“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” begins Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, about the French Revolution. The phrase, which so concisely captures the complexity of life, has become a cliché. But this underrates its descriptive power: it defines a society caught between two eras, both a France in the process of overthrowing its ancien régime, but also Dickens’s contemporary Britain, still feeling its tentative way through the realities of an industrial economy.
Applied to the present, it captures the situations in a host of developing countries where decades of steady economic and social progress have nonetheless resulted in riots and political upheaval. More specifically: Kenya, which has experienced a summer of widespread unrest, ostensibly in opposition to a new finance law; and Bangladesh, whose long-time prime minister Sheikh Hasina resigned in August after a series of violent protests.
“But weren’t those countries supposed to be success stories?” many might ask. They are, and that is the point. Kenya has gone from a rural, tribal-based society to a much more complex and middle-class one. Bangladesh has gone from one of the poorest countries on Earth to a country of light industry and dramatically increased literacy. Both are developing the vigorous middle class that is a prerequisite for democracy. Both countries have also rapidly emerged as geopolitical powers in their regions. Kenya with 56 million people has been designated as the US’s principal ally in sub-Saharan Africa. Bangladesh with 171 million people (25 million more than Russia, which sprawls across 11 time zones) has also emerged as a key country, especially owing to the weakening of Myanmar, torn apart by civil war, next door.
But success only leads to new patterns of instability, including riots and revolutions. This is part of how countries build complex institutions. These societies are climbing the ladder of success, and the steps include periodic revolts. No one understood this concept better than the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P Huntington, who made the crooked path of progress in the developing world the theme of his greatest book, Political Order in Changing Societies, published in 1968. It may still be the most arresting guide to the rigours of globalisation ever published. By reading developing countries through his analysis, we can see the tragedy of their condition – as well as better understand the path before them.
Huntington begins by noting how hard the West finds it to understand this development. The US’s happy circumstances – a stable mass democracy on a resource-rich continent, protected by oceans – has led its citizens to believe in what he called the “unity of goodness”, a collective assumption that national development flows in concert, to the benefit of all. But that is not the case for much of the rest of the world. Indeed, as a general rule, “the faster the enlightenment of the population, the more frequent the overthrow of the government”. This is why long periods of economic growth and reform, however uneven – and much more so than periods of stagnation and repression – lead to popular upheavals. Growth and change restructure the developing country’s class system.
Kenya and Bangladesh have followed this pattern closely. The governments in both, while corrupt and autocratic in important respects, have overseen significant periods of economic growth and particularly the creation or enlargement of middle classes, as people flooded into the cities from the countryside. Another example: Tunisia, where the mass revolt known as the Arab Spring began in 2011, had the most developed middle class of any Arab country that was not rich in oil. Middle classes are, quite simply, harder to govern than rural and illiterate peasantries. They are not fatalistic, and are rarely grateful. They have more acquisitive needs and desires and always demand more. As Huntington explains, while the existence of a large middle class becomes a moderating force in political life, its genesis can be highly destabilising.
The creation of a middle class is of course necessary for well-functioning political institutions, which rely on literate bureaucrats. And the more complex a society becomes, the more such institutions are needed – and efficient ones at that. In less developed societies, loyalty to clans and tribes predominates; in more developed societies loyalty instead flows to institutions and the state. Kenya and Bangladesh, as well as many other societies in the developing world, are moving in that direction. You can discern this by what people complain about. Demonstrations about taxes, corruption and press freedoms – which is what drove much of the summer unrest in Kenya and Bangladesh – are signs of populations demanding higher standards of governance. This is progressive in itself. Better that they complain about corruption in general than about this tribe getting more favours than that one.
Corruption is a complex phenomenon in two respects, as Huntington points out. It is a sign of intense modernisation, since it indicates that institutions, even as they are being built, cannot keep up with the demands of the population and alternative networks for getting things done emerge, while functionaries are poorly paid and must seek income from other sources. But corruption is also a sign of perceived “backwardness” in a society, of people being ashamed of their own state authorities, and thus demand cleaner and more efficient performance. Progress in politics always begins with complaints.
As Isaiah Berlin wrote: “Men who live in conditions where there is not sufficient food, warmth, shelter, and the minimum degree of security can scarcely be expected to concern themselves with freedom of contract or of the press.” That complaints about the lack of press freedoms and of protection for journalists are widespread in these societies is a sign of how much they have progressed in recent decades. Kenya’s youth-led revolt, which began in late June and featured riots and demonstrations, was not over a tribal or ethnic dispute but a tax hike that threatened to increase the price of basic goods. When the Kenyan president William Ruto withdrew the tax, protesters continued to demand his resignation for corruption and mismanagement.
In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina – who had been in office for two decades and had overseen a dramatic expansion of the economy and middle class – was forced from power in early August because of repression, democratic backsliding and the curbing of media freedom. Again, issues such as famine and communal tensions had little to do with the demonstrations. Those motivations belong to the past – at least for the moment. It is also notable that an aspirational youth played a dominant role in both countries’ protests. They are digitally literate in a new way, and subject to a deeper engagement with global influences. Whereas in the past, each country in the developing world was consumed by its own issues, today, thanks to a form of political-cultural globalisation, local issues can be subjected to Western standards. This stokes demand for change. Such outside influences were always present, but not in the immediate and intense way they are now through technology.
This does not make the process of development easier: rather, it is even more tumultuous than in the past. Revolts, driven by higher and higher standards for governance, are easy – a mere matter of producing crowd formations. Solving the problems that revolts rally against is much harder. And that’s why the building of order, by way of institutions, is more progressive than even the holding of elections, as Huntington explains. What is required are more and better institutions, which are painstakingly hard and time-consuming to construct. The lag time between revolts and institution-building constitutes the age that these developing societies will inhabit for some time.
“The truly helpless society is not one threatened by revolution but one incapable of it,” Huntington writes. Countries mired in low-level and communal or territorial conflict – and there are plenty of those – are incapable of modernising revolt. Kenya and Bangladesh are in a more advanced state. But that is the key to their current instability. Probably the best example in history of a truly bloody and extreme uprising was the French Revolution, Dickens’s subject, which despite great cost in lives produced a modern, democratic state with civil liberties. Other revolutions, such as in Russia and Iran, have led to Bolshevism and Islamic radicalism. But that is not what Kenyans and Bangladeshis are yearning for. There is little hint of religion or communism in their revolts: only better governance. The very absence of extremism is a sign of healthy modernity.
This is a happy story, if it continues. The problem is with Western elites who see progress as linear, without the great chicanes of history in the road. But when Joe Biden held a state dinner in the White House in May to honour Ruto and to announce Kenya as a major American ally, he was only being somewhat naive. Biden thought Kenya and its society had already “arrived”. But Kenya will never “arrive”, it will continue to evolve in periodic and tumultuous ways. And that is not a tragedy, but a hope.
[See also: Van Gogh in the yellow house]
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