many years the EU and other international bodies have monitored the conduct of elections, declaring whether they were "free and fair." However, these judgements have not been linked to any significant consequences. I want to introduce a red and green card system for coups according to the monitoring rules. A verdict of "free and fair" would lead to a red card: a statement that the international community would use its best efforts to put down a coup against this legitimate government. President Obama now has command of the new AfriCom military force for Africa, stationed in Rwanda, which could be used both to deter or put down a coup, and the EU supposedly has a rapid reaction military force intended for African deployment, although the timeline is not clear. A judgement of "not free or fair"—a green card—would not launch an invasion by these forces. All it would mean is that if the military launched a coup, the government would not be protected. Of course, a green card would constitute a signal: the international community would be inviting the military to take action.
Would this work? As it happens, there is one election which came quite close to simulating these conditions: Senegal in 2000. President Diouf was standing for re-election and was known to control voting in rural areas. Urban areas voted first and his opponent, Abdoulaye Wade, gained a lead. As the rural votes started to come in this lead shrank, but then an astonishing thing happened. Before all the votes were declared, Diouf conceded defeat. What was going on? The answer was that the Senegalese army had learnt that the French government had changed its policy towards coups in Francophone Africa: there was no longer a red card. The army quietly told Diouf that if he stole the election there would be a coup. The president realised his dilemma. The opposition had taken an early lead, so even if he gained sufficient rural votes to win the election he had no way of convincing the army that he had not stolen it. He did not dare to win, shrewdly recognising that being ousted by a coup was worse than an honourable defeat.
So it is possible to circumvent our own impotence on intervention. But there is another issue holding back the bottom billion: national sovereignty. The leaders of the bottom billion frequently complain about their lack of international clout. In reality very few heads of government anywhere have significant international leverage on their own—instead they have learnt to pool various aspects of sovereignty: the EU, the European Central Bank, Nato, the WTO, the European Court, the IMF and the OECD. Among the bottom billion there is nothing equivalent. The African Union is virtually powerless, and African governments' unwillingness to pool power outside their countries is matched by greater concentration of power within their countries. Burundi and other such polities do not have national sovereignty so much as presidential sovereignty. Of course, any attempt to impose external curbs on presidential sovereignty will be criticised by those with an interest in maintaining the status quo. But, in the end, what is at stake is not the defence of weak societies against international bullies, but the power of local bullies over weak societies. Obama has the legitimacy in Africa to use AfriCom as a red card against coups. The great thing about the green card is that, with the red card in place, all it requires is inaction. The international community can manage that.
