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A recent publication of mine can be found here.

Cambodia: democratization

I began reading Caroline Hughes' The Political Economy of Cambodia's Transition, 1991-2001 last night.

The introduction is about 'democratization' which seems relevant to certain other exercises in progress around the world today. Her basic argument is that "the development of the Cambodian economy over the course of the 1990s has erected barriers to the emergence of substantive democracy in Cambodia".

We have, she argues, two views of democratization predominant in the Western and donor agency discourse. These are called 'habituation' and 'culturalism'. Culturalism says that cultures have been fixed for all time and democracy is not possible until they change. Major echoes here of the 1950s modernization theory, but apparently enjoying continued respectability in some circles. The habituation theory, on the other hand, says that if you install the institutions of regular elections, independent legal system, etc, people will eventually become accustomed to behaving in a democratic fashion. Thus the last two Cambodian elections were carried out in a peaceful and relatively fair fashion and this therefore demonstrates the country's 'progress' towards democracy.

Hughes herself adopts a definition of democracy in which "a more complex economy permits the capture and mobilization of economic resources by non-state actors. These resources may be used to force the state to concede terrain - public forums, free media - in which political debate can take place". In other words, democracy has to be wrested from the state in such a way that the political agenda is set, not by the state or by international donors, but by the people themselves. There has to be a three way balance, between the classes, between state and society and between the society and the transnational power structures. By contrast, the habituation approach, puts more emphasis on embedding the legitimacy of certain procedures than on the initial motivation for erecting those procedures or actual public participation in decision making.

The following passage struck me as a particularly accurate description of what takes place in Cambodia:
"international democracy promotion tends to substitute the provision of international resources to non-state actors, for the democratizing activities of non-state actors engaged in wresting resources from the state. This can lead to the substitution of international political forums - meetings of bilateral donors, or UN committees - for the emergence of a local sphere in which participation in agenda-setting is possible."

Still reading, but I can see where it is taking me. The economic development that has taken place in the last decade has so severely disadvantaged the rural areas that, although they go to vote every 3 years, the country's farm population has no role at all in setting any political agenda.