Book Review Pages
The Kathmandu Post Review of Books
Vol. 4, No. 1
Issue Coordinator: Swarnim Wagle
Martin Chautari for
CSRD and The Kathmandu Post
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Essay
Reviews
- We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with our Families: Stories from Rwanda (Phillip Gourevitch)
- Mero Kathaka Panaharu, Volume 1 (Ganesh Man Singh; presented by Mathabar Singh Basnet)
- Guns, Germs and Steel: Investigations in the Science of Human History (Jared Diamond)
Revisiting Transition Debates
Hari Sharma
(This essay is based on Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Volumes 1, 2 and 3), edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Phillippe C. Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead, and on Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Volume 4); written by Guillermo O'Donnell and Phillippe C Schmitter, all published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1986.)
The literature on democratisation offers a wide array of competing explanations about regime change. Analysts have long been fascinated about how, why and whether democracies are installed and consolidated. The dominant debate revolves around the relative impact on political change of structural factors versus individual actions and events. Are regime transitions a function of underlying preconditions at the level of deep formations of economy and society? Or does political change depend on the preferences and choices of leaders, and on their skills in mobilising resources, counteracting opponents, and taking advantage of opportunities? There is much more in this debate than the old dilemma of whether history unfolds itself as a result of tectonic shifts of social forces or through the deeds of great men and women. A complete theory of political agency also attends to the endeavours of ordinary citizens, the interplay between elite and mass actions, and the unintended as well as planned consequences of political events.
Transition From Authoritarian Rule is a pioneer study that marks a departure from the dominant structuralist approach. Structural analysts consider that the prospects for political change are embedded in the architecture of social systems. From this perspective, democracy is viewed as a political expression of the social order. The process of democratisation is the analogue in the realm of political authority of the breakdown of feudal systems of economic production and aristocratic social status, representing a general trend toward the inclusion of previously excluded groups in the various institutions of the state. The driving forces of these systemic changes are impersonal forces such as technological innovation and their application to production, the spread of market-based social relations, and the emergence of new social identities.
The other dominant school or approach, known as the genetic or contingent school stresses the actors' interests, perceptions and choices. Although there are differences, both schools equally contribute to our understanding of democratisation. However, the genetic school has dominated the regime transition studies since the publication of the Transition from Authoritarian Rule. This school holds that domestic factors play a predominant role in transitions. It has a clear genetic, actor-oriented, domestic perspective on change in regimes. Rather than adopting a macroscopic perspective on the abiding features of societies, contingent school analysts have focused on the decisions of individual political agents. Rooted in the classic liberal tracts of Smith and Popper, this approach grants conceptual primacy to the freedom of the individual to make choices, whether among goods in a marketplace or through open political expression, association, and voting. A focus on individual agents produces a contingent model of change in which the outcomes of political conflicts are not predetermined by the weight of structural precedents.
In the volume Tentative Conclusions, Schimitter and O'Donnell state explicitly that individual actions are "much less tightly determined by 'macro' structural factors during (the breakdown of authoritarianism) than during the breakdown of democratic regimes". Accordingly, the factors that have received extensive attention in case studies of authoritarian rule are the interests of external forces and capital, while the interests of a particular sector of the national bourgeoisie receive little attention. Tentative Conclusions argues that "elite dispositions, calculations and pacts largely determine whether or not an opening (to democracy) will occur at all". The study suggests that a good starting point for looking at the crisis of an authoritarian regime is the 'opening': the appearance of political and ideological space for a challenge to be mounted against it. The process of transition from an authoritarian regime involves at least three stages, i) the breakdown of the old regime involving both a loss of established legitimacy and the availability of an alternative, ii) a period of uncertainty in which reversal to the previous state of affairs may be possible, and iii) the consolidation phase, when the reversal becomes costly and the rules of the game are established for future negotiations.
According to O'Donnell and Schmitter, regime transitions are abnormal periods of "undetermined" political change in which "there are insufficient structural or behavioural parameters to guide and predict the outcome." A contingent model of change as advocated by O'Donnell and Schmitter assumes that one agent's initiative prompts another actor's response and that political events cascade from one to another. Compared with the orderliness of the authoritarian rule, the interludes between regimes are marked by frenzied partisan disputes and by uncertainty about the nature of the resultant regimes. From a contingent perspective, political outcomes emanate from interaction and bargaining. Here, the key to democratic transition is the ability of participants to arrive at arbitrated agreements that grant everyone at least part of what each wants. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan have described this process as political crafting.
A contingent approach as advocated by the writers has several evident strengths. Most obviously, it provides analytical tools to penetrate and dissect the internal dynamics of the transition period itself. It reveals that contenders for political powers react situationally to initiatives taken by opponents and that political change is often an unintended consequence of unplanned chain of events. From this perspective, the prospects for change hinge less on the constraining conditions inherited from the past than on the skills of individuals as seizing opportunities. Because the contingency approach makes room for political agency, it frees the analyst from the deterministic lockstep inherent in inquires that begin with pre-existing structures. In doing so, contingency analyses allow the possibility that transitions will lead to innovative outcomes that break with the routine.
On the other hand, the weaknesses of the analysis derive from its excessive voluntarism. As the outcomes of political struggles are uncertain, a contingency theory lacks explanatory and predictive power. Similarly while the process of regime transition can often be highly uncertain, it is never purely random. Instead, political regulations show regularities. These however do not derive from the free play of unconstrained action; indeed, they are counteracted by them. The patterning of transition trajectories is traceable to the context in which political actors operate. Therefore, a contingency theory can gain analytic purchase only when placed on some kind of a structural scaffolding that imparts a motif to political action.
It is troubling to think that the process of re-democratisation is so uncertain that we, as citizens and scholars, must forgo predictive theory and simply wait for an opening. This implies that demands for the redistribution of property and power may not always succeed in an electoral democracy in the absence of a strong social movement which builds on the patience of the poor and the powerless. The sacrifices that people of all classes have made to promote representative democracy across the globe show that institutional changes are important. Even a little change can have a great meaning if one is surviving on the margins, and if one is given to dissent, difference between democracy and dictatorship can be as wide apart as between life and death.
(Sharma is the Prime Minister's Principal Private Secretary, and a political scientist by trade)
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We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with our Families: Stories from Rwanda
Author: Phillip Gourevitch
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 365pp
Price: US$25
Surreal Barbarism
Niraj Shrestha
In April of 1994, a little known African country, Rwanda, exploded onto the international scene, flooding the air waves with stories of atrocities that were numbing even to the most inured. In just over a period of hundred days, at least 800,000 people were slaughtered - roughly five and a half every minute, an efficiency unmatched even during the Holocaust. The victims were mainly the minority Tutsis and the killing had an almost artisanal ring to it. The killers, the ruling Hutus, mainly used machete and nail-studded clubs and often times fire in the schools and churches where the Tutsis had taken refuge. And the killers, by and large, were ordinary people. Neighbours killed neighbours. Teachers hacked students. Pastors beheaded parishioners. "Do your work ! Clear the bush ! Crush the cockroaches !" were the rallying cries heard everywhere in this tiny African nation's three month, labour-intensive self-slaughtering. Destroying the Other -even if the Other was your wife, child or relative - became the state sponsored public duty.
The Rwandan genocide, its roots and its aftermath, are the subjects of Phillip Gourevitch's at once profound and powerful book "We wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with our Families". Gourevitch, who is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine did not himself witness the atrocities. Between '95 and '98 he spent a total of nine months in Rwanda interviewing victims and perpetrators, government officials and hotel managers, relief workers and UN "peacekeepers". His compassionate portrait captures the immense sadness and the emptiness of Rwanda where a single spasm of political violence had left " a society whose soul had been shredded, where an attempt had been made to extirpate an entire category of humanity - and where the threat of another round remained intensely real".
One of the great worths of this book is making us realise that Rwanda's slaughter did not happen out of nowhere but was against a long background of colonial exploitation. One cannot understand Rwanda's voluntary self-slaughter , but perhaps one can begin to imagine a people eager to be relieved of their freedom, doing what they are told to do. In the process he debunks some of the myths surrounding Rwanda: that the conflict was the result of a centuries-old animosity between the two communities ; that Rwanda had descended into a state of chaos and anarchy in that summer of '94; that there was little the international community could do to save the people who were hell-bent on destroying each other. As a matter of fact, the two communities were sufficiently intermingled to the point that many ethnographers did not see them as distinct ethnic groups . Alike in language and religion, they are more akin to castes or classes. To switch between two communities was common and many of the rabid Hutu instigators were born as Tutsis. And contrary to anarchy and chaos associated with failed states, "the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history. The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual- always an annoyance to totality- ceases to exist".
As for the role of the international community, Gouevitch maintains, that their response to the genocide guaranteed that the next war in Rwanda would be about genocide. For the most part, the role played by the United Nations and its "peacekeeping mission" ( as if there was peace to keep ) was worse than useless, providing a false sense of security and standing fully armed as innocent bystanders when the whole country was engulfed in an orgy of violence. The role of the United States, was no less shameful, thwarting the belated efforts within United Nations to organise a new peacekeeping deployment. The Americans also refused to provide aircraft and the vehicles for an all- African intervention force. State department spokesmen engaged in a shameless and bizarre semantic tap-dance around the word "genocide" and whether it described the events in Rwanda. But it is the French responses which are the most "despicable", having supported the old Hutu regime and whose own humanitarian military intervention "Operation Turquoise" was little more than a surreptitious way of providing aid to the Hutus. As the writer says, its principle achievement seems to have been "to permit the slaughter of Tutsis to go for an extra month and to secure safe passage for the genocidal command to cross, with a lot of weapons to Zaire". And when at last the genocide was halted, it was entirely due to the military campaign by Tutsis grouped in Rwandan Patriot Front (RPF) in exile. And in the war's aftermath, most of the international humanitarian effort, instead of helping rebuild a devastated country, went to the Hutu refugees in the neighbouring Zaire. Most of these "refugees" had either participated in the genocide themselves, or had fled with family members who had blood on their hands, and were sheltered in a safe haven from which to re-launch the genocide.
But talking of genocide, one always returns to the same question "Why?" although there is little possibility of finding a rational structure of explanation. It leaves us intellectually disarmed, staring helplessly at the reality or, if you prefer, the mystery of mass extermination. And yet such a question must be asked if only to resist the temptation of seeing such an occurrence outside of history, a sort of diabolic visitation, for then we tacitly absolve its human agents of their responsibility. So then "what sustained the killers beyond the first frenzy of first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and mess of it?" Gourevitch provides some pointers, not clear-cut answers. The contributory factors to this cycle of slaughter - the quasi-feudal relationship between the Hutu and Tutsi, the unequal economic pattern, the decades of political indoctrination, the blind worship of authority - simply do not match the grotesque nature of the crime. Greed, passivity, superstition, drunkenness - these and other ordinary vices played a part as well, and were happily exploited by the captains of Hutu Power. But in the end "the decimation had been utterly gratuitous". That so many ordinary people should turn against their own neighbours, blood-relations, co-workers, drinking and gossip companions - this is where the process of comprehension is stalled however compelling the arguments of economics and politics or of the deleterious role of memory.
Is there any hope for Rwanda then? Can two groups, one which suffered so grievously, and the other which inflicted such suffering, live together again in a single cohesive society? we find ourselves asking at the end. The writer, again, does not answer the question directly. He wants to be hopeful, although there is little reason for it. He ends with a story about a massacre at a school in 1997 where a party of Hutu gunmen tried to get the students to separate themselves into Hutus and Tutsis. The girls refused and were shot indiscriminately. Poignantly, he concludes "Rwandans have no need - no room in their corpse-crowded imaginations - for more martyrs. None of us does. But mightn't we take some courage from the example of those brave Hutu girls who could have chosen to live, but chose to call themselves Rwandans ?
(Shrestha is a computer programmer based in Washington D.C., and also a student of philosophy and literature).
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Mero Kathaka Panaharu, Volume 1
Author: Ganesh Man Singh (Presented by Mathabar Singh Basnet)
Publisher: Ayam Publications, Kathmandu, 1998
Price: Rs. 400
Reminiscences of a Giant
Jayaraj Acharya
Ganesh Man Singh (1915 - 1997) was a legend in his own lifetime. His Mero Kathaka Panaharu (Pages of My Story), published last year on the first anniversary of his death, is the first of the six volumes of his autobiography. It is currently available only in Nepali. This is a most remarkable book which must be read by all those who prize democratic values and those who want to know what it meant to be part of an arduous struggle to install democracy in Nepal. The name Ganesh Man Singh is itself synonymous with the fifty-year long democratic struggle, and it is thus natural that his autobiography makes an authoritative reading on this subject.
Although Ganesh Man Singh did not have a high academic degree, he was a voracious reader and an extremely well informed man. This is an impression that no reader can escape after reading this book. He had a dramatic way of telling stories. The book, for example, begins by telling the reader that he was born around the time the First World War was breaking out. To quote him, "The army of Kaiser was spreading fast all over Europe. The rest of the world seemed to be helplessly waiting for an impending peril. The Indian National Congress was divided and weak. Mahatma Gandhi had not yet risen in the horizon of Indian politics. In Nepal, the Rana rule was at its peak as Chandra Shumshere was ruling ruthlessly. It seemed that it was dark and quiet all around. The only light that shined was the name of Chandra Shumshere whose first name meant ๋the moon'. The king and the people were under the shadow - hardly visible. I was born in one of those days in the year 1915. It was a wonderful coincidence that I was born in a place called Yatkha, just two or three hundred yards north of the Royal Court of Hanumandhoka where Prithivinarayan Shah had worn the garland of victory terminating the Malla dynastic rule in 1768, and where Jung Bahadur Rana had staged the bloody Kot Massacre in 1846 to usurp absolute power from the king."
Ganesh Man Singh obviously looked at his birth in a historical context. While he does not clearly say that he was destined to liberate the Nepali people from the autocratic rule of the Ranas, he seems to be well aware of the context in which he was to play a role later on in overthrowing the Rana regime (1846-1951). Singh was born in the first year of the First World War, and physically so close to a place (the palace) where history had played dreadful dramas over the centuries. The birth at such a time and place: was this an omen for a difficult life filled with struggle? Perhaps it is also more than coincidental that Singh was to go on to launch his political career in the late 1930s, around the same time the Second World War broke out.
The book reflects Singh's amazing sense of humour. He had an enviable propensity to laugh at himself, and, paradoxically, present his ego in utter humility. This is an unflinching evidence of what a great and sincere soul he had. In many ways, Ganesh Man Singh's autobiography is similar to that of B.P. Koirala's (1914-1982), but it is more refined and more complete. Singh also demonstrates a photographic memory, recounting in detail the events that occurred during the early days of struggle for democracy. Some of these details have not even been documented in the books of modern Nepali politics. This fine volume must thus be credited for being tremendously rich on little known historical facts. Written beautifully in a literary style, it doubles as a history book. Furthermore, its language and style are so similar to that of the literary giant B.P. Koirala's incomplete Aphno Katha (My Own Story) that one may even wonder if B.P. edited it. While this is obviously not the case, Singh's long political association with B.P. may offer an explanation about the roots of this influence. In fact, a student of Nepali language can actually write a doctoral dissertation in stylistics comparing the two books.
This first volume of Singh's autobiography has over 300 pages and about 40 chapters. The one page addendum contains the family tree, and there are pages that contain rare photographs of historic value. One wishes though that this premier volume contained the little publicised picture of Singh in fetters in the cage when he was imprisoned by the Ranas in early 1940s on charges of high treason. It remains a photograph that tells a grand story of struggle, something comparable to what the black slaves went through before slavery was abolished in the west. For some reason, this volume also does not have a chapter describing the gruesome killing of four anti-Rana activists in 1940, for after all, Ganesh Man Singh was a close associate of two of these four martyrs, Dharma Bhakta and Ganga Lal, as a fellow member of the Nepal Praja Parishad.
This book is primarily a piece of literary work, which begins to sound like a political narrative only towards the end when Singh recalls poignantly the story of his first meeting with B.P. Koirala, together with whom he was to sculpt many of Nepal's landmark political events this century. He says he wondered - before their first meeting - if B.P. would be "the one he was looking for in an imaginary friend in his subconscious mind". Reading about the dilemmas that Singh describes, one feels that all of us confront similar situations in our daily lives. The only difference perhaps lies in the degree and quality of the perils that the ordinary and the extra-ordinary go through. He describes aspects of his struggle in such a manner as they constitute a major literary work. It is not just his description that is poetically dramatic, but the reality of his life itself provides enough substance for a tragic drama or poetry. Readers of this first volume can thus claim with confidence that Singh's lifelong struggle was no perilous than that of any other freedom fighter from any part of the world - may that be a Thomas More or a Nelson Mandela.
Singh demonstrates in the book a firm grasp of global historical and literary contexts. He knew he was not struggling blindly, and it is clear that he knew he was making history. There was no remorse, regret or bitterness in him about what he was doing. He knew that his fight was part of humanity's search for freedom, and he knew struggles for freedom always triumphed. This book is indeed a promising precursor to what is likely to be an almost fantastic political epic, and one can just hope that the subsequent volumes will also be as good as this one.
(J. Acharya teaches at Tribhuwan University; he represented Nepal as Ambassador at the United Nations from 1991 to 1994, and played a role in the process that led to the award of the UN Human Rights Prize to Ganesh Man Singh in 1995).
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Guns, Germs and Steel: Investigations in the Science of Human History
Authors: Jared Diamond
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997
E-Link: http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall96/germs.htm
Rise of Civilisations
Nicholas Hutchings
Why was America dominated by the peoples of Europe and not the other way around? This is the sort of question that fascinates yet discomforts many people with an inquiring mind and a liberal education. Can the unequal fates of human societies be explained without invoking biological differences in human intelligence?
This remarkable and convincing book aims to do just that with a history of the world for the last 13,000 years - heavily influenced by information from scientific disciplines such as genetics, molecular biology, ecology, epidemiology and linguistics. The author gives his own summary of his belief:
"History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people's environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves"
The book identifies the switch to agriculture from hunter-gatherer societies as the crucial step in the path to cultural dominance. In this respect the cards were dealt in Eurasia's favour from the end of the last ice age. For example Eurasia had 32 of the 56 wild grasses that were candidates for cultivation; no other region had more than six. The undeniable advantages of the Fertile Cresent, an area of Southwest Asia occupying portions of what are now Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, for the early development of agriculture are well documented here. This area had wheat and barley - high yielding, fast growing, high protein crops requiring few genetic changes to be domesticated. It also had the ancestors of four of the five most important domesticated mammals - the cow, goat, pig and sheep.
Diamond also makes a careful analysis of the comparative disadvantages of candidates for domestication in other parts of the world. Crops such as corn in Mexico required enormous genetic changes to reach current sizes from smaller than a human thumb. In 200 years modern European geneticists have failed to develop any crop from Australia's native plants except the macadamia nut. Most large mammals are unsuitable for domestication often being: expensive to feed (all carnivores); slow growing (eg gorillas); nasty (eg grizzly bear, African buffalo, hippo, zebra); hard to breed in captivity (eg the vicuna, an Andean wild camel); easy to panic when fenced in (eg gazelle) or impossible to herd (eg antelope).
Even the orientation of the continents may have favoured the early development and spread of agriculture in Eurasia. A quick look at a world map confirms that the axis of Eurasia is broadly east-west while America and Africa have north-south axes. An east-west axis allowed newly domesticated crops to quickly spread east and west to new areas where critical parameters such as day length and it's seasonal variation are exactly the same. Other variables such as temperature and rainfall are more likely to be constant along an east-west axis than a north-south. As a result, citrus fruit domesticated in Southeast Asia could quickly spread westward to Europe but it took thousands of years for the corn that evolved in Mexico's climate to become modified into a corn adapted to the short growing season and seasonally changing day-length of North America.
It is a clear theme of the book that societies evolve predictably, perhaps inevitably, from development of agriculture. Simply put, food surpluses and food storage lead to large dense sedentary societies with a division of labour that allows specialisation. Such societies lead to political organization, writing and to technology such as the guns and steel of the title. Less obvious to most readers is the development of germs in such societies.
Infectious diseases undoubtedly played a major role in the conquest of America and Australia by Europeans. The author estimates that within two centuries of Columbus's landing, imported diseases such as measles and smallpox may have killed 95% of the estimated 20 million Indians that had inhabited North America.. Why did Eurasian diseases destroy American populations not American diseases destroy Eurasian populations? This was probably another deadly advantage obtained from Eurasia's early development of agriculture. The diseases involved characteristically spread rapidly though populations by direct person to person transfer and cause quick death or complete recovery with lasting protection. Such diseases cannot be sustained in low density or isolated communities and were probably derived from animal diseases by close proximity to domesticated animals. Smallpox, measles and tuberculosis all have closely related diseases in cattle while influenza is found in pigs and ducks.
The advantages of guns, germs and steel (plus the horse and literacy) in an encounter between two cultures is vividly demonstrated by an account of the meeting of the Incan Emperor Atahualpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro. Pizarro had just 62 horsemen and 102 foot soldiers. Atahualpa, despite an epidemic of small pox which had ravaged the empire 6 years earlier, was surrounded by an army of 80,000. The meeting was initially friendly but Pizarro suddenly attacked. The Incas panicked and by nightfall 7000 were dead without a single Spanish loss. Atahualpa was held ransom but when enough gold to fill a large room was received was executed anyway. Within decades the Incan empire collapsed.
The author is successful in finding and explaining broad trends in human history and utterly convincing in it's refutation of simplistic racist explanations. However, the impact of cultural idiosyncrasies (such as religion) and perhaps individuals on history, especially in modern times, is more resistant to such generalizations. Much is necessarily left unexplained in a book of under 500 pages - there is little discussion of the Indian subcontinent or the effect of mountains on human societies for example. However in his Epilogue the author makes an interesting case for studying the histories of human societies scientifically - as the histories of dinosaurs, nebulas or glaciers are studied.
In conclusion this book is fascinating, important and readable. It should be recommended to the widest possible audience.
(Nicholas Hutchings is at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford)
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