29 December 2007
Democracy and Benazir Bhutto
The inevitably violent death of Benazir Bhutto was a personal loss for anyone who has believed in the progress of mankind--those of us who truly believed that the "End of History" had been reached. She was foolhardy enough to act as if with the force of her personality alone she could overcome the differences between Pakistani society and the Western culture in which she lived, was raised and was educated.
It has been often said that the military is the only public institution in Pakistan that restrains tribal/ethnic rivalries in that contentious society. Those violent rivalries govern relations not only between regions and subcultures in Pakistan, but also between the social strata of the population, making Bhutto a symbol of the dominance of business and politics by wealthy families, and between officially unarmed civilian movements and the military.
It does not require the subversive activity of Al Qaeda to create "chaos" in Pakistan. If we define chaos there as the absence of democracy, all the conditions for democracy not to work already exist in the Pakistani environment. The semblance of order has only existed in that country under the oppressive control of the military. It will probably take a long time for the common desire for peace and prosperity to emerge across factions and social strata and establish the possibility of working democracy in Pakistan.
That society needs to achieve many prerequisites for fulfilling the conditions of Western culture before it can adopt the emblem of Western self-government. It should not be discounted that Western democracy is unsuited to Pakistan. Certainly the violence that took Ms. Bhutto's life will not be eliminated by the imposition of Western democracy on that very different culture.
The inevitably violent death of Benazir Bhutto was a personal loss for anyone who has believed in the progress of mankind--those of us who truly believed that the "End of History" had been reached. She was foolhardy enough to act as if with the force of her personality alone she could overcome the differences between Pakistani society and the Western culture in which she lived, was raised and was educated.
It has been often said that the military is the only public institution in Pakistan that restrains tribal/ethnic rivalries in that contentious society. Those violent rivalries govern relations not only between regions and subcultures in Pakistan, but also between the social strata of the population, making Bhutto a symbol of the dominance of business and politics by wealthy families, and between officially unarmed civilian movements and the military.
It does not require the subversive activity of Al Qaeda to create "chaos" in Pakistan. If we define chaos there as the absence of democracy, all the conditions for democracy not to work already exist in the Pakistani environment. The semblance of order has only existed in that country under the oppressive control of the military. It will probably take a long time for the common desire for peace and prosperity to emerge across factions and social strata and establish the possibility of working democracy in Pakistan.
That society needs to achieve many prerequisites for fulfilling the conditions of Western culture before it can adopt the emblem of Western self-government. It should not be discounted that Western democracy is unsuited to Pakistan. Certainly the violence that took Ms. Bhutto's life will not be eliminated by the imposition of Western democracy on that very different culture.
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