4 - Democratizing liberal states

Summary

To arrest Africa's economic decline, the new consensus prescribes glasnost as well as perestroika. Political democracy and free markets are the twin panaceas. Democracy will serve to keep the liberal state honest and attuned to the societal interest in economic prosperity. Market forces will stimulate the entrepreneurial drives and productive energies that the dead hand of the monopolistic state has smothered or misdirected. The two goals are seen as indissolubly linked.

Realpolitik has doubtless played a part in facilitating the democratic tendency of the new consensus. With the waning of the Cold War, geopolitical considerations are no longer as compelling as formerly in the capitals of the major global powers. France, the United States, and Russia are no longer willing to support ‘their’ African strongmen against all challenges. Western liberal democracies and the international institutions they dominate are therefore now freer to pursue their natural preference for electoral democracies. Also, the widespread popular protests of the 1980s against authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa would have encouraged Western regimes to claim paternity of the triumphant democratic tendency.

This new-found enthusiasm for democracy, though welcome, is problematical in two respects. Can liberal democracies emerge and survive in Africa? And, if so, will they indeed promote the equitable and sustainable growth that all commentators espouse?

The unpalatable reality is that sub-Saharan Africa is unlikely soon to yield many stable democracies.